The Haven by Fiona Neill - Review

I got this on Netgalley way back in 2024 but only just got to reading it, for which I am really sorry as I really liked it. Thank you to Michael Joseph and Penguin Random House for granting me access to the book. 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. 

Cass, aged sixteen, wakes up with injuries, but isn't sure where she is or what has happened. Then she realises she's in The Haven. It's an off grid intentional community where Cass' family has been living for the past few months. She can't remember everything but she thinks she has done something terrible. 

It all started at Cass' younger sister's birthday party. Matilda (I think, it's a couple of months since I read this book so the details may be wrong) is about seven and there were family and friends around, including Cass' dad's new friend, Mo. He had recently been travelling and he kept talking about the place he lived, The Haven. Cass' dad loves the idea, but her mum is more uncertain. Cass' aunt thinks it's a loopy idea, and Cass and her older brother, Josh (I think), are aghast at the idea of living off grid. 

However, the family moves there. They have a van which ends up crashing but they do manage to get there eventually. There are a bunch of people already there including a few younger people like Cass and her siblings. Mo isn't there to begin with but he's been texting Cass and wants them to be together. He's grooming her, definitely, it's really gross. The people already there don't want Cass and her family to be there so they're angry with Mo in his absence. She does make friends with some of the teen girls who are there, but there's something weird and cultic going on with them too (which I didn't totally understand by the end, but there was are).

When Cass wakes up the place is destroyed. There was tension with people living across the lake, where everyone in The Haven was forbidden to go. Cass needs to work quickly to save her family and herself.

I generally liked the book and am giving it four stars out of five. I think it was a compelling Young Adult novel, with a lot of intrigue and mystery. 

Barrowbeck by Andrew Michael Hurley - Review

I saw this book recommended somewhere and thought it sounded really interesting so I requested it at the library. I've been using my library a lot this year, it's much better than buying books and my library system has the vast majority of the books I've wanted. I run a craft club in my local library on Monday mornings so pick up books then and the librarians know me well.

This book is set in Barrowbeck, a fictional town on the Yorkshire/Lancashire border. Now I don't know if you've ever been to towns on those borders, but they are hinterlands, somehow neither one thing nor another. often quite remote and isolated. So I could well imagine the setting! The book follows the town from its very earliest foundations until a post apocalyptic future. 

The first people in the area are Ancient Celts, driven out of Wales. They make deals with the local gods in order to settle in the area but are servants of the supernatural forces there. This motif carries throughout the whole novel. We pop into the town every couple of centuries or so and meet the locals. To begin with there's a lot of witchcraft and so on but then Christianity takes over. There's a childless couple who do a deal with the devil in order to have a baby. There's a progressive clergyman who has impoverished children from Barnsley and Huddersfield visit. There's World War One and there's a doctor who knows her husband is having an affair. It's a series of vignettes and I thought it worked really well. 

The final part is set in the near future when the town has been flooded and is no longer habitable. I found this spookiest of all because it was just so believable. 

I haven't read anything by Andrew Michael Hurley before but I know people raved about The Loney so maybe I will read that soon. I really wanted Lee to read this so he bought it to read on his tablet. In all I'm giving this five out of five because I thought it was brilliant. 

Everyone Is Lying to You by Jo Piazza - Review

When I read Yesteryear I saw recommendations for this, which is similar but apparently better. So I got it and read it on Kindle. I was reading it when I went to Brighton in August which is where I took this photo - the pink item is my bag and the blue item at the bottom is my dress, and I swear the creamy colour to the right hand side is actually the white sheets in the lighting in the room, not my flesh! I didn't notice what this photo looked like until I've uploaded it just now... 

Anyway! On to the plot. I haven't written here in ages and it's weeks since I read this book so I am trying to remind myself about what happened in it. I really need to get caught up on my book blogging because I don't want to miss out any of the books I've read! Please bear with me. 

The first character is Lizzie. She's a magazine writer whose job is in jeopardy because of the death of magazines and so on. She's married and she has two young children. She spends quite a lot of time scrolling through the instagram of her old friend Bex, who is now a tradwife influencer. It's a love/hate kind of thing and Lizzie can't tear herself away. Then she gets a message from Bex, now known as Rebecca, suggesting that she break some news about Rebecca's life in her magazine. It will be a huge story and Rebecca wants her to be the one to break the news. She suggests that she and Lizzie meet up at a blogging conference and she will give Lizzie the exclusive interview. 

