I exercise a degree of caution when reviewing poetry, since I’m by no means a competent practitioner. Therefore my judgment is necessarily both subjective and lacking in personal experience. This is a pleasant read with a great deal of variety in the poems offered. There's rhyme and blank verse here. For me, the blank verse …
Continue reading Travelling Light, by Vickie Johnstone: #BookReview.
Genre can be the bane of the author’s life: most publishers insist on slotting fiction into predefined pigeonholes. But some books defy this process, either merging genres or crossing boundaries. Emanation is such a book. It is, essentially a science fiction book, but reads, certainly in the beginning, like a fantasy novel. It’s …
Continue reading Emanation: Shadeward Saga #1, by Drew Wagar: #BookReview.
[A review is a personal opinion. No reviewer can represent the view of anyone else. The best we can provide is an honest reaction to any given book.] This book is listed as ‘lesbian romance’. So, what attracted an agnostic, heterosexual man to delve into its pages? The description intrigued me to begin with. …
Continue reading The Purple Bowtie, by Lisabeth Reynolds: #BookReview.
This is a book I'd love everyone to read. Really. With its subtitle, ‘And How We Can Get There’, it offers hope for the future. Well written and, with forty pages of bibliography/research annotations, a book that has clearly been thoroughly researched. If you’ve reached that stage where you see a future for humanity in …
Continue reading Utopia for Realists, by Rutger Bregman, Reviewed.
It’s dangerous to review a much-loved and respected classic; even more so for an author. So I face this review with some trepidation. The story is, of course, of its time; a period when readers had fewer distractions, were happy to read wordy stories, and were educated enough to understand the subtleties of language. I …
Continue reading The Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan Poe: #BookReview.
Subtitled ‘A Manual for Writers’, this is a scholarly work that attempts to analyse what makes a story ‘literary’ rather than ‘genre’ and advises on how to go about achieving this distinction. Presented in two parts, after a brief introduction to the topic, the book looks first at ‘Structuring the Story’, in which the author …
Continue reading Story in Literary Fiction, by William H. Coles: #BookReview.
Until I read this short, I hadn’t realised how good Poe was at comic writing. This is a tongue-in-cheek dig at the horror genre that had me laughing out loud. Although some of the constructed names are a little juvenile, I suspect they would have been thought quite revolutionary at the time. The story, inasmuch …
Continue reading The Devil in the Belfry, by Edgar Allan Poe: #BookReview.
Translated from the original Italian, this melancholy novel captures the nuance and subtlety that can so strongly influence a young mind. The wrong thing said, the poor choice made, the misunderstanding never fully comprehended until much later, all act as controllers in the lives of those still forming. This is the story of two young …
Continue reading The Solitude of Prime Numbers, by Paolo Giordano. #BookReview.
Fantasy? Science Fiction? Magical Realism? This book is all of these. But it’s also a thoughtful, imaginative, and ultimately terrifying cross genre piece that stirs both emotions and ideas. We’re plunged into an undefined land, except that it must be the so-called civilised world, in an undeclared time, which must be the future. What is …
Continue reading Till They Dropped, by Sue Knight, Reviewed.
This is the first part of a four book series. I have a certain distrust of such books, if they fail to perform the function of a proper story in each volume. This one, it must be said, is marginal. The ending is ambiguous and designed to draw the reader to the next part, which …
Continue reading Red Desert – Point of No Return, by Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli, Reviewed.
This book was recommended to me by a friend in Australia; I doubt I’d have come across it otherwise. Full of detail on the personalities involved in setting up and running the first colony in Australia, the book chronicles events leading up to the decision to transport convicts from England, and describes life for those …
Continue reading 1788, by David Hill, Reviewed.
I bought a copy of this book because I’d previously read/reviewed the author’s previous title, Naked Truths About Getting Book Reviews. This is an update of that book, but it’s also much more. If you’re an author in search of reviews, you really should give this book some time. I discovered aspects of review writing …
Continue reading Naked Review: How to Get Book Reviews, by Gisela Hausmann, Reviewed.
The third book in the trilogy, and a fitting conclusion to a compelling story, Pilgrims of the Pool draws the threads together and weaves an ending that’s the only one possible. The book combines three strands, weaving them into a cohesive tale that takes the reader into different worlds. Nick Blaketon, in his continuing search …
Continue reading Pilgrims of the Pool, by Linda Acaster, Reviewed.
A virginal, shy, geeky, young woman falls for a broken-hearted medic on a TV reality show. This comedy romance is peppered with characters that are probably common to this televisual form of torture sold as entertainment. I don’t watch it; it’s not ‘real’ in any proper sense of the word, and generally brings out the …
Continue reading The Leftover, by Brooke Williams, Reviewed.
Cosy crime with dogs. Dogsbody is a Georgie Crane Comi-Crime novel by an author whose work I’ve always enjoyed. As usual, Karen Wolfe gives good value with plenty of laughs, a few deaths, and a romance that might or might not… For lovers of crime, this one will keep you turning the pages to find …
Continue reading Dogsbody, by Karen Wolfe, Reviewed.
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Antidote to the Novel
Stuart Aken 