Oh, I was really gripped and totally invested in the lives of Leni Allbright and her troubled family – dad, Ernt, returned from time in Vietnam including time as a prisoner of war and totally wrecked with PTSD and Mum, Cora, who does her best and stands by her man even as he gets more and more obsessive and violent and controlling of her.
When they move to Alaska, Leni finally feels at home in the tiny school where she meets her first true friend and the love of her life, Matthew.
The Alaskan scenery and harshness is beautifully described as is the close knit community looking out for each other who become Leni’s extended family. But, hoo boy, does poor Leni have to go through a lot of hard tragic life experiences. An emotional rollercoaster this certainly is, and in the hands of a less accomplished writer this may have strayed into melodrama, but it was in fact perfectly pitched to tug at the heartstrings and push the reader to the brink of anxious tension before everything is masterfully resolved.
Well, they say you should write what you know, so it makes sense that radio talk show host Jeremy Vine would write a whodunnit set in and around a local radio station with the main character a talk show host.
There were many things that I liked about the book – I liked the pathos of the main character suffering through grief and guilt after the death of his son, and his relationships with colleagues, his ex-wife and his new blossoming romance.
However, I thought the whodunnit aspect was just so glaringly obvious I couldn’t believe all the characters could not have worked it out sooner. Hmmm.
I had this book on my kindle for quite a while before I got around to reading it, thinking it would be a bit of a chore, like reading Shakespeare, but actually, when I finally got around to it, it was very readable and fun.
It is a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (a play that I am not that familiar with, although the book explains the plot quite well so that wasn’t a hindrance to my enjoyment or appreciation). A washed out over ambitious actor is ousted from his theatre position and ends up teaching a Literature class in a men’s prison where he has the inmates perform a retelling of a Shakespeare play every year, which they re-write themselves in modern American parlance (like a mirror to the novel itself!).
When the people who turned on him and fired him from his previous role themselves rise through the ranks of politics and visit the prison (not knowing who the teacher is as he works under an alias) he plots a way to get his revenge on them.
I enjoyed the book, I think it was quite short (it’s hard to tell with a kindle book – lol!) at least it didn’t take me long to read it, or the reading flew in, so, if like me you are put off – don’t be, read it, it’s fun!
I listened to this series of short ‘things’ that you should do to make yourself a bit healthier (according to the sadly deceased Michael Mosley) while out walking my dog or running so I could feel quite smug whenever the ‘thing’ involved being outside or exercising!
I’m writing this about two weeks after I finished the book, and I’ve already forgotten (to my shame) some of the things, although I have also remembered some – for instance, on my dog walks I now divert slightly from my previous route to walk through more woodland because nice Dr Mosley told me about the beneficial chemicals given out by trees in woodlands that can make you healthier if you breathe them in. I did for at least a week try standing on one leg every time a used my chuckit to hurl the dogs ball across the (what we call) ‘chuckit field’ for time it took him to run after the ball and bring it back. I’ve stopped that now.
A lot of the stuff I already knew – like avoiding processed food and sugar and not eating after dinner time to have a longer fast period. I tried incorporating beetroot into my diet, but I just don’t really like it.
My hubby Paul is about to retire (two weeks and counting!) and we’re excited to try learning a new language or new skills with all the extra free time we’ll have (I’m already early retired) which was another ‘thing’ recommended.
I am sorry that Michael Mosley passed away because he came across as a very nice man, and he went to a lot of trouble to make himself healthier. It seems like such a waste.
This was an interesting and enjoyable book. Set in a post apocalyptic world, where a poisonous gas covers most of the planet and a small community lives on an Greek island that had been inhabited by a team of scientists before the apocalypse most of whom were put into suspended animation in an underground lab, now cut off by gas in the tunnels and a few, unnaturally long lived ‘elders’ survive and rule the community of descendants of the original scientists.
An AI presence has a telepathic connection to the villagers and also some control over them. Most of the villagers happily accept both this control and the strictly hierarchical society with the elders calling the shots, including that all other villagers peacefully die on the evening of their 60th birthday (my husband is about to turn 60 so we had a rueful laugh about this!). One villager, however, is unusually questioning and when one of the elders dies in suspicious circumstances, she is tasked with investigating the ‘murder’.
I found the book quite thought provoking, with interesting twists that I didn’t always see coming. Thumbs up from me!
I was pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed the first book in this series, but this sequel didn’t excite me so much. It was fine, a bit young adulty for my taste (I am after all a retired granny now!). The relationship between the two main (living) characters was sweet but I got a bit bored with all the action and the mystery elements. Maybe my head just wasn’t in it enough and I got a bit lost.
