I have three published novels and might write/publish more someday. Now I'm more of a reader – welcome!
I really love Sarah Painter’s Crow Investigations books. Like Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series, Crow Investigations is a modern urban supernatural series set in London. I’ve enjoyed getting to know the characters of Lydia, the reluctant new head of the Crow magical family, her ghostly flatmate and her love interest policeman who is not magical (or is he….?). My only sadness is that the book was over too quick and now I can’t wait for the next installment!
My daughter recommended this book to me as a sweet and lovely read, and she was right! A grumpy old lady, Veronica, contemplates her legacy and decides she wants to visit a penguin research centre at the South Pole with a view to leaving her vast fortune to them after her death. We learn about Veronica’s life through flashbacks, and begin to understand why she is the way she is while at the same time getting to know lots of fun and fascinating penguin facts! As Veronica starts to love both the penguins and her fellow research centre occupants, she melts the frozen barriers she spent a lifetime building up and allows herself to feel and heal from the pain of her past.
Every year Jodi Taylor releases a St Mary’s short story on Christmas Day and this is 2020s. I loved it! It’s an atmospheric Victorian haunted house murder mystery and I very much enjoyed reading it over snatched moments on Christmas Day and Boxing day. Thanks Jodi Taylor and happy Christmas to you and yours!
As I mentioned in my previous review (for Ready Player Two) my mum just died (on 14th December) and for that reason I decided to read this young adult fantasy novel by Frances Hardinge because I was looking for a gentle ‘easy’ read. Well, I should have know better than imagining that a Frances Hardinge novel wouldn’t pack both an emotional and intellectual punch! This is a deep, rich and incisive story mostly about growing up and becoming your own person. The main character, Hark, is a young orphan who lives in the shadow of his overbearing and manipulative friend and must find his own way when he is convicted of petty crimes and sent as an indentured servant to a island retreat for old ex-priests. All priest in this universe are now defunct because the gods were killed but a vast often criminal empire revolves around finding old ‘god’ artifacts because they contain magical properties. Hark is caught between priests, scientists and various criminal gangs all trying to exploit the magic and he has to struggle to know who to trust and what is the right thing to do. Like the previous book I read, this took me a while to get into, but once I did I found it gripping, compelling and ultimately satisfying.
So, my mum died on 14th December. It was pretty sudden; she had been hale and hearty the last time I spoke to her on the phone, two days later she had a massive stroke from which she never fully regained consciousness and died after eleven days. Because of Covid rules, she wasn’t allowed visitors until just hours before she passed, by which time it was too late for myself or her other children or grandchildren to get there in time, but she was with her friend and church pastor. The reason I’m including this in my review, is just to put it into context – for me, often I hang my memories of books read on the same hook as memories of what else was going on in my life at the time, and also because I really didn’t give the book the concentration it deserves, so inevitably, my review will be coloured by this distraction on my part.
I loved Ready Player One, both the book and (to a slightly lesser degree) the movie. I used my audible monthly credit to buy the audiobook of Ready Player Two as it worked out cheaper for me than buying the kindle version. I found the book slow to get into (although perhaps this was for reasons already stated in my opening paragraph…). Like the first book, it quickly becomes a treasure hunt through the virtual world where clues must be interpreted to find artefacts and defeat fiendish plans of bad guys and save the world. Again there were lots of fun references to geekish things from my youth, like The Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy, The Princess Bride, various old video games and movies, even Harry Potter. I have to admit I loved the references to Tolkien’s Middle Earth and the quest that mirrored the plot of The Silmarillion. There were character journeys and some touching romantic arcs as well as some interesting philosophical stuff about AI consciousness and immortality and that kind of thing.
I think I’ll wait until the kindle gets cheaper, and my mind gets onto a more even keel and maybe give the book another go, as I’m sure I missed lots from my half hearted listen and it should probably have been a more engrossing experience than it was for me.
I loved this book! I’m a member of a book group that happens to be all female (a man did come a couple of times but he hasn’t been in a while) and at 51 I’m the youngest member. The girls are by no means ‘fuddy duddy’, and yet they are unanimously horrified when I tell them that I like to read and or watch horror. I don’t like the rubbish jump scare scantily clad young women running about screaming type of horror, but when it is done well, with an interesting plot that makes sense and characters with depth who face challenges and go on journeys of discovery then horror can be a really good genre for thought provoking essays on the human condition. Great examples are The Babadook and the recent movie ‘His House’ as well as the French tv series ‘Marianne’ and everything written by Grady Hendrix! I’ve read/listened to most of his novels now and they have all been brilliant. (I initially assumed Grady Hendrix was female as all his books seem to be female centric and he does the female mind so well!). This book follows a middle aged failed former heavy metal guitarist who is making one last-ditched attempt to get recompense from her former band member who screwed over her and the rest of the band and now has a phenomenally successful solo career. Her journey quickly moves her down terrifying paths and she uncovers terrible secrets. The book is a love letter to music in general and heavy metal in particular (a genre I don’t enjoy, and yet was still moved by the passion towards it of the character). It was a bit overly gory for my taste at times (although I guess the violence was maybe necessary to progress the plot) but all in all it was a moving, exciting and satisfying read.
