Iris & Ruby by Rosie Thomas - Review

This book was the October choice for my book club, and I bought a second hand copy off eBay. I'm not sure I would have ever picked up this book by myself, and the first half dragged a bit for me, but I really liked it by the end. My book club is tonight (as I'm writing this) and I'm looking forward to hearing what everyone else thought about it. 

The book was published in 2007 and is set around then. Ruby is nineteen and arrives to her grandmother's house in Cairo having run away from her family home in Kent. Her mother is back home worried frantic about her, but there's a gap between Ruby and Lesley that neither of them can seem to cross. Iris, Ruby's grandmother, has lived a reclusive life in Cairo for many years. She is beginning to lose her memory, and is quite frail. She hasn't spent much time at all with Ruby before, but she agrees that Ruby can stay in Cairo with her for a while. 

Ruby rubs up against Iris' staff, Mamdooh and Auntie, who fuss over Iris to quite some degree. She also starts to explore Cairo with Ash, a boy that she really likes, who wants to become a doctor but who has to work nights in the hospital to help keep his family afloat. Ruby has had some recent sadness in her life, and is quite raw and still grieving. 

Iris has lived in Cairo for years, but before that she was a doctor in remote parts of Africa doing basic medical care and didn't spend much time at home with her husband Gordon and her child, Lesley. This led to the two of them not having much of a relationship once Lesley was an adult. Lesley in her turn has become an over protective mum and Ruby has rebelled against this.

Iris also lived in Cairo during the Second World War and it's this we see from her point of view throughout the book. She was the secretary to an officer, and she lived with an Egyptian girl, Faria, and another English girl, Sarah. Her life is a whirlwind of cocktail parties and dinner with officers who are never sure when they will head back to the desert front to fight. This makes them reckless men, and the women are tugged along for the ride.

Iris meets Captain Xan Molyneux and starts a relationship with him. The two fall in love and Iris makes many plans for their future. It's obvious that Xan didn't survive the war, and this is the great love that Iris never got over. She is back in Cairo because that's where she feels closest to him. She lives in a huge house that has become very dusty and unloved, and which belonged to a friend of Iris during the war. Iris ended up becoming friends with some medical personel during the war and that's how she ended up a doctor.  

She and Ruby forge a relationship throught the time Ruby is in Cairo. Something happens in the second half of the book that I loved, and which redeemed the whole book for me. It's really long though, and I did feel the first half dragged a lot. I very nearly gave up on the book but really wanted to finish it for book club. 

I loved the depiction of Cairo during the war, which had a lot of information that I didn't know. I enjoyed learning the history. The depiction of the glamourous girls and the parties was so good, too. It was all too easy to imagine, and imagine the personalities of the men who were determined to make the most of all their off time and they didn't know how long they had. I liked Iris but did find her quite cold and didn't quite think that her great love affair with Xan was reason enough to not move on properly latrer in her life. I loved Ruby and felt very sorry for her. I loved a lot of the secondary characters, too, especially Ash. Cairo itself is almost a chracter in its own right. I really want to visit one day!

I'm giving this four out of five. 

Blood Moon by Lucy Cuthew - Review

Where did I get it? I bought it at Warwick Books, in Warwick, when I was on holiday there a few weeks ago. I had heard about it at YALC At Home, when Lucy was on one of the panels, and I liked the sound of the book so when I saw it I picked it up. 

What's it about? It's a book told in free verse like books by Sarah Crossan or The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta. Frankie is a teenager who is really into space and astronomy. She wants to apply to do a special programme in astronomy, along with her best friend Harriet. The two of them have a telescope at the bottom of their gardens, where they spend many a night watching the stars and the moon.

Harriet has recently gone a bit boy crazy, and on an outing for a birthday, she's really into Jackson and trying to get to know him. Frankie meets Benjamin, and the two of them make friends. It turns out they're both into physics and the stars. They end up having a sexual experience together and at the end of it, Frankie gets her period, meaning her blood ends up on Benjamin. The two of them agree that it's nothing to be ashamed of, it's just blood after all. 

But then someone at school finds out and soon everyone knows it's Frankie whose period started. A meme of her and a picture of some blood goes viral. She and Harriet fall out and she obviously doesn't trust Benjamin anymore. Frankie feels ashamed and like she is disgusting, and she spirals into feeling really sad and alone. 

It's time to fight back. It's just blood, after all. 

I loved Frankie and wanted her to do really well. I loved her interest in physics and the stars and liked how this was incorporated. I liked Benjamin and their relationship. Harriet is a total nightmare for a lot of the book but she is a great character too. I liked how the whole thing about something like this going viral was handled, I liked how ashamed Frankie felt when she really didn't need to, and how we saw her fight through that. It's a really good book and especially for a teen audience. It's okay to have sex, you're allowed! Be safe, and make sure the person is around your age - those are my two piece of advice. 

