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Foster by Claire Keegan - Review

Saturday, March 16, 2024

 

I got this book for my birthday from Lee's brother and sister in law! As you may have seen, I've previously read two others of Claire Keegan's novellas and really enjoyed them. This one was on my wishlist which is where Lee's brother picked it from. It was a lovely present and I picked it up to take away with me on a work weekend where I knew I wouldn't have much time or energy for reading. It was perfect for that because it's so slight but still riveting. 

The protagonist of the story is never called by name, but she is a girl of maybe ten or eleven. She lives with her parents in Wexford, in a family with many siblings. Her mother is expecting again and, unable to cope, her parents have decided to send her 'down country' to some relatives of her mother's. She doesn't know them. They are the Kinsellas and they live on a small farm with a small bungalow. The girl is welcomed in, and given a little room of her own. There is no sign of a child but she is given a boy's clothes to wear and her room has train wallpaper. 

The girl flourishes under the care and attention of the Kinsellas. She spends her days helping around the farm and both John and Edna seem to genuinely care about her. Edna says something about how if she was theirs, she wouldn't be left in the company of strangers. They take the girl to town for clothes of her own and she learns that they did have a son, who died in a tragic accident. They are clearly still sad about it. The girl I think would have stayed there, but all too soon her dad turns up to take her back home and it seems like the Kinsellas will be saddened again by her leaving. 

I'm giving this four out of five; I really liked it.

A Swift Return by Fiona Barker, Illustrated by Howard Grey - Blog Tour and Review

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Hello and welcome to my blog for my stop on the tour for A Swift Return. It is a pleasure to welcome you here and I hope you will click around my blog to read some of my other reviews. I don't often review children's books, and I don't often read them as I don't have children, but I signed up to this because I really liked the sound of the book. 

It is written by Fiona Barker and illustratred by Howard Gray. I know that in children's books the illustrations are often as important as the words, because they provide visual cues for early readers so they can grasp the story, and because they add background details. The illustrations in this book are absolutely divine, and I would encourage you to spend some time looking at them if you read this book. 

The story is about a little girl, Aria, who "has her head in the clouds". Yousuf, meanwhile, has his feet firmly on the ground. They live near each other in an apartment block and watch the birds. One falls to the ground, injured. The two work together to nurse the swift back to health and later set her free too. 

I loved the book and would recommend it for your small ones. I'll be passing on my copy to my friend S and her little girl! 

The Djinn's Apple by Djamila Morani

Saturday, March 9, 2024



Hello and welcome to my blog for my stop on the tour for The Djinn's Apple by Djamila Morani. It is a pleasure to welcome you here. Please do have a click around and read some of my other reviews. 

I don't often read books in translation but this one was done in a lovely way. Here's to translators the world over! There were certain phrases that were just so beautiful and which added to this book feeling like poetry almost. It definitely feels like a bit of a dream. 

The book is set in Baghdad, in the Abbasid period of time, under that caliphate. This was new to me so I enjoyed learning a little bit about it. At the beginning of the book Nardeen is twelve and she lives with her parents, her two older brothers, and her little sister. Her dad is a doctor and a translator; he teaches Nardeen about healing the sick and so on. She wants to be a doctor too. The caliph doesn't like her family, and one night his men break in and kill all of Nardeen's famile except for her. She manages to escape, unsure who or what they are looking for. She comes round in a hospital and learns she has been captured as a slave and will be sold. 

However, then a man called Ishaq saves her from that. He is known to her and it's not entirely clear whose side he is on. But she trusts him and over the next four years they do build a sort of father/daughter relationship. Then he takes her to the hospital where he teaches, and includes her in the teaching even though the male students aren't too keen on this. But she can do things that the men can't, including treating high class women who can't be seen uncovered by men. Ishaq teaches Nardeen to trust in her instincts. She starts to fall in love. But she still wants to serve justice on the men who killed her family... what will she do when she comes face to face with one of them?

I loved the setting of this book and Nardeen is a great character. I loved the historical background and really I just wish it had been longer because I wanted more of it!

Thank you for reading. Please check out the other stops on the tour! 

None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell - Review

Thursday, February 29, 2024


You know I've really enjoyed Lisa Jewell's crime thrillers over the past couple of years, so when I heard of this one I thought it sounded right up my street. I searched for it at the library but it had a queue, so I put myself in it and then waited about four months for it to come through to me. But by that point it felt like a really nice present to myself! If you've read this I would love to hear your opinions on it because I'm not sure what was true and what wasn't!

