The Grass Widow by Vanessa Edwards - Review

Hello and welcome to my blog for my stop on the tour for The Grass Widow by Vanessa Edwards! It is a pleasure to welcome you here to my blog. Please do have a click around and read some of my other reviews. Thank you for having me, The Write Reads! 

I like thrillers like this so was intrigued by the premise of the book. I think it's obvious that Vanessa Edwards used to work in law; it's meticulously written. I could barely put the book down because it just kept me engrossed! There are so many different strands and so many different people who are all out for themselves. But most of the characters are really likeable even though they are out for themselves! 

The book revolves around a man called Hugh, but he isn't a main character at all really and it's hard to get to know him. He is married to Amanda and they live in a big house in Winchester which has taken a lot of refurbishment which has taken up all of Amanda's time. He is also having an affair with a woman called Leonie, who works for his law firm in London. Before the beginning of the book, he has broken up with her on the same day that she is made redundant. She wants to get revenge on Hugh so she gets a job at the cleaning firm that Amanda employs, wanting to eventually get to clean Amanda's house. She plans to plant things like receipts and stuff in Hugh's posessions to get Amanda to suspect his affairs, and hopes to bring his life down around him. 

However, there are other things going on too. First of all there's Simon. He is a bit of a loner who lives in a camper van. He does garden work, which he uses as a cover to size up people's houses to burgle. He manages to get a job at Amanda's house and begins to win her over by taking her food, cooking for her, etc. He's charming and so different to Hugh and eventually the two begin an affair. 

But Amanda's current cleaner, Tina, is being blackmailed by her brother in law to steal people's information from the houses she cleans. She makes some money off this which she needs for her son as she's a single mum, but she feels terrible about it. She ends up meeting Simon, who realises what she's doing and realises he needs to contain her. Then there's a woman called Brenda, also a cleaner, who knows about Simon and Amanda's affair and who sends a bribery letter. Leonie knows both these women but doesn't know everything, of course. 

The bodies don't appear in this book until really late on, because so much happens and there's just so many threads. As the reader you know everything, but no one else does. All of the women are pretty sympathetic, even those who are breaking the law, because you understand their desperation. Amanda really has a lot of growth throughout the book and I wanted her and Leonie to succeed. 

In all I'm giving this five out of five because I was just enthralled. I will definitely read something else by Vanessa when she publishes something else! 

The Red Tunic by Kate Wiseman - Review and Blog Tour

Hello and welcome to my post on the tour for The Red Tunic by Kate Wiseman! It is a pleasure to welcome you here. I'm sorry that this post is a day late, but yesterday got away from me. I've been a bit overwhelmed and unwell for the last few weeks, so I needed to just not worry about this yesterday. 

But here I am now! And hopefully, here you are too! Please do have a click around and read some of my other reviews. 

The Red Tunic is mostly set in the trenches in France/Belgium in World War One. The main part of the narrative takes place in 1917. Nina is in uniform, posing as her twin brother, Alfie, in order that she may fight in his place. She is writing to him. The narrative then flashes backwards to various points in the twins' lives, to show us how they got to this point. 

Basically, they are both gender non-conforming. Nina feels totally constricted by the expectations that are held for her as a young woman in the 1910s - she doesn't want to marry well and do embroidery. She wants to fight, be free, get into scrapes, in the same way that Alfie is allowed to. Alfie, meanwhile, definitely reads as a trans woman. However, I will keep using 'she' for Nina and 'he' for Alfie because that is how they are described in the book. This book is set more than a hundred years ago and obviously gender wasn't necessarily understood in the same ways that it is now - I think both twins would be living far freer lives - thankfully - if they were alive now. 

Nina manages to pose as her twin when they are younger, so when the two turn eighteen and Alfie's call up papers arrive, she knows she can pose as him and go to France. She is determined to protect her twin. I actually really liked this about Nina - she's headstrong and knows what she wants in life. I liked the depiction of the trenches and the things that happened there. I liked Alfie's life back home in England, where he is posing as his sister... but I won't spoil that any further because I loved how it unfurled. 

The twins also lost their mother when they were young, and their father is very standoffish and cold towards them. However, they have an aunt, Julia, who is a suffragette and who takes both twins under her wing. I loved her appearances throughout the book. 

I would love for this to be the start of a series! It sort of feels like Young Adult literature in parts, which I also really liked. I'm giving it four out of five. 

The Dark Wives by Ann Cleeves - Review

Thank you so much to Pan Macmillan for granting me access to this, the new Ann Cleeves book, on Netgalley. I love Ann Cleeves and am slowly making my way through her back catalogue, so I was really happy to read this new book just as it came out. I was provided with an electronic copy of this book for review purposes, but was not otherwise compensated for this review. All thoughts and opinions are my own. 

