You Only Live Once, by Jess Vallance

I loved this book! It was just what I needed to get out of my reading slump. Seriously funny, the exciting beginnings of a cute F/F romance that feels like any other teen YA romance, a likable protagonist with Lessons to Learn that does a bunch of dumb things and becomes a better person.

Gracie Dart is one of the best characters I have encountered in YA for ages. She was a model student at a bit of a crossroads in her life. She had always assumed she'd ace her A Levels, go to one of the good Unis and do something like Business, intern in London, get a good job and charge around with a coffee cup and go for loud After Work Drinks on Fridays. Her best friend Till wants to be a plumber based on an eyewateringly impressive emergency plumber bill she once had to pay. They are really different as characters, but it's a friendship that works and I loved how in sync the two were.

After a dramatic near death experience, Gracie decides that her summer of revision, highlighting and cramming was a waste of precious life and resolves to be less boring, less predictable and less afraid. She is going to Say Yes to stuff, Live A Life and Have Experiences. Because YOLO. Also, she can put it all on Instagram. Because, as the kids day, Pics or it Didn't Happen.

The book is basically about the lessons that Gracie has to learn about loyalty, responsibility, real life vs instagram, balancing friends, being decent to family and just being honest about how you feel and what you want. Just general life balance. Stuff that's still hard in your 30s and that you probably never really learn entirely tbh.

Highlights included: Nan in Paris. Amazing. Hilarious. A real example of the true Gracie just doing something nice for someone else and finding it a meaningful experience.
The excruciating gig and subsequent cute.
Gracie's flustered and unnecessary Coming Out to her super supportive and already onboard with G being gay parents.
Gracie's first proper talk with her brother in ages. It's not so much that it's funny, just really a really sweet moment.

The cover says it's for fans of Geek Girl, which is a sensible play, but YOLO feels much more modern and savvy than Geek Girl, and Gracie is a much more relatable character, in my old lady opinion. I think more readers will relate to feeling frustrated with your own perceived lameness and striving to be more interesting and more outgoing than accidentally becoming a model.

Loved it. Will definitely be on the lookout for the next one. Also, if you don't follow Jess Vallance on Twitter and Instagram, you are missing out on additional hilarity. Although if this book teaches us anything, it's that that is not a 100% accurate reflection of a person's life.

The Water Cure, by Sophie Mackintosh

Imagine a world very close to our own: where women are not safe in their bodies, where desperate measures are required to raise a daughter. This is the story of Grace, Lia, and Sky kept apart from the world for their own good and taught the terrible things that every woman must learn about love. And it is the story of the men who come to find them - three strangers washed up by the sea, their gazes hungry and insistent, trailing desire and destruction in their wake.

 Hypnotic and compulsive, The Water Cure is a fever dream, a blazing vision of suffering, sisterhood, and transformation.

I think my main problem with this book is that I expected something very different based on that intentionally vague synopsis. It's not that it's a deliberately misleading summary, it's that my expectations were just sent in a different direction and I think that affected, rightly or wrongly, the way I feel about the book.

So the book begins exceptionally well with the disappearance and assumed death of Grace, Lia and Sky's father, King, the only man any of them have ever been around. He left for the mainland to gather supplies and hasn't come back. The family, three daughters and their mother, live in isolation on an island, in a crumbling house, safe from the toxic mainland and the predatory men that populate it. Women used to come to the island to be cured, to be cleansed of their experiences using a variety of home-developed treatments. They don't come any more. There have been no strangers on the island in a long time.

I loved the hazy, ethereal, endless summer vibe of the prose. The languid language, the vagueness. As the reader, your suspicions are heightened fairly early on, purely by how dreamy and unreal everything seems. I was not sure if these narrators were unreliable, or if they really believed they were speaking their truth. The narrative switches between two of the sisters but to be honest, it's very difficult to notice any difference in who's speaking. Perhaps this is the dual narrator format not working out, perhaps they have been fed the same opinions and values to the extent that they are largely indistinguishable. The novel seems to settle into Lia as the main narrator after a while. The sisters have been encouraged to give and withhold love as a means of control and I guess as a type of psychological torture. Everything the sisters partake in seems to be considered a Therapy...lots of importance is placed on water and salt. I wondered if they were the survivors of some sort of apocalypse or the leftover members of some kind of cult. The answer is much less interesting.

I know deception is a main theme of the novel (along with survival, sisterhood, truth etc) but as things started to become a bit clearer, the whole thing sort of fell apart for me. I had been suspicious of the lack of world building, and was disappointed with the direction the story went in. As soon as the (male) strangers turn up, you can pretty accurately predict what happens next. Any remaining interest in the story and its conclusion dries up as the narrative limps towards its end. I know there will be readers that love this, and that will argue that everything is done deliberately to highlight the ridiculousness of certain types of feminism, for extreme worldviews lacking in nuance , the infinite corruptibility of humans and the many ways in which the naïve will be taken advantage of and molded into a new shape. It just didn't really do anything for me at all. I struggled to find much to hold on to in the narrative, even after more information came to light I still found it hard to feel much of anything for any of these characters. In a book as detached and as Othering as the Water Cure, perhaps that is the take away experience that was intended. However, it leaves me not particularly inclined to reread, to recommend or even to think about once that last page is over with.

*spoilers*
The writing really was excellent- claustrophobic, oppressive, languid and threatening, but I just really did not think much at all to the story, which, ultimately is about a man and his wife abusing their daughters away from the eyes of society.

Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

I read graphic novels reasonably frequently, so the quality, impressiveness and sheer triumph of this novel is not a surprise. It is among the most affecting, most chilling and most prescient stories I have ever read in any medium.

This could be our Winner.

Sabrina is largely physically absent from the narrative- an ordinary woman that goes missing, very close to her home just after page 2. We don't see this abduction happen, only its aftermath. This is a narrative of aftermath- of consequences and cause and effect disguised as a straightforward mystery.

How does the world (or America, in this case) respond to horror or tragedy? The Kennedy Assassination? 9/11?Columbine? Sandy Hook? There really are too many school shootings to choose from. The way the masses handle tragedy and violence, the way hysteria breeds conspiracy in the welcoming arms of internet forums and talk radio is at the root of this book. What happens when we aren't bothered about truth, only agenda? What happens when being in agreement is more important than being right? What happens when fact checking just doesn't matter?

The novel mostly follows Calvin, a US airman doing a soulless US security related desk-job at a fortress-like unit in Colorado. He agrees to take in an old childhood pal for a few weeks, a change of scenery. Teddy's girlfriend, Sabrina, has disappeared, presumed dead, and Teddy is wracked with grief, comatose some days. Unsure how to best care for his reconnected friend, Calvin falls back on pizza and beer and resolves to be as supportive as he is able. Teddy sometimes talks to Sabrina's sister, Sandra on the phone as she struggles with the lack of answers, not knowing what happened to her sister. When a videotape surfaces of the murder being committed, things speed up.  Violence too extreme to be so random. An unscrupulous media. A story too unsatisfying and too scary to be true. An apparently senseless tragedy is distorted and rewritten, when Infowars-esque "fringe thinkers" and conspiracy theorists begin to interpret and dissect events to fit their own narratives. Death threats. Accusations. Hoaxes. Sabrina never existed, it's a government cover-up, etc. An increasingly frustrated Calvin, Sandra and Teddy (who is slipping further and further into the mad paranoia of the internet) are tied up in these online wannabe journalists own rejection of the truth in their frenzied, anonymous search for more meaningful answers.

It's a fascinating book about the weaponisation of misinformