I thought this book was brilliant and just the kind of thing I love to read. It’s hard to define the genre – hmmm, horror, dark humour, mythology… some reviewers compared it to Neil Gaiman, and that’s fair, I think.
I loved the feisty funny female protagonist, Carolyn, one of twelve children adopted and raised by a person (entity?) they know as ‘Father’ who kept them completely separate from everyone else in the world and made them each become experts in fields such as talking to animals, fighting, healing, reanimating the dead and so on using books from The Library.
Carolyn employs an ex-criminal now peace-loving Buddhist, Stephen, to help her in some very violent and criminal activities, and the chemistry between them is fun.
The book is sometimes a bit confusing, but (in my mind at least) it all became clear in the end and was all the better for the plot not being spoon fed to the reader.
I can’t believe it is a debut novel because I thought it was very well constructed and written. Five out of five from me!
I loved the film adaptation of this book, which prompted me to seek out and read the novel. Well, it is definitely the same story as the movie, but the tone is very different. While the film was full of joy and whimsy, the book is quite a bit darker. More ribald for a start (sexual humour) and much more politics and philosophy. It’s the first book in a series of four (with a fifth, prequel coming soon, I believe) and yet it goes quite a bit beyond the point where the movie ended (I think there is a movie sequel coming) following Elphaba beyond her school years, during her time in hiding and working with a resistance movement in Oz protesting the wrongs against people and sentient Animals carried out by The Wizard’s regime, and into her later life. I did buy and read the second book, and will probably read the rest eventually, but I did feel a bit ambivalent about them.
I was excited to read this as I loved Naomi Alderman’s previous book, The Power, and although I didn’t hate this one, I didn’t love it as much.
Set in a near future with things like artificial weather and slightly more technology than we’re used to, it follows (mostly) two women dealing with an approaching global catastrophe. One was raised in a sort of cult and her beliefs and takes on Bible theology are quite interesting as she joins in chats on a preppers forum.
The other is working on a high tech system for predicting when an apocalyptic even is imminent and extracting certain very rich individuals to safety before it’s too late.
The book combined elements of action thriller, thought provoking musings and romance and I mostly enjoyed it although I got a bit confused and a bit bored at times.
I really liked the first two thirds of this book. Set in a near future where automated (self driving) cars are mandated because of how much safer they are than human driven cars and how they improve the roads by driving more efficiently etc.
Unfortunately, the government body that polices any accidents that occur with driverless cars is (surprise, surprise) corrupt and more interested in their own interests than fairness and safety for everyone.
As a protest to this, someone manages to hack into the computer ‘brain’ of several driverless cars and broadcasts to the world live footage of the passengers who are on a pre-set collision course that will kill them all in two hours time. The hacker invites the world (as well as the committee that was meeting to judge on previous driverless car accidents) to vote on which one of the passengers they want the hacker to save or else he will just kill them all.
This part of the book was pretty darn exciting and thought provoking but as the crunch time was seconds away, and there was still at least a third of the book left, I wondered what was going on, and indeed there was a further twist.
The book took a slightly different turn then, and while I didn’t see it coming, I also wasn’t so interested any more and found the last part of the book a bit of a drag. Ah well.
I loved listening to this novel! Siobhán McSweeney’s narrations is as fabulous as you would expect from such a comic genius actor, and the plot was pure nostalgic cosy mystery a la Agatha Christie without the outdated attitudes.
I’m a big fan of Jess Kidd and her previous books have been more magical realism (one of my favourite genres) but I do like a cosy mystery as well, so this was a winner for me. It follows ex Nun, Nora, who leaves the cloistered life because her young friend has gone missing and nobody else is bothering to investigate what happened. I like Nora, a middle aged woman who is navigating life on the ‘outside’ as well as battling past emotional demons, and also flirting a bit with the police man with the film star looks (a bit of a cliché, but I find I don’t mind it because I want Nora to experience nice things). I’m excited for the next books in the series!
This was a fun if somewhat confusing sci-fi thriller. It starts by introducing lots of different characters, and I did get a bit lost wondering who was who and how they connected up.
