Pretty Little Thing by Kit Duffield - Review
Sunday, October 27, 2024
The List by Yomi Adegoke - Review
Wednesday, October 23, 2024
I bought this book on a whim off Vinted alongside some other ones - I think I got five books for about £13, which was good. I love Vinted for books! They're so cheap!
I am glad I took a chance on this and I am glad it exists as a book, but I'm not really sure it worked for me. That's fine, not all books are for all people. But I found it a bit of a slog and I would have liked it to end a little bit earlier than it did.
So Ola is the heroine of the book. At the very beginning, she is less than a month from marrying her fiance, Michael. They are both somewhat famous, and are totally #couplegoals and Black aspiration. Ola is a journalist at a feminist magazine. Michael has just been hired by CuRated but up until now he's been a successful podcaster. He's been hired by CuRated because they've been called out for being so white and he's their diversity hire to prove that they're not racist. Similarly, Ola is "the Black one" in the magazine office, and her friend Kiran is "the Asian one" and Sophie is "the gay one". Ola seems to think that this is just the way life has to be for her to get ahead.
Anyway, on the morning of Michael's first day at CuRated, Ola wakes up to her best friends Ruth and Celie messaging her about a thing called The List. This is an open document which has named abusers and rapists in UK media, like a Me Too kind of thing. And Michael is on the list. It says that he is guilty of harassment (so not like the worst offences on the list, but even so) and that he has a restraining order against him. This is news to Ola and she obviously doesn't know what to do.
She wants to believe Michael when he says he's innocent, but she is also a feminist and wants to believe women. Her editor Frankie asks her to write about The List for the magazine, but Ola clearly doesn't want to do that and is desperate to get the focus off herself at work.
Now I think it's just really stupid that she just doesn't postpone the wedding until they decide what to do, but Ola keeps giving excuse after excuse. She wants Michael to prove that he didn't harass anyone but how do you prove a negative? She sets a private investigator on to him.
Meanwhile, Michael is certain that he knows who is behind the accusations, and he is sure they aren't exactly true. He is really misogynistic though and as I read in someone else's review on Goodreads, I wish that he had undone his views just a little bit. For instance, near the end of the book there's a bit where he admits to himself that the number of people that Ola has slept with is too high for him, even though it's below his own 'colossal' number. Two of his friends are proper dicks, too, and he is complicit in their sexism a lot of the time and never calls them out. The fourth friend realllly needed better friends. I won't say that I disliked Michael's parts of the book, but he did annoy me.
Ola, too, kept seeming to make stupid decisions and not for reasons that I could understand. There didn't seem to be enough good things about Michael to keep her coming back, and they had had their issues at the beginning of the relationship. I liked her relationships with her friends.
I don't want to give spoilers so I won't say much more, but I did think the end was just a bit stupid. In all I'm giving this three and a half out of five.
We Solve Murders by Richard Osman - Review
Sunday, October 20, 2024
The Last Thing to Burn by Will Dean - Review
Friday, October 18, 2024
Fat Girl Best Friend by Sarah Grant - Review
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
To be clear, I have been involved in the fat acceptance movement for well over a decade, and I love the non fiction writing that has cropped up over the last however many years so I was keen to read this too. But for me, it was just a bit old news. I have been here so long that I've heard all these critiques before. I mentioned this to two friends who are also fat and who are also in the movement, and they agreed that for us it's just not new, but that it may be for some people. And I agree, so if some people do need to read this book and would get a lot out of it, I can't really diss it too much.
Basically, it looks at the 'fat girl best friend' in TV shows and films and explores the tropes that the fat side character endures. She's never the main character, she never gets to have her own wishes and wants, she is often either over sexualised or isn't allowed to be sexual at all, she is just the friend of the Thin Main Character. There are lots of examples given but the ones people are often more familiar with are Fat Monica in Friends and Fat Amy in Pitch Perfect. (And it's actually really problematic that both these women are nicknamed 'Fat', for god's sake). But as I say, there was a lot of new information for me.
Things I did like were: the fact that some of the women who are depicted as 'fat' in Hollywood are actually just 'entertainment thin', and what that means, and I also really liked the look at Paula in Crazy Ex Girlfriend because generally that show does so well at representation and I liked Paula when I watched the show.
I did find there were parts of it that weren't proofread properly which I found annoying, and there were some parts of it that were just plain wrong. For instance, it said that the film Frozen was released in 2019. No, it was not. I don't even like the film and I know that. This made me feel like not enough care was taken over the book, and that disappointed me.
In all I'm giving this three out of five. I will donate it somewhere I think, and will hope that someone else will get more out of it that I did.
The Four by Ellie Keel - Review
Sunday, October 13, 2024
Keedie by Elle McNicoll - Review
Friday, October 11, 2024
Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter? by Nicci French - Review
Tuesday, October 8, 2024
The Fells by Cath Staincliffe - Review
Sunday, October 6, 2024
Thank you so much to Joffe Books for giving me access to this book via Netgalley! I cam across it while browsing and was intrigued, so I was pleased to be able to read it. I was provided with an electronic copy of this book for review purposes but was not otherwise compensated for this post. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
I love detective fiction but I hadn't come across Cath Staincliffe before. This is her first book in the series with these detectives, but she has other books with other officers and I would be interested in picking one of those up. I would also definitely read more in this series, I hope to see one soon!
The detectives are Leo, who is fifty something, happily married, and good at his job. His son, though, is causing a bit of worry because he's quite right wing and racist and stuff like that. Leo and his wife don't know what to do with him.
Shan is new to the department I think, she's definitely new to Leo. She's married to a woman and she's pregnant with their first child. She tells Leo this straight away but is keen to get stuck into her new job.
And the job is this: a potholer has found a skeleton in a cave and Leo thinks it must be the bones of a young woman called Vicky who went missing in the late 90s. She was in the area with friends, at a festival, when she went missing, and was never found. It was commonly thought that she was another victim of a serial killer in the area, although he always denied it. She left a note saying she was going to watch the sunrise, but was never seen again. Two of her friends have stayed in touch with her mother, who desperately wants to know what happened to Vicky and to bury her properly.
Leo and Shan - who has Chinese heritage, although she's adopted - get to work going over the cold case.
I was worried in case this book was a bit too close to something by J R Ellis - there's even one of his about a body found in a cave in the Yorkshire Dales - but I shouldn't have worried. This story felt fresh and new and I liked how the mystery was solved. I liked the parts set in the 90s, too, and I liked Leo and Shan and want to know what's in store for them in the future. As you can see from the photo I was reading this while on holiday and it was perfect holiday reading for me! I'm giving it four out of five.