This is the sequel to Wicked and follows Liir, who may or may not be Elphaba’s son in the immediate aftermath of what Dorothy did to his ‘mother’. He goes on quite the journey, trying to find his identity and place in the world. He is searching for his half sister Nor, who was last seen imprisoned in the dungeons of Oz, as well as trying to fulfil a promise to help an enchanted half elephant half human princess who lives in endless suffering, and to help the sentient birds who are being menaced by dragons trained and used by the soldiers of Oz.
Like Wicked, this is a deep and thoughtful book and sometimes a hard read. I found it worthy but not always fun and I’m not sure how I feel about reading the other books in the series – I feel like I should to get completion but it’s not like I can’t wait to read them.
So, I’ve had psoriatic arthritis for over twenty years, but in the last four or five years (since Covid) my levels of pain, tiredness, insomnia, low mood etc etc have escalated and last year my rheumatologist diagnosed me with fibromyalgia in addition to the PA. On a fibromyalgia forum someone recommended this book, so I bought it and gave it a go.
A lot of it is stuff I already knew (although no harm in being reminded) – that our perception of pain varies hugely on the circumstances, with anecdotes about people in agonising pain when they believe they have a nasty injury (a giant nail through the sole of their boot, and out of the top via their foot), only to discover that the nail actually went between their toes and they’re not injured at all when the pain miraculously vanished, to people actually having terrible injuries that they don’t notice until later because they are too distracted (e.g., running a marathon on a broken leg etc). The book also talks about how in almost all cases, chronic (i.e. long lasting) pain is caused by our brains being over protective and telling us we’re hurting when the actual cause of the pain has long since healed.
So the solution offered by the book is largely about mindfulness and re-training the brain. The author suggests thinking hard about the sensations of your pain and describing it in neutral descriptive terms like warmth, pressure, pulsing etc, while at the same time reminding yourself that you are safe and fine and that these sensations are nothing to worry about.
Does it work?
Well, I actually quite enjoyed playing the describe your pain game and did feel like it was having some level of positive effect initially. However, I haven’t really stuck with it (the author does say it takes a long time to re-learn something that is so ingrained in our brains) plus I’m getting a new kitchen which has involved me moving furniture and big boxes of crockery etc in readiness and then all the stress of having workmen in the house for two weeks so my pain and insomnia has actually got worse, but I acknowledge that it’s unfair to test it in these circumstances. I do believe that it must be possible to re-train the brain to reduce chronic pain, and I will try to get back to it, once the kitchen is finished!
Funnily enough, this book was similar to my two previous book group reads, The Colony and The Whalebone Theatre. Like The Colony, it is set on a small island that clings on to old ways and old language (in this case, Welsh, whereas the language in The Colony was Irish) and like The Whalebone Theatre, the plot loosely revolves around the decaying corpse of a beached whale on the edge of the community.
Like in The Colony, a young islander, Monod,’s head is turned by the arrival of sophisticated English visitors, who come to make a book/documentary about their image of island life, often manipulating the truth to fit their narrative. They use Manod, and let her believe they will help her in return, but like the metaphor of the decomposing whale, they just take what they can exploit and sell and leave the rest to rot.
I liked it well enough – not as much as The Colony, but more than The Whalebone Theatre!
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.
Sarah Wray Writer 