What age range is it for? I'm going to say from 14 onwards. 

Are any main characters LGBTQ+? No, but I do want to say that I was worried there might be a bit of "all girls have periods! The only people who have periods are girls!" neither of which are true, and which would be cissexist. But, there isn't any of it, and I was pleasantly surprised and was glad about it. 

Are any main characters people of colour? No 

Are any main characters disabled either mentally or physically? Not really, but Frankie does get to quite a low point and I was quite worried about her at one point, so I would look after yourself there. 

Is there any sex stuff? Yes, obviously, but it isn't very graphic. 

Are drugs mentioned or used? No. There's maybe a little alcohol use? 

Is there any talk of death? Not really. 

Are there swear words? Yes, they're used so well and I really liked their inclusion 

 

What criticisms do I have? Almost none. This is a great book. 

Would I recommend the book? Yep absolutely. I'll look forward to what Lucy writes next! 

Why did I choose to read it at this point in life? Because I'd just bought it and I love picking up new books! 

What do I think of the cover? It's cool, it's relevant to the story. 

 

What other books is it like? It's like Sarah Crossan's books in terms of emotional impact. 

How many stars? Five out of five

 

Where is the book going now? Oh I'm definitely keeping it!

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman - Review

Now, I'll be honest, I don't really like reading books by celebrity authors. I think they're saturating the market too much and a lot of them are subpar or ghost written and they mean that genuinely talented writers don't get the chance to be heard as publishers want to concentrate on 'names' that people will recognise and will spend money on. I usually avoid them, so I probably wouldn't have ever picked up Richard Osman's first novel, which is a bit of a cosy crime novel. But then my mum mentioned it to me. She's a big fan of Richard's so she wanted to read it, and then she wanted me to read it so she had someone to chat about it with. So, I picked it up. 

The Thursday Murder Club is a club that meets on Thursdays in a retirement village somewhere near Brighton, that way on in the world. The founding members were Penny and Elizabeth, only now Penny is in a coma and Elizabeth has three other members - Ron, Ibrahim, and Joyce. They pore over old cold cases to see what they think, and whether they can find the culprit. They can do this because Penny was a police officer, and Elizabeth seems to have been some kind of intelligence agent, some kind of spy, although it's not obvious what. 

The retirement village is quite upmarket - everyone lives in their own flats, but there is an upscale restaurant on site and a pool and plenty of other facilities. Most of the residents still have all their faculties, but Elizabeth's husband Stephen is beginning to suffer from dementia. It is owned by a man called Ian Ventham, who is a bit of a cartoon baddie, and who wants to buy land further up from the village to expand it, but the landowner won't sell. He also wants to cut ties with his business partner, Tony Curran, who is a proper baddie, having shot someone in the year 2000. Ian cuts ties, and Tony ends up bludgeoned to death at home. Ian is the obvious suspect, but there's a bunch of other people who may have wanted Tony dead too. 

Detectives Chris and Donna are on the case. Except Donna is not actually a detective, she's an ordinary PC, but in a really contrived piece of storytelling, the Thursday Murder Club manage to get her on the case. Chris is alright, a bit of a nothing detective, but what really put me off him was that he was OBSESSED with calories, and food. It was boring to read and added nothing to the story or to him as a character. He was also desperate to get a woman, which I didn't enjoy reading either. 

Left at Tony Curran's murder scene was a photo of him, a man called Jason, and a man called Bobby Tanner. It turns out Jason is Ron (from the Murder Club)'s son, an ex boxer who had some dodgy dealings and is a suspect. There's a whole load of nonsense around ANOTHER fella called Gianni, a Turkish Cypriot, who cleaned up the fact that Tony shot someone in 2000 and who then disappeared off the face of the earth. 

Someone else is murdered and there's a ton MORE suspects for that, including an old priest (I didn't mention that the village is built on an old convent, because of course it is) and a fella who sits on a certain bench every day. The Thursday Murder Club generally make a nuisance of themselves and even confront several people they suspect of murder, while the police are left in the dark and jetting off to Cyprus to try to track Gianni down. 

So, let me talk about a few positives. I did find the book compelling, and wanted to keep reading until I found out what happened. We get several points of view and one of them was Joyce's diary, which I thought was funny and quite warmly done. I liked Elizabeth and wanted to know more about her past, and I liked Ron and Ibrahim too. 

However, I thought there were quite a lot of negatives too. For one thing, it just plainly isn't brilliantly written. All writers have idiosyncratic tics, and it's an editor's job to iron those out so the reader doesn't notice, and I didn't feel that had happened well enough here. There were 99 instances of the verb 'agrees' being used in place of 'said', which was a lot for a book of less than 400 pages. It grated on me every time I read it. Said is fine! Honestly!