At the beginning of the book two women are celebrating their birthdays. They are Alix, forty five years old, who is married to Nathan, and has two small children of like eleven and six. He earns a lot of money and she has a successful podcast. She has just finished her series about successful women and isn't really sure what to do next, and then she meets Josie. 

Josie happens to be in the same fancy restaurant that night, also celebrating her forty fifth birthday. For her and her husband Walter this is out of their ordinary as they don't generally eat at places like this restaurant. Walter is much older than Josie - like nearly thirty years older than her. They have two daughters, Erin and Roxy. They are both grown up now; Roxy disappeared five years ago when she was sixteen, and Erin still lives in the flat with Josie and Walter. There's clearly something going on with Erin but it's not clear as to exactly what. 

The two women meet in the toilets, have a brief discussion, and leave. Then Josie approaches Alix on a different day and says that she wants Alix to interview her for a podcast. Alix is intrigued and agrees to a test interview. Josie is unsettling (in fact she reads as neurodivergent, which really makes a lot of sense) but Alix is intrigued by her. Josie begins to tell the story of her and Walter - they met when Josie was just thirteen and she was groomed by him; she lost her virginity to him when she was sixteen and married him at eighteen, having her children shortly thereafter. She tells a story of him being controlling and violent, and the more they dig into her back story the more unsettled Alix becomes. But she somehow can't look away, especially when Josie makes serious allegations about Walter. 

Alix's life may look perfect on the outside, but actually things aren't what they seem. Nathan is a loving husband, but he keeps going on total benders where he drinks too much and disappears for hours. Alix is rapidly getting to the end of her tether and is considering divorce. Josie's whispers in her ears make her even more uncertain...

I was quite shocked by some of the twists and turns in the book. I also am really not sure what was true and what wasn't by the end. I'm not sure that any of the characters came off brilliantly. The podcast becomes a series with a bunch of other interviewees so right from the beginning it's obvious that something has gone terribly wrong... but what exactly? It's so intriguing. I really found it a fast paced page turned and I'm giving it four out of five!

The Last Slice of Rainbow by Joan Aiken - Review

Saturday, February 24, 2024


As I mentioned when I read The Silence of Herondale recently, I used to have this Joan Aiken book when I was very little, and absolutely loved it. It's one of the first books I remember loving, alongside Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl and others like them. I can remember it living on the shelf of my cabin bed in our tiny bedroom in the first house I lived it. God knows how many times I read it. I probably still have my original copy but it will be in the black hole of my mother's loft, so I just bought it again on eBay for a few quid. I picked it up and read it straight through. It is a children's book so not very complex, but the stories really give excellent depictions of fantasy worlds and like all good short stories drag you in immediately. I loved my reread!

The only story I remembered clearly was the titular one, about a little boy who wishes for a rainbow and then ends up having to give it all away. Rainbows are fleeting! You can't posess them! That's the moral of the first story and I was wondering if they would all have morals, but they don't. Which is good, but the mid eighties were a totally different time so I did wonder. I will also say that I wondered if there would be anything in this book that we would now consider 'problematic'. I'm thinking of Blyton and Dahl, both mentioned above, both of whom I really loved, but both of whom I now wouldn't read because of their racism, sexism, anti Semitism, and so on. Honestly children's literature has moved on so far in forty years which I'm really glad about, but it does make me nervous about revisiting some of my favourite books. However, I'm pleased to report that there wasn't anything in this book that I found offputting, which I'm glad about. 

As I read, I did remember another of the stories, in which a small boy called Tim gets tricked by a stone goblin. I loved that one, too. I didn't remember any others. I did think there was a bit of an over reliance on princesses and kings and queens, but that maybe was the fashion at the time. I liked the rich worlds of those stories anyway. I also liked that not all the protagonists of the stories were 'good'. We need a baddy every now and then! Maybe then they don't get their happy endings!

In all, I would recommend this for children these days as I think it would still go down well. My copy had some really lovely illustrations in it which I liked. I'm giving it four out of five. 

1979 by Val McDermid - Review

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

You may remember that last year I read 1989 by Val McDermid, not realising that it was the second in a series about journalist Allie Burns. I really enjoyed it so I wanted to read the first one. I bought it on Kindle a while ago but had forgotten about it. But then I was on holiday in Edinbugh last week, tabling at the Zine Fest and then staying with a friend for a few days, so I decided to read something set in Scotland and this fit the bill perfectly. I really enjoyed this book but I think I liked the second one more. Like the second book, it really has a lot going on, with many plot lines. I don't think it's detrimental to the book overall, but I do wonder if it would be better to split the lines into separate novels? 