The conference is very clearly meant to be Blog Her, which is probably defunct now and which really made me laugh. It's full of influencers and corporate giveaways. It's held at a luxury hotel and Lizzie enjoys her first couple of days there. She barely sees Rebecca, but enjoys herself anyway. Rebecca comes to her room one night and they drink together, Rebecca letting her tradwife side slip. 

Then the next morning, in the middle of the keynote speech or whatever, news comes that Rebecca's husband Gray has been found murdered on their ranch. She is taken for questioning and so is Lizzie. 

Rebecca's life turns out to not be as rosy as it looks online. She is married to Gray, and has moulded him into the man she would like him to be - a bit like Natalie in Yesteryear. They have five children. Rebecca is working hard at her job of making everything look perfect - but clearly not everything is. 

I did find the book really compelling and I liked Lizzie's point of view and thought it was so true how she couldn't look away from Rebecca's life. But it just fell a bit flat for me. I'm giving it three and a half out of five because I do think it's worth reading, and I do think it's better than Yesteryear, but it just wasn't quite there yet. 

The Bookman's Wake by John Dunning - Review

This book was my choice for book club. I wasn't sure what to suggest this year so ended up picking this. I first read it about twenty years ago, maybe longer. It was definitely when my dad was still alive and he died in 2008. He read it first when we were on holiday in France I think, and he liked it so much that he made my mum and I read it too. I absolutely loved it at the time but have never reread it. I thought it was an interesting choice for book club as we don't tend to read a lot of crime, and I thought it would be interesting to read it now I'm 42, not in my late teens or early twenties as I was before. 

The book is one of a series about an ex police detective called Cliff Janeway. He now works as a book dealer and he's minding his own business doing that one day when an ex colleague arrives in his shop. This colleague is now like a bounty hunter, returning those who have skipped bail and cashing in on it. He has a new person he's chasing. She's called Eleanor Rigby and she's a young woman who's skipped bail. Janeway is intrigued because of the connection to books - there have been ashes of books left behind after robberies that Eleanor has been arrested for, and Janeway wants to know why. 

He sets off in pursuit of her and ends up in Washington or Oregon, one of those places. I think. It's a while since I read this so the details are a bit fuzzy. Anyway she's been all over the country and there are dead bodies, too, so if it was Eleanor then she is also wanted for murder. I can't fully remember. But Janeway captures Eleanor and then they spend a nice twenty four hours together scavenging rare books and teaching each other some lessons. He then decides to take her back to her family farm and meets her parents and her uncle. There's definitely a frisson of something sexual between them even though, as Janeway points out to himself, he's old enough to be her dad. 

So the books that have been left in ashes at crime scenes. Eleanor's dad used to work for the Graysons. They were a pair of brothers who had a printing press. Darryl Grayson was proud of his work and was very exacting about it. He printed a copy of The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe and there was a mistake in it, way back in 1949, and he was haunted by it for twenty years. The brothers died in a fire in 1969, a fire that took their entire workshop and everything else up in smoke. But Janeway finds that there were rumours that there was a new copy of The Raven, without the mistake. The rumour goes that Darryl sent it out to his subscribers, first of all, but that he was going to do a proper print run but then he died, and couldn't. Janeway suspects that the ashes of the books left at the crime scenes were copies of this new version of The Raven.

These parts of the book are all fine, and interesting, but it gets bogged down in detail at about two thirds of the way through. There are people after Eleanor and it all gets a bit stupid and there's too many characters and it's hard to wade through. But I did enjoy the main story. I think most people at book club agreed with me. 

In all I'm giving this sort of three and a half out of five - not quite a four but it was nice to reread something that I read so long ago and that I shared with my dad. I'm not sure I would read any others in the series, though! 

Are You Awake? by Sarah Crossan - Review

I realised there was a Sarah Crossan book that I hadn't read so I requested it at the library. It's six weeks since I read it now so I'm struggling to remember the names of the people in the book. Let me go google... 