Proof that 'agree' was used faaaaar too many times

There were also FAR too many characters. I forgot who some of them were by the end, like near the end there's mention of a Steve Georgiou and I could not for the life of me remember what he had done and why I had to care about it. There were too many trite coincidences too, like that Jason's dad happens to be Ron, who happens to live in the village. There were also a few storylines that just didn't need to be there, and they didn't work very well as red herrings either. 

The ending wasn't very well explained or put together, I didn't think. It didn't wrap up well enough for me, and I was a bit baffled. I feel like a bit of cutting down of the book and a decent edit would have improved it immensely. But it's Richard Osman, isn't it, so it's going to sell whatever the writing is actually like. 

However, I am giving this four out of five because I DID find it compelling, and I know there's going to be a sequel and I'll probably read that, too. Sigh. 

They Them Their by Eris Young - Review

I saw a tweet in May by the author about this book, looking for reviewers. I responded, and Eris passed along my details to their publisher, who emailed me the book for review. So thank you very much to Hachette for the chance to read and review this book! I was not otherwise compensated for this review and all thoughts and opinions are my own. 

Eris is a non binary author who has lived in both the US and the UK. In this book they talk about what being non binary is, what it's like to live outside of the gender binary, what it's like to be a queer person in the LGBTQ+ community, whether being non binary means being trans, what transition might look like for non binary people, and many more things. 

This is the Amazon blurb:

Chosen as one of The List's Hot 100 in 2019.

In this insightful and long-overdue book, Eris Young explores what it's like to live outside of the gender binary and how it can impact on one's relationships, sense of identity, use of language and more.

Drawing on the author's own experiences as a nonbinary person, as well as interviews and research, it shares common experiences and challenges faced by those who are nonbinary, and what friends, family and other cisgender people can do to support them. Breaking down misconceptions and providing definitions, the history of nonbinary identities and gender-neutral language, and information on healthcare, this much-needed guide is for anyone wanting to fully understand nonbinary and genderqueer identities.

I really enjoyed the book. I'm a cis woman, but I have non binary friends so I'm not coming at this from a place of total ignorance. I also think that most cis people have never interrogated gender up to and including their own gender and that that is something we should all do. I 'know' I'm a woman - but how do I know that? How would I feel if everyone else was convinced I was actually a boy at birth, but I knew better? I think it's useful for all of us to keep an open mind here, and this book would certainly help with that. 

It's written in quite an academic way, but it's also really readable and accessible. There's a lot of theory, but interspersed are anecdotes from several non binary people that Eris interviewed, which make the book feel more personal. There's also a ton of resources in the back, if you feel you may need more information or help. 

I'm giving this four out of five, I really enjoyed it and through Eris wrote in a really approachable way about something that is personal to them but which may be new to a reader. I would definitely read something else by the same author, and am really grateful for the chance to read this. 

And remember, there's nothing radical or feminist about transphobia. TERFs have no place in this world in 2020. 

Ghost Story Writing Course with Adam Z Robinson

Over the past few weeks I've been doing a ghost story writing workshop with Adam Z Robinson. I wanted to just write a little bit about it because I've thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it to any writer. 

I actually went to 6th form college with Adam and one of my best friends is a friend of his, and we're friends on Facebook, which is where I saw the link for this workshop. It was a six week course, with a live workshop on Facebook every Monday evening, and it was around £35. I thought that was excellent value so signed up. Each week we had recommended reading and some 'homework' to do. Then in the workshops we had exercises to do, prompts to follow, and had the opportunity to share our work too. Adam was live on Facebook and the attendees could comment alongside. 

The reading list was so good, I am still only about halfway through it and have plans to read lots more. I don't often read ghost stories, but after reading Good Girls Die First I really wanted to try my hand at writing some. I usually write contemporary, realistic fiction with no hint of the supernatural, but I wanted to stretch myself and this seemed ideal. 

Our course ended on the 26th of October and then, for Halloween, Adam was doing a horror writing workshop on the 31st, so I signed up for that too. That was £6 so really good value. It was for 2.5 hours and in that time I wrote over 1700 words, which was great! I really enjoyed myself. 

I liked a lot of the exercises throughout the course and wrote some interesting little bits through them. I also liked the theory about what is scary, and why it's scary, and how to achieve that in writing. I learnt a lot and would definitely do another of Adam's courses in the future. 

I'm actually about to embark on Nanowrimo, where you write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November, which is 1667 words a day, but I won't be incorporating ghosts... Maybe next year! I love my realistic YA too much!

The Nidderdale Murders by J R Ellis - Review

I think I was auto approved for this title on Netgalley, so thank you very much to Amazon for granting me access to this. This book was published in September 2020. I was granted an electronic copy of the book for review purposes, but was not otherwise compensated. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Okay so this is the fifth book in the Nidderdale Murder series, although it's the first one I've read. As is usual with these crime series, it works as a standalone novel, as it only briefly references previous books, and it's easy to get to grips with the main characters. Our DCI here is Jim Oldroyd, who I thoroughly liked, and his underlings were pretty good too. They are usually based in Harrogate, but this book takes them on to the Yorkshire Dales, to a small village there. 

