Tag: reviews

3.5 out of 5.

An engaging thriller with a hint of the supernatural mixed in.

This is a multi-perspective thriller with a good balance between victim/s, killer and police POVs set in England with some internal themes around parenthood – specifically fatherhood – and the relationships between fathers and sons. The added reflection between the different father-son relationships in the book made for some extra content to think about in relation to the central story and characters as well as a couple of unseen twists along the way.

One part of the killer’s identity was guessable but another aspect to it was hidden until late in the book and there were other reveals that I didn’t see coming.

The prose was easy to read and still engaging and the main character was sympathetically written. There were some supernatural-ish elements that I can’t add much more about without spoilers and some additional creep-factor moments that added to the suspense.

Worth a read and can be picked up fairly cheap (e.g. The Works, paperback, £2; Amazon Kindle ed, £2.99).

This is a brilliant book that, while fictional, is drawn from the author’s own experiences as a black woman in a predominantly white environment in the aftermath of police shooting and killing Oscar Grant (2009). Thomas has taken some of her own experiences, feelings and even guilt over her silence in that situation and turned it into a novelisation focusing on Starr, a 16 year old black girl who attends a predominantly white private school and lives in – as she describes it – “the ghetto”.

Starr witnesses her childhood friend Khalil get shot dead by a policeman and the book then follows her as she struggles to keep herself and her world from falling apart. She seeks justice for Khalil while her neighbourhood erupts into riots and the police roll in with tanks and tear-gas.

Black Lives Matter has been around since 2013 and we have seen a huge surge this year, 2020, again following the multiple unlawful killings of unarmed black people by police in America. THUG is as relevant now as it was in 2017 and when it began as a college short story for Angie Thomas in 2009. Despite being fictionalised this is a very realistic account of aftermath of one such police shooting and the various ways in which oppressed people can react.

I am not usually one for YA but this book doesn’t feel like YA to me. By all means, it still is, I mean more than it doesn’t dumb things down and that’s important especially with a topic like this.

If you haven’t read it, please do so, it’s a brilliant book with captivating prose and a seriously important story.

This was a bit of a weird one to rate and categorise for me. It’s billed as being ‘darkly comic’ but I didn’t feel anything like that coming through. It’s a tale of a woman who does not fit in and trying to fit in the only ways she knows how. It explores ideas of normalised behaviour within society and how these normalisations can make anyone who doesn’t adhere to them feel alien or, in Keiko’s example, not human.

She goes from trying to be normal based on what her family and sister want or react to, to people she’s known from school, to her colleagues at the convenience store, including Shirara, who also falls outside social norms but is equally no good for Keiko.

This is a story about following your instincts whether or not that makes you appear ‘normal’ and ultimately trying to shake off the restrictive expectations that are placed upon us by societal and cultural norms.

Keiko is a well-written, neurodiverse character in a story that does not focus on naming and parading her differences. The author has successfully made a sympathetic character and does an excellent job of telling the story through the eyes of someone who feels out of place and as if they don’t understand the world swirling around them. Keiko’s slice of normalcy as a ‘Convenience Store Woman’ feels tangible and provides an excellent opportunity to explore the difficulties she faces getting on in life.

Ah, Falcio, Falcio, Falcio; sometimes you are a bit of a great big dumb-dumb.

As this book was significantly longer than the first I was expecting it to take longer to read but somehow it was just as easy to make progress with and went by quite quickly for 600 pages. Compared to the first book there was also a lot that was very similar and Falcio seems to be somehow both clever and utterly oblivious all at once, which did start to grate on me a little in this installment.

How is he so intuitive in battle and negotiations and putting all the pieces of the puzzle together to see the picture no one else can and yet still never figure out who is behind the grand machinations that are sweeping Tristia? I guessed both “big reveals” of who was behind the two different forms of atrocities fairly early on and found myself getting more and more frustrated by Falcio’s dumbest genius routine. This happened in the first book too but as that was a lot shorter it didn’t impact my overall enjoyment quite so much; in this book I found myself getting a bit bored of Falcio’s selective stupidity.

Oh, and can we stop calling every woman in the book a ‘whore’? I mean, c’mon! Use your imaginations, boys & girls.

DESPITE the drawbacks above, I still enjoyed the story overall though it feels very compact. I will continue with the series to Saint’s Blood and I’m curious to see if any of my other predictions will come true.

When We Cease to Understand the World features an exploration of major scientific advances in the 20th century alongside the idea that genius is often beset by madness. It is important to note, however, that there are increasing fictionalised elements as the book goes on and it becomes hard to determine what is truth and what is fiction. I was unsure how to rate this book because of this. On the one hand, I enjoyed the scientific content whereas on the other hand I would’ve appreciated more a genuine account of genius vs madness, to see what the real correlation is (if, indeed, there is one).

In order to separate facts from fiction, the onus is placed on the reader to go and do further research to determine what is true and I have two issues with this:
1) I don’t read a book in order to be left with the prospect of extensive research to unravel it, and;
2) There is a risk others will not read the Author’s Note (noticeably at the end of the book) to see that parts have been fictionalised and continue believing everything within it’s pages as truth and fact. In an age of ‘Post-Truth’ this is a bit of a risk to take and I felt like the scientific discoveries detailed are diminished because of this.

Otherwise, the book is well written and interesting. It’s not too heavy to read and seems to have been translated well.

As a modern retelling of The Turn of the Screw I was sceptical at first as I didn’t enjoy the original. I saw a lot of positive reviews for Ware’s interpretation and ended up receiving this via a giveaway on bookstagram.

I enjoyed this much more than ‘…of the Screw’! The modernised elements (such as the smart house) gave more avenues to explore strange goings-on at Heatherbrae and had me guessing. It is a clever use of technology in a ghost(-ish) story, proving that not all spooky things have to be in ancient mansions purely by candlelight.

I would have liked to have known what happened to the characters after the end of the main story – written as a letter from the protagonist as she waits in jail for trial – but I’m content enough to draw my own conclusions.

A good thriller, cleverly written and enjoyable (so much so I finished it all in one day).