**SPOILERS**
So all the characters got the same flight, from France to America, on which there was some quite severe turbulence which they passed through and landed and then got on with their lives, in a slightly better way than before (thinking, well, I survived that near death experience, I should do better with my life now).
But – three months later the same flight with the same passengers comes in to land after being blown off course by severe turbulence. As far as they are concerned, they took off from France a few hours ago, even though three months have passed, and they (or duplicates of them) landed and have been living (or in some cases, dying) since then.
What the heck!
So, the government keeps them all locked up while they try to figure out what was going on, but eventually have to let them go, and all kinds of questions arise – did God do this? Which are the ‘real’ passengers? Are any of them real? Is anything real? The winning theory seemed to be the simulation hypothesis, which is that everything we consider as real, including ourselves, is actually just a simulation (ie computer programme) made by aliens, or future humans.
Then when a third iteration of the same flight of passengers appears in the sky, and the American government decide to blow it to smithereens, the book ends abruptly with the implication being that by making this decision, they have effectively ended the life of the simulation and therefore destroyed the whole world as we know it.
Yikes.
As I said at the start of the review, it was kind of fun and thought provoking (if a little confusing) and made me go and look up the simulation hypothesis, which is considered by some at least as a viable explanation of life and stuff, but I just can’t bring myself to believe it could possibly be true (in the same way I have researched the multiverse -ie lots of parallel universes theories, which seem to make sense in terms of maths and physics, but which I can’t make myself believe are actually real).
Oh my goodness, I thought this book was just fabulous! It was my book group read for March and by far my favourite book group title and audiobook title for some time. The narrator (Stephen Hogan) deserves a special mention because he was so good. Partly because his lovely soft Irish voice is very easy on the ears (even when he read the copyright notice at the end it sounded like poetry!) and also largely just the brilliant interpretation of the words written into meaning – I couldn’t fault him.
The book is both a captivatingly readable story and a richly layered metaphor – from the first chapter, where the irritable complaining Englishman is ferried by coracle to the remote Irish language speaking island where the book is mainly set felt like classical literature – I was almost screaming ‘don’t pay the ferryman’ as the journey felt like a passage to the afterlife! And I laughed out loud when the Englishman tried to get the sailors to sing as they rowed, because his guide book has told him they did that, and that was the only reason he chose to travel that way, and their response was to flat refuse and tell him he needed to get a better guide book!
The characters on the small island are given flesh and feeling as we get to know them as well as the Frenchman who visits every year to work on his PhD thesis about the erosion of the Irish language over time due to the historic English colonisation of Ireland.
The narrative is interspersed with news reports of Northern Ireland troubles atrocities – policemen shot, soldiers blown up, as well as people just caught up in bombs and shooting by being at the wrong place at the wrong time and so forth and we realise that the old lady matriarch of the island listens to the news on her radio because they sometimes discuss the stories around the kitchen table.
The Englishman is an artist who always reproduces old classic paintings, or his interpretation of them at least, one island inhabitant described him (not to his face) as a magpie – ‘it’s in his nature to steal, he doesn’t even see that he’s doing it’ (paraphrased, from memory).
A teenaged boy does odd jobs for the Englishman and becomes enamoured with the idea of becoming an artist himself, and after very reluctantly allowing him to try some sketches and then paintings, the English man sees that the boy has real talent and originality. Now the book reminded me of Mozart and Salieri – the older mentor being horrified that his young upstart apprentice’s gift far outstrips his own.
The Frenchman hates the Englishman, and as we learn his backstory, we see that his mother was Algerian and his French father was a soldier in the French Colonised Algeria when he met her and they had a child, but when he brought her back to France with him he bullied and abused her and tried to force her to fit in and abandon her Algerian Muslim heritage and become more like a French woman.
All the threads – the Englishman’s casual theft of ideas and culture, the Northern Irish troubles and the Frenchman’s backstory all illustrate the long ranging effect of colonisation – of one nation (or more than one) believing that they are better than another and entitled to take what they want.
The Englishman’s relationship with the young wannabe artist perfectly illustrates this – he shamelessly exploits the young man but when he gives him the smallest crumb of assistance he expects grovelling gratitude. When they discussed the mistreatment of the Irish by the English the Englishman genuinely still seems to believe that the ‘Empire’ helped the poor savages more than abused them and they should be grateful.