This is a Vera Stanhope book and it was really good to be back with her. At the beginning of the book a young girl goes missing from a care home, and the body of one of the workers from the home is found nearby. The girl, Chloe, has left a diary behind and it seems like she may have had a crush on Josh, the worker. He is a student and his parents live in a big house quite nearby - but they didn't know he was working in the care home. It seems very much like Chloe could have killed him and taken off, but Vera doesn't want to believe that of a damaged young woman. The team starts to investigate. Vera is blaming herself for the death of one of their team in a previous book, and there's a replacement, Rosie, to get to know too. 

Josh took the job to try to impress his ex girlfriend, Stella, who is a save the world type and who lives on a commune with her dad. It's somewhere that Chloe has visited, too, so there's a link there. Josh and his dad used to go climbing on a hill where the titular Dark Wives - three stones - stand. Another body turns up there, the body of one of Chloe's housemates, another vulnerable young man in care. It looks like an overdose, but is it? 

There's a lot of layers in the book and many different strands of story. I'm honestly not sure how Cleeves keeps them all straight! I really enjoyed this and am giving it five out of five because I really enjoyed reading it. 

No Funeral for Nazia by Taha Kehar - Review and Blog Tour

Hello and welcome to my blog for my stop on the tour for No Funeral for Nazia by Taha Kehar! It is a pleasure to welcome you here. Please do have a click around and read some of my other reviews. I was intrigued by the premise of this book and liked it, so I'm glad to have joined in on the tour. 

As the title implies, Nazia has died and there is to be no funeral for her. She was living in the house of her sister, Naureen, and her husband, Asfand. The two sisters didn't always get on, and Nazia had had an affair with Asfand some years previously, but Naureen had cared for her sister as she was dying and now wants to enact her last wishes. These are that there is no funeral, but that several of her friends and relatives are invited over, alongside a mysterious stranger, for the evening. 

There is Nazia's daughter, Sabeen, now a woman in her mid twenties, who was estranged from Nazia. She had been living with Parveen, an old friend of Nazia's. Parveen is also at the party, as is Nazia's ex husband Salman. The final guests - apart from the mystery one, who I won't spoil - are a couple who were friends of Nazia too. They had all fallen out with her, though. Nazia was not a likeable person and had really screwed some people over - but they had also done wrong to her. In fact no one in the book is particularly likeable, which makes it an interesting read! 

I would recommend this book for fans of Kamila Shamsie and the like. I loved the setting and the secrets and lies that came out. 

The Man in Black and Other Stories by Elly Griffiths - Review

I am really sorry to have been absent from my blog for a bit. I was feeling a bit uncreative after I came back from a few days away, and then one of my beloved cats died very unexpectedly. She probably had a heart attack or something; it was very sudden. We're just very sad and shocked. I was about to start writing this post when she died, and I know it published as an empty post before. I'm sorry about that if you saw it. 

I also read this book weeks ago - I finished it on the 26th of July - and I feel like I've forgotten loads of what is in it. As with all Elly's books, I enjoyed it, though. It's a book of short stories; I've read a couple of Elly's short stories before but it was nice to read a whole book of them. I also read this just before I went to Norfolk on holiday and as a few of the stories are set in Norfolk it was nice to do this. 

Some of the usual suspects are here - Ruth and Nelson and Kate, Max Mephisto, and Harbinder Kaur. I liked all their stories, of course, and the one about Ruth's first Christmas tree. I've read that before but it was lovely to read it again as Kate is a baby in it and of course in the books she's quite grown up now. I loved seeing Max in the theatre and in the lodging houses again, and learning a bit more about his past. I liked the stories with new characters too. I think the best one was a twist in the tale about a woman who discovered something in her husband's garden... 

In all I'm giving this four out of five and I really liked it!

Anticipation by Neil Taylor - Review

Hello and welcome to my blog for my stop on the tour for Anticipation by Neil Taylor! It's a pleasure to welcome you here and I am so glad I am on the tour for this book! I was also lucky enough to get a paper copy of this in the post, which was a lovely surprise. Thank you so much to The Write Reads and to Neem Tree Press for having me on board!

If you're new to my blog please do have a click around and read some of my other reviews. I love Young Adult literature which is why I signed up for  this tour. It is a really good example of dystopian YA literature and I would recommend it to anyone who likes that. 