So, in 1979 Allie is working for the Daily Clarion in Glasgow. She hasn't been there very long; newly returned to Scotland from university in England and is pretty new to journalism. She is always just given the 'miracle baby' stories and isn't taken seriously by her bosses or colleagues. The miracle baby is genuinely one given to her after she and her colleague Danny witness a baby being born on a stopped train on New Year's Day on the way back to Glasgow. Allie is fed up, so when Danny suggests a story he might have she's willing go in on the investigating with him.

Danny's older brother Joseph has always been the golden boy in the family. He drives a flashy car and boasts about his high flying job with an investment company. Over Christmas he mentions something which means that the way the company works may be laundering money for rich clients. Danny starts looking into his brother's actions and asks some questions, and realises that money laundering is exactly what is happening. He and Allie start investigating, and take the story to their boss, but Danny realises he can't keep his brother's name out of it. He knows this is going to have a terrible effect on his family. 

They get the story and the credit, but at what cost? Allie starts hanging out with Rona (who I remembered as her girlfriend from the second book, so I knew where the relationship was headed) who works on the 'women's pages'. She tells Allie to keep an eye on some SNP meetings and the women involved. There is about to be a vote on Scottish devolution, and the SNP are getting antsy. While there, Allie meets three men who talk about forming a Scottish Republican Army, like the IRA, to force complete independence from England. Allie persuades Danny to infiltrate this group, and again she and Danny face danger in the pursuit of their story.

I did think the very ending of the book was a little bit anticlimatic. But maybe it is quite real in that way. The book has a lot of heart and emotion, and it's hard to not feel for both Allie and Danny in their ways. I loved the 1979 setting and all the sexism that Allie faced in her job and the way she was just fobbed off despite being a good writer and having excellent instincts. I also really liked the look at journalism at the time with all the copies of stories, the copy boys, the hierarchy of the newsroom, and all of that. There's less of this in the second one so I appreciated this look. Plus some of the stuff they had to do because there just weren't phones and computers around was totally wild. A totally different world and yet it really isn't that long ago. 

I'm giving this five out of five. Despite a couple of misgivings I did really like it. I have just learnt that 1999 is coming out later this year, so I will look forward to that! 

Heartstopper Vol 5 by Alice Oseman - Review

Saturday, February 17, 2024


It's the latest instalment of Heartstopper! Yay! I wanted to read this as soon as it came out, but it wasn't available in my library. Then it appeared, but I couldn't place a hold on it. So I asked the librarian to, and she was able to, so finally I had it in my hands! I picked it up last week, because I knew it would be an easy read while I was away in Edinburgh with my friend. I really enjoyed it and am glad I read it.

So as you may remember, Nick and Charlie have been together for a couple of years now and they've said 'I love you' to each other, and they're out to everyone important in their lives. Nick is in the sixth form so he's having to start making some decisions about his future. Meanwhile Charlie is sitting his GCSEs.

Charlie is mostly in recovery from anorexia, but it's something they both keep in mind during this book. They want to stay over with each other, but their parents aren't too sure. There's funny bits about keeping the door open and stuff. Charlie's parents say they can have a sleepover once Charlie's exams are over, which they do. They have some sexual contact and they're both really happy about it - but Nick doesn't really have friends to talk to about it so he's a bit sad about that. The sex stuff is really cute, not explicit but adorable between the two of them. Charlie is a bit anxious about his body and I'm glad that it was shown that they talked about it. 

Meanwhile, Nick says he's going to go to the University of Kent so that he can stay near Charlie instead of them having to be long distance like Elle and Tao. But he drives Elle and Tara on a bit of a road trip around some universities. He really likes Leeds Uni (and so he should, Leeds is great) but can he bear to be so far away from Charlie? He talks to Elle and Tara about his relationship with Charlie and it was really nice to see him being more open in general.

The art is as usual just really cute. I liked a lot of the little details like when they're kissing or cuddling. I liked the sort of dotty bits where at one point Charlie was like 'fine' and the picture of his face was adorable. I liked again how Alice showed text conversations between a few different people. I liked the depictions of the universities - trips that I remember well myself - and I liked how Nick really grew in this book in particular. In all I'm giving this five out of five because I love them, and I'll be really sad to say goodbye to them in Vol 6! 
 

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