The ending was poignantly predictable but no less powerful for it. Very good book.
Hmmm, not sure what to make of this book. Normally I love a time travel book, but this seemed to be dipping its toes into all kinds of different genres without giving any one enough heft.
The premise is that a time travel machine is discovered and for some reason the titular ‘ministry of time’ decide to pull a handful of people from different points in history and keep them in a big house for a while to see what would happen.
There could have been a lot of fun/interest out of what these historical figures thought of modern sensibilities and technologies, and this is touched on but not nearly as much as I feel it should have been. A lot of the book seems to be based around the slow burn romance of the main protagonist, an unnamed contemporary time person with the arctic explorer that it is her role to mind.
Quite far into the book it suddenly becomes a thriller, with future baddies chasing and killing people. I can’t even remember how it ended now, and it’s only 12 days since I finished reading it. I didn’t totally hate it, but didn’t love it either.
I liked the beginning of this book – I thought the premise was interesting and the set up was good, and I liked the very end of the book and how it was wrapped up, but I found the journey from start to finish to be a bit of a slog. To be fair, it is kind of a on-the-run thriller with fighting and car chases and shooting etc which is never something that I enjoy.
So, the interesting premise was that the main character, Logan, was the son of a brilliant geneticist, who engineered vectors to populate crop genomes with a view to ending world hunger and poverty, but accidentally caused a global famine which shattered the world’s economy and had the opposite of its intended effect by actually worsening world hunger. Logan’s mother died in a car accident (possibly suicide) and logan now works for the authority that regulates and polices now outlawed genetic research.
The following is a bit SPOILERY
Logan is involved in an explosion when following up a lead on an illegal genetics lab, and after recovering in hospital starts to notice changes in himself – he gets cleverer, in lots of ways – perfect recall, fast thinking, intuitive etc, as well as super strong and super fit and healthy and it turns out his genome has been hacked and improved in thousands of different ways.
He is locked up to be studied but is broken out of a very secure facility by what turns out to be his estranged sister who has also been genetically upgraded.
So then follows all the boring chase stuff. The interesting parts were that the person who made all this genetic upgrade stuff, wants to seed these upgrades to the whole world with the thinking being that humans are making such a mess of our planet between climate change and war etc that if only everyone was cleverer they would maybe not destroy themselves.
Logan and his sister disagree – she thinks giving the upgrade to the whole world is a good thing, even thought they realises that about 13% of people who get it will die horribly of a prion condition like mad cow disease.
Logan reasons that if his sister who has this super intelligence is willing to sacrifice so many people for ‘the greater good’ then that removes what makes humanity worth saving – our empathy and collective feeling, and he comes up with what I thought was a nice neat solution.
This is a very surreal book and I struggled to really get into it at first, although it grew on me until I was actually quite taken with it, thinking about the plot and characters when not reading it and looking forward to getting back.
It reminds me somewhat of another book by a Japanese author: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (I was trying to reach the title/author of the book in my memory which I knew it reminded me of and my vague google search threw up some interesting new reading ideas before I found the title I was looking for!) in it’s dream like quality where the reader is never quite sure what is real or even what is reality and whether that even matters.
The main character, now a middle aged man, reminisces about his first love, a girl who he met when they were both finalists in a school creative writing award ceremony in Tokyo. They lived in different towns, but he would travel by bus to visit her and they had a sweet shy relationship. She told him that she never felt truly real in this world and how she imagined (or believed) that she was purely a shadow and her real self lived in another place. Together they fleshed out their ideas of this ‘place’ as a walled city with a library and some homes and a river and the only life apart from humans being unicorns.
He lost touch with the girl who abruptly stopped communicating with him until years later when he found himself waking up outside the walled city and having to separate from his shadow in order to enter and live there.
It gets weirder. He manages to leave the city and goes and works in a library in a small town where he makes friends with the ghost of and old man and a selectively mute (probably autistic) boy. Whether these both represent parts of himself, and whether the city was real and the real world was just a dream or shadow is not clear.
A very strange but beautiful and thought provoking novel.
Sarah Wray Writer 