Dan
The subtitle of this book is “Never A Dull Moment”.
This turns out to be not entirely true.
Thanks for the advanced copy of this one. Over to my ten year old daughter to tell us what she thought...
This is a story about a princess called Eugenie who absolutely hates her royal life. She loves gardening, and although the royal court objects, she spends most of her free time in the palace grounds with the gardener. When visiting a nearby village, Eugenie comes across a young girl - called Alyssa - who is exactly like her: not just in personality, but in looks. Eugenie discovers that Alyssa wants to be a princess, like she wants to be a gardener. In a fit of excitement, they daringly switch places. One tragic day, the kingdom falls ill and after the girls discover a cure, they must work together to prove it....
I love this book because after the first page or so, I felt like Eugenie was my best friend and I'd known her all my life. The storyline is intriguing and once the action had started, I couldn't put the book down. If I had to rewrite the book, I would not change a thing! I would 100% recommend the book to anyone who likes adventure and fantasy. I feel like this book will be a bestseller!
The last Tyler Keevil novel I read was his phantasmagorical road trip The Drive, which I hugely enjoyed. This is a different beast, one much more grounded in reality, but it's just as good a read. Our narrator is a fisherman, working a difficult but above board life until his brother, out of jail and involved with some gangsters, shows up needing his help....that's all the plot description you're going to get, because the twists, turns and reveals of the novel are half the fun. Basically, if you like Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska album, you're going to love this. It captures that same sense of hardscrabble lives, of trying to live the best you can under impossible circumstances. One of the epigraphs at the beginning is from the song Highway Patrolman, and it's perfect for this tale of brotherly loyalty trumping the sensible and safe, frankly better, alternatives. Sometimes it's sad, sometimes it's (darkly) funny, sometimes it's unbearably tense, but it's always very very readable.
over to my ten year old daughter for this one....
I loved Beauty and Bernice SOOOOOO much! The book is about a girl called Bernice who loves skateboarding. Her life is going great until annoying pink ‘princess' Odelia moves in across the road. At first, Bernice pays no attention to her - she grew out of princesses years ago. But there's more to Odelia than meets the eye.....
I loved this book because I, like Bernice, love skateboarding. I found this book hilarious in some parts, but moving and gripping in others. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves skateboarding, princesses and mysteries that leave you on the edge of your seat. I rate this book a definite five stars.
A mixed bag for me, this one. To begin with I struggled with the clunky prose, which is truly dreadful at times, but the more I read, the more the story began to capture me, and I started reading huge chunks at a time. I found it increasingly easier to ignore my misgivings over the style, and indeed over the daftness of the whole setup (it's an espionage story involving at least four different countries chasing the MacGuffin, and yet every single character involved in this chase is connected to the same school in Oxford). So it became a pacy and engrossing read, and then I hit the ending. On a narrative level, it's deeply unsatisfying, but I reckon you could make a case for it being a political allegory, an illustration of the way strife rolls down from the rich and powerful to those less able to deal with it. Maybe, maybe not.
Essentially what we have here is a thriller with pretensions. Those pretensions don't always convince, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't keep me turning the pages.
A bit frustrating, this one. The author fires out loads of ideas, some of which land and some of which don't, and also teases out lots of threads for discussion. The problem for me is that most of these threads just don't get tugged on enough. There are seeds of some really worthwhile discussion here, but it all gets passed over very quickly. It's partly a failing of the monograph format, I guess, but I would have preferred a book of this length to concentrate on fewer things and follow through on them a bit more. It doesn't help that the whole thing is written in an academic style, which a) brings back terrible memories of my own dissertation, and b) adds a layer of unnecessary verbiage to a book that's already chafing against size restrictions. It's interesting, but not what it could be.
I'm glad to see that Near Dark has enough clout these days to merit a BFI Classic. It's a great film, and Abbott's monograph does a skilful job of illuminating it. It's a short book, but it covers a lot of ground, from diving into the (excellent) cinematography to the ambiguities of the characters, without leaving us feeling shortchanged. It made me want to watch the film with fresh eyes, and you can't really ask more than that from one of these, can you?