The first victim is a man called Fraser. He used to be a judge, but he's retired to the manor house in the village and owns the local grouse moor. He invites his friends to come and shoot there quite often, and on those occasions the group uses the local pub and has lots of food and spends a lot of money. So the publicans need his business even if they don't like him. 

On one of these occasions, one of the pub staff is upstairs in her bedroom just as the party is finishing. Fraser leaves the pub and is shot by someone with a shotgun. The member of staff, Kirsty, sees the perpetrator when he looks up at her, and identifies him as local handyman Alan Green. 

The local police can't really cope with the investigation, so that's when Oldroyd and his crew step in. They start to look into Fraser's life, and while there's certainly a lot of people who would have a grudge against Fraser, the witness is so sure she saw Alan Green that they are at a bit of a loss, especially as he's now missing and can't be found. 

Someone else is shot later and again, there seems to be an obvious culprit, who again has vanished... 

I liked this a lot, it was an easy to read crime novel but with quite a lot of twists and turns that kept me guessing up to the end. I did catch one of the twists - not outright but I noticed something and thought, 'well, that's not quite right', and it turns out to be one of the twists. It was so cleverly done!

I'd give this a good four out of five, and will definitely look to read the others in the series!

Stranded by Stuart James - Blog Tour

Hello, welcome to my blog for my stop on the tour for Stranded by Stuart James. If you've never been here before please do have a look around my blog. I often read crime thrillers so there's plenty of reviews here for you to read. 

I was intrigued by the premise of this book, so signed up for the tour. I liked Ben and his family and I felt sympathy for them. The book is quite gory and grisly in parts and the ending really got to me!

Here's the book description:

A family trapped. A psychopath on the loose. Let the game begin…

What could be more innocent than going on holiday?

As a family drive along a quiet country lane on their way to the airport, they meet a stranger standing alone in the middle of the road.

Steering them along another path, he tells the driver, Ben, that a tree has fallen and there’s no way through.

But as they make their way along the diverted route, they come across a coach blocking the road.

Getting out of the car Ben goes to investigate and is horrified to find the passengers tied to their seats.

Then a discarded phone starts to ring…

If Ben calls the police, everyone on board will die.

Let the horrific game begin…

And here's the author's bio:

I have always loved scary stories, especially ones that shocked me, left me terrified, looking under my bed or in the wardrobe before going to sleep.

There was just a fantastic buzz whenever I watched or read something that took my breathe away.

I remember going to my nan’s house in Ireland as a youngster with my mother and sister, on the West Coast, staying in a cottage, surrounded by miles of fields and my family sitting around the table in the kitchen at night telling ghost stories. Going out and exploring derelict farmhouses in the middle of nowhere. I remember clearly the field at the end of the road was supposed to be haunted by headless nuns.

My cousins often remind me of the great times we had, frightening each other and running for our lives whenever we’d see something that didn’t look right.

This is why I love nothing more than to tell a story.

I started writing three years ago, penning The House On Rectory Lane which has just won The International Book Award in horror fiction. I got the idea from something that has often seemed scary to me. I know that a terrifying story has to be something that you’re frightened of doing, something that makes the hairs stand on the back of your neck, something that fills you with dread, yet also with excitement.

To me, the thought of going to a house in the middle of nowhere, upping and leaving a busy town and moving to the country is something that scares lots of people and me: the seclusion, the quiet, the darkness. That’s what inspired me to write my first novel.

My second thriller is called Turn The Other Way, which was a world wide number 1 best seller and stayed at number 1 for 19 weeks in the US.

I have multiple stories running, past and present. A family who want answers from the surgeon responsible for their daughter’s death. A young woman looking for her parents after they go missing from a party. A couple driving home and hearing screams for help from the back of the van in front of them. A serial killer on the loose in North London, dragging victims off the street.

I’m so grateful when people not only read my thrillers but also take the time to get in touch and leave a review. To me, that is the greatest feeling, hearing from people that have enjoyed my work. I know then that I’m doing something right.

My third thriller, Apartment Six, was published in January of this year and was a number 1 hot new release on Amazon for 4 weeks.

Stranded goes on pre-order Monday October 12th on Amazon and is released October 19th.

I’m 47, married and have two beautiful children. Currently, I’m a full-time plumber but would love nothing more than to make a living from my writing. I hope I write stories and people continue to enjoy them for years to come. That would be completely amazing and a dream come true.

stuartjamesthrillers.com

@StuartJames73

https://www.facebook.com/stuartjamesauthor/