I am such a fan of Stephen King, especially his more recent books which have moved away from full on horror to more rich character led books of different genres, often (but not always) involving supernatural elements and sometimes mystery or thriller elements and deep thoughtful plots.
I saw an ad for the TV adaptation of this book and realised it was a Stephen King that I hadn’t read and it sounded great so I bought it right away.
The institute that the book is named for is a secure and secret unit hidden in the woods in Maine, housing children with special gifts – either TK (telekinesis or the ability to move objects with their minds) or TP (telepathy – mind reading) or very rarely, both.
The children are abducted from their homes and told that they will be returned when they have completed their ‘service’ but we know that this is not true – the staff of the institute are ruthless and cold blooded in the pursuit of their mission and leave no witnesses. They believe (or at least some of them do) that they are working toward a greater good that is worth the sacrifice.
When Luke Ellis is taken to the institute, the staff hadn’t reckoned on his superior intelligence making him the first child in their ‘care’ with a real chance at fighting back.
I loved it (of course!) and I’m enjoying watching the tv show too.
I enjoyed this latest instalment on the Rivers of London Urban Fantasy series – this time the gang are on holiday/work trip to Scotland to bring their specialist knowledge and skill set to the weird sh*t that has been going on up there – farm animals mutilated by giant invisible creatures and a man turning up dead who is found to have gills.
The Scottish element very much reminded me of the wonderful Edinburgh Nights series by T.L. Huchu (I can’t wait for the new book in that series coming out soon btw) so much so that I really wanted there to be crossover and for the gang to meet up with Ropa Moyo and do some magical investigating with her!
The plot was quite fun with seemingly disparate threads all coming together, but for me the relationships were more fun – the alternate chapters featuring Abigail with her new found love, not to mention love among the foxes, were my favourite bits, although I also enjoyed seeing Peter juggling being a husband and father of small twins with being a supernatural police man. Nice.
I did enjoy the first book in this series about the 100 year old man going on an adventure and like Forest Gump, remembering stumbling into all kinds of historical moments in his long life which came in useful in getting him out of trouble in sticky situations.
This sequel, is largely more of the same, and I mostly enjoyed it, although I did find it a bit daft. The scenes with Donald Trump were quite funny, but then Donald Trump is low hanging fruit for comedic parody.
I felt slightly uncomfortable with the narrator’s exaggerated accents for the people of different ethnicities, it’s a bit of a rocky path I guess and I’m not sure how narrators should approach giving voice to ethnic characters but it seemed a bit inappropriate.
If there is another sequel, I don’t think I would bother reading it (although I might be tempted if is was super cheap!).
Written over forty years ago, this dystopian/utopian, speculative, sci-fi, feminist novel (I know, that’s a lot of genres!) feels prescient and relevant to our times. The main character, Connie, is a Latin American woman struggling to cope with poverty and abusive relationships. When she defends her cousin by attacking her violent pimp he has her committed to a mental asylum. Peopled largely by women and ethnic minorities, the asylum is like One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s nest – with cruel and self serving doctors and care workers who treat the patients more like sub-human test subjects to experiment on.
Connie is contacted by a person from the future who only she can see, and she is able to leave her body in a trance like state to travel with this person to the future – the utopian future where there are technological advances unheard of in the 1970s (when the novel was written) like wrist computers, and interactive touch screens and solar powered fully automatic factories, but also a return to subsistence farming and shared belongings because of respecting the earth and its natural resources. The future people have abandoned gender roles, having neutral personal pronouns and having both male and female born people able to breast feed babies grown in artificial wombs. In this future positions of authority and government are rotated so everyone gets a turn and democracy is king.
However, there is a darker possible future that Connie also visits, where the world is so toxic that people have to live underground, where men rule the roost and women must augment their bodies to be attractive enough.
A battle over which future will win out rests on Connie as a turning point in history like a small pebble in a stream might change it’s course over time.
The novel always leaves the possibility that all of this is in Connie’s mind and not based on any actual reality, in fact, there is a confusing (at least I found it confusing) sequence with a battle and the enemy seem to be people who work at the asylum, lending credence to the psychosis rather than reality theory, at least for that timeline.
I did find the book very readable, and thought provoking – in fact it was one of the books that I talked about in depth to my (long suffering) husband on our nightly dog walks because my mind was full of thoughts and implications that it raised.
Sarah Wray Writer 