This is a long audiobook (over 25 hours) and due to a glitch with my audible not synching properly between the different devices that I listened to it on, I must have listened to about 40 hours of it! This was actually not a bad thing, because there are a lot of characters and a lot is going on and often I only picked up on things on the second (or even third) listening of a certain passage. Also, I was never bored even with the overlaps. The narrator, a woman with a lovely southern American accent is a joy to listen to, and brings the characters and plot to life really well. The book is set in the recent past (just pre-covid, I guess) in the small town of Dooling, West Virginia. The appearance of a mysterious woman in town coincides with a world-wide phenomenon where all female people who fall asleep are covered in a weird fibrous cocoon and enter a sort of sleeping coma. If anyone tries to remove the cocoon the women rouse long enough to react with extreme violence before returning to their sleep. We discover that their conscious minds are inhabiting a sort of parallel town of Dooling in a new society without any men. As more women fall asleep, the two societies polarise with the male Earth erupting into violence and mayhem while the female place gets on with life peacefully.
The book was a lot of fun to listen to, although it paints a really bad picture of men, with most of the male characters being total toe-rags, and most of the women bearing the scar of systematic male abuse. The ending was interesting and satisfying.
This is the second book in the series by Eva St. John about a parallel Earth whose inhabitants can travel to our Earth at set points in time and they use this ability to retrieve precious artifacts just before they are lost or destroyed and display them (or at least holographic images of them) in museums. In this parallel world, Julius Caesar was lost as sea which changed the course of history, meaning the Roman Empire did not flourish and the Greek and Egyptian societies did. The result is that the world view of the people is much more ‘civilised’ at least on the surface and crime is low. A man from our Earth was trapped in this other Earth at the end of the first book, and this book is about how he copes with the culture shock and trying to fit into this new society. As he begins to suspect corruption and foul play amongst high ranking citizens, he meets resistance from those he tells who just can’t fathom that anyone would do that. The book led to some interesting discussion with my husband on our daily dog walk about human nature and why utopian political ideals don’t work in practise because there are always enough selfish or immoral people to mess with the system. Even though the book raised deep questions, it is not a heavy read – it’s fun, similar in feel to the Jodi Taylor Chronicles of St Marys.
This book was written by a westerner who has lived in Japan and whose PhD thesis (I think) was about the role of cats in Japanese literature. My son, Danny, is hopefully moving to Japan in a couple of months, initially to attend an intensive language school (he’s already pretty conversant in Japanese, but not quite fluent yet) and then to live and work. He’s living at home at the moment and immersing himself in all things Japanese for language and cultural acclimation, so we have watched lots of Japanese movies with him (with English subtitles for us!). It was fun reading this book and having ‘oh yes, Danny has told us about this Japanese custom’ or ‘oh yes, we saw that in that film’ moments. I really liked the start of the book where a mysterious woman asks for a tattoo (quite taboo in respectable Japanese society) all over her back of the Tokyo city scape with no people in it. The tattoo artist adds a cat which seems to have moved around her back every time she comes back for a new tattooing session. The cat also meanders through the book’s connected stories of several Japanese characters (the cast is so large that I often found it confusing). I liked the book, it was well written and interesting, but I was a little disappointed that the books opening hints of magical realism weren’t really followed through the whole book, but then I’m a sucker for magical realism!
Hmmm, I wasn’t sure what to make of this book. I have read some amazing books that have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, so when they come up as the Amazon Kindle Daily deal, I usually buy them. Also, the premise of this book interested me, both the dynamics of a difficult mother/daughter relationship, and the exploration of the unreliability of memory, for all of us and especially in the case of the mother in this novel for those who are entering the decline of dementia. If I’m honest, I found the book a bit boring in places (although bits of it resonated and I felt the pain of the characters) and then just as my interest was being piqued the book ended, abruptly and confusingly. I don’t know if this was intentionally unsettling, the way life often is, or if it was just poor writing?
Sarah Wray Writer