In this third of Lissa Evans' loose trilogy we have moved on to 1944, and are offered a strong depiction of the London home front in last full year of the war, a city bearing a resigned but stoic acceptance. The story revolves a house in Hampstead that will be familiar to readers of the previous books, its landlady and her ward (ditto) and a new supporting cast of lodgers who are well drawn and provide some excellent colour. There is a sense of danger throughout, with death unexpectedly coming out of the sky and a smaller, more personal, calamity for Vee and Noel, but there is also humour and good companionship. The charm of Crooked Heart and Old Baggage is still here, and this is a fitting capstone to the trilogy (if indeed it is a trilogy - there are, not loose ends, but throughlines to future novels at the end of this one).
Mark Stay's Woodville books deal with the magical awakening of a young Kent girl in the early 1940s, as World War II is underway and England is threatened by German invasion. Faye Bright and the rest of the cast are well drawn and engaging. The village feels like a real place, and the period is evoked without drowning the reader in research. This is the third in the series, and like the others it's a great comfort read that stays just the right side of twee. They're not going to change your world, but they will make it a nicer place for a couple of hours. If you've ever had too much cheese before bedtime and dreamt of Terry Pratchett writing a Dad's Army novelisation then these are the books for you.
Multi-author anthologies are always going to be a mixed bag, but this one hits more than it misses. There's some really strong stories here, especially the ones by Lesley Nneka Arimah, Nnedi Okarofor, Nalo Hopkinson and LD Lewis. Pretty much essential for anyone interested in modern horror.
An interesting short novel that deals with themes of memory, commemoration and time.
It's not quite magical realism but it's not quite mundane either, well worth a read.
I was a big fan of The Mountain In The Sea, and rated it as one of the most interesting debuts to come along in a while. This one also deals with non-human intelligence, but one closer to today’s headlines. Yes, it’s an AI novel. But what’s most interesting here is the form. It’s told from many different viewpoints, all of whom of have different levels of access to what’s really going on, and it ends up reading like a classic twisty espionage story. More than anything, I was put in mind of Dave Hutchinson’s fantastic Fractured Europe books. And like those, be prepared to be left scratching your head at the end, as you piece together what was really going on. A reread will, I think, throw lots of new perspectives on the novel, but even after a single read through it’s clear Ray Nayler is a hugely promising talent.
Review is for the collected editon. Looks nice, story is cliched and workmanlike at best.
Contains spoilers
** spoiler alert ** The fifth Witches Of Woodville book. If you’re reading this, you’re probably already a fan, and just want to know if this one is any good. And I’m happy to report it is, with plenty of the same lovely and warm but also threatening and scary vibe that has run through the series. I do think there’s a limit to how long we can keep reading tales about Woodville being menaced by occult villains though, which is why I was particularly excited by the epilogue here, which suggests a new direction for the books. I for one am very much up for Faye Bright, SOE!
To begin with, this is a bit ploddy. Isaka's voice is idiosyncratic enough that it isn't boring, but it didn't feel particularly fresh or exciting. And then, just past the halfway mark, the whole book gets upended, everything changes, and it becomes a propulsive race to the end. It's cleverly constructed and very readable. My only caveat is that the relationship between the main character and his wife feels like something out of a terrible 80s sitcom. It's not entirely surprising, as Japanese views of gender roles are a lot more conservative than they are in the modern West, but it did stand out to me. If you can put those qualms aside, you'll enjoy a zippy and arch crime thriller.
Family as a cross-pollination experiment. Thomas is great at moving you from one sentence to the next (I went through this one in two days flat), but the bigger story here falls a bit flat, circling round an unsatisfactorily explained void, both in the family at the books heart and the plot. It's very entertaining, with some smart characterisation, and may benefit from a reread, but right now I feel a little disappointed with it. Props for the robin, though. He's aces.
Great world building, but a very average plot that doesn't stand up to tough interrogation. Not blown away but interested to read the next one
No book has blown me away like this for a long time. A wonderful paean to books and SF. I'm seriously considering having a key line tattooed on my arm