Ah, yes. This book is for adults, definitely, so be careful if your children know Sarah Crossan from her YA books and want to pick this up. I've read another of Sarah's adult books and think I've read everything she's written actually! The other adult book was told in verse like her YA books are. This one is told in sort of vignettes, so it's not a full novel but the way of writing worked really well for the subject matter. It gives a really compelling look into the mind of Dolores, the main character.

She is a secondary school teacher and she's married to David. He's some kind of corporate something, I don't remember. One morning Dolores discovers a sex doll hidden in a bag in the garage. She's a lifelike full size doll called Zoey. In fact, the book was previously published under the name Hey Zoey, because that's what Dolores keeps saying to activate her. Finding her throws up a lot in Dolores' and David's marriage. She asks him to leave but then she unpacks Zoey herself and ends up opening up to the doll in ways she's never been able to with David.

The two of them met at university and I feel like Dolores engineered a lot of their relationship to ensure that they ended up together. Like David just isn't that forthcoming as a person. Dolores is traumatised and seems numb throughout the book, which I liked. She had a difficult relationship with her mother and protected her little sister from a lot of things. When she was young, her mum moved in her partner and his son. The son was just a bit older than Dolores and eventually sexually abused her. It isn't told in explicity terms but it is definitely there, and Dolores struggles with it. 

I didn't feel like we got to know David at all, which I found strange, but honestly I have very little criticism of the book. I'm giving it four out of five. 

The Family Friend by Claire Douglas - Review

This was the third book I bought in Waterstones in Peterborough and I read it near the end of July. I've read other books by Claire Douglas and I was intrigued by the premise of this book so I got it. My cousin's wife saw it when I'd bought it and expressed interest, so I passed it on to her when I was done. I hope she liked it more than I did. I didn't hate it, but I only gave it three out of five stars so there was obviously something that didn't gel with me. It's a while since I read it but I will try to cast my mind back...

The book is about Imogen, a woman in her thirties who has been working as a journalist but she's suspended at the moment due to something that happened with one of her investigations. She is I think married to Josh, who is a tiresome human being that I disliked from the off. Some of his actions were really abusive so I would give a trigger warning for that. Imogen gets the unexpected news that she has been left a massive house in Bath in the will of a woman called Dorothea. 

Dorothea is an artist and has had a successful career, but the house went up in flames and a lot of her artwork was destroyed. But Imogen finds a box addressed to her and realises Dorothea is trying to tell her something about her own past as well as what happened to Dorothea. Imogen hasn't seen Dorothea since she was sixteen, half her lifetime ago, when her mother left her dad and took Imogen with her. They stayed with Dorothea and she helped them, but Imogen's mother went back to Imogen's dad, and he is now serving time for her murder. Imogen has had a difficult life because of this, but is very close to her sister.

She starts trying to unravel what happened to Dorothea. There's a weird neighbour who is a bit too friendly, and there's a hunky next door neighbour who Imogen remembers from the summer she was sixteen. Dorothea's studio yields nothing but then there's a hidden bunker in the garden which does. There are three friends of Dorothea's who know a lot about what happened with Imogen's parents, but they are under threat too. 

I liked the sense of threat in the book a lot, but Imogen drove me mad by making stupid mistakes and decisions. Josh is a proper dickhead to her. I thought it was a bit slow in parts, too. I think maybe my time with Claire Douglas is up as I don't find her that interesting. 

Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan - Review

I've read other books by Claire Keegan so when I spied this in Waterstones in Peterborough I picked it up. I had a voucher to spend so got this and something else on buy one get one half price. I then read it really soon after purchasing, which is good going for me. 

I love the sparseness of the prose in this book, which I've said about Claire Keegan before. I love these little novella books, of around 150 pages, as I think they're really accessible for readers. This one is short stories and I like how Claire said so much in so few words. They were even sparser than her usual stuff! All the stories are set in Ireland which I loved. There are only seven stories and I liked them all. 

I really liked the title story, about a priest performing a marriage involving a woman that he was in love with, and how he moves through the day. There's a story about an abused daughter which was hard to read but done so beautifully. I liked the story about Martha, a storyteller, who causes chaos in her family by exposing the truth about them to the neighbours. But they were all good! 

I think I've read everything that Claire Keegan has published now which is a shame, but I more recently read a book that was a lot like this one, which I'll review soon! In all I'm giving this four out of five and I thoroughly recommend it.