So, Riya is seventeen and she lives with her dad. Her mum is already dead, and at the very beginning of the book her dad dies in a plane accident. She is left with her auntie Hannah and staff from the company that her dad owned. He was in tech and it turns out he had made a very sophisticated AI machine that these social media giants are nore after. The main guy here is like the Mark Zuckerberg of the book, but much more evil. He comes after Riya and she has to get away, aided by some of her dad's employees. 

She then has to decide whether she wants to become a Keyholder for the company. This will teach her about the AI machine but it will risk her life even more. But she feels like she has a moral responsibility to keep the creation out of the hands of ruthless people. 

She faces a lot of true peril and I really enjoyed watching her escape - it's like an action film. I did feel like there were maybe a couple of bits towards the end that weren't needed, but it is a really good, twisty and turny thriller that I think teens will love. 

I am sure there will be more in the series, too! 

I liked Riya and I liked a lot of the supporting characters. I would definitely read something else by Neil and I'm giving this four out of five. 

The Reanimator's Heart by Kara Jorgensen - Spotlight and Blog Tour

Hi and welcome to my blog for my stop on the tour for The Reanimator's Heart by Kara Jorgensen. I was really intrigued by the premise of this book so eagerly signed up for the tour. But then time ran away from me and I haven't had chance to read the book yet. So instead I'm sharing the spotlight, and I really hope to get to the book soon and review it. Thank you for having me!

The Reanimator’s Heart by Kara Jorgensen

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Book Details

Length: 300 pages

Genre: Fantasy, Romance

Age Category: Adult

Date Published: October 25, 2022

Amazon Link: https://a.co/d/6wPDGiw (Canada)

https://a.co/d/g3j99sX (USA)

https://amzn.eu/d/0P97OSx (UK)

Goodreads Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61473626-the-reanimator-s-heart

The StoryGraph Link: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/31e30ef2-2c2d-4574-bcd0-e72e0add2dda 

Blurb

A reluctant necromancer, a man killed before his time, and the crime that brings them together.

Felipe Galvan’s life as an investigator for the Paranormal Society has been spent running into danger. Returning home from his latest case, Felipe struggles with the sudden quiet of his life until a mysterious death puts him in the path of the enigmatic Oliver Barlow.

Oliver has two secrets. One, he has been in love with the charming Felipe Galvan for years. Two, he is a necromancer, but to keep the sensible life he’s built as a medical examiner, he must hide his powers. That is until Oliver finds Felipe murdered and accidentally brings him back from the dead.

But Felipe refuses to die again until he and Oliver catch his killer. Together, Felipe and Oliver embark on an investigation to uncover a plot centuries in the making. As they close in on his killer, one thing is certain: if they don’t stop them, Felipe won’t be the last to die.

Author Bio

Kara Jorgensen (she/they) is a queer, nonbinary oddball with a penchant for all things antiquated, morbid, or just plain strange. While in college, they realized they no longer wanted to be Victor Frankenstein but instead wanted to write like Mary Shelley and thus abandoned their future career in science for writing. Kara melds her passions through her books and graduated with an MFA in Creative and Professional Writing in 2016. When not writing, they can be found hanging out with their dogs watching period dramas or trying to convince their students to cite their sources. 

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F Scott Fitzgerald - Review

So I'm back on an audiobook thing! I don't know why, but I have been listening to some on Spotify and enjoying them. I started with a couple of shorter pieces just to see mostly if I could concentrate on audiobooks again. I really only use Spotify when I'm driving, and I don't do a lot of that by myself any more, so I tend to just choose some music to listen to. But I was fed up of listening to the same old playlists, so I thought some books might be good. The first one I reviewed recently, the Ernest Hemingway short story. 

Then this one popped up. I've heard of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button because of the film, but I haven't seen it and I don't really know the story so I was intrigued. I also couldn't have told you that F Scott Fitzgerald wrote this book if my life had depended on it. I haven't ever read anything by him so that was a plus point for this book.

Plus the narrator on Spotify was really good! I really liked him and thought he brought a lot to the story. A good narrator can really made or break an audiobook for me. 

So, Roger Button is a successful businessman, and married (albeit to a wife who has very little to do in the whole book, which I did find a bit odd), and their first child is born. When Roger visits him in the nursery he finds a seventy year old man in the bassinet, with his feet hanging over the edges. 

Roger and his wife at first try to hide Benjamin's age by making him dye his hair and they try to pass him off as a five year old. As he gets 'older', he finds he cannot go to Harvard because staff think he is his own father and is trying to play the system. He gets married and has a son himself, and soon finds himself getting younger and younger, surpassing his wife in years. I knew the story vaguely but the way it was described was really good. 

I liked this a lot and I also really liked the narrator which is good as that really adds to an audio book. I'm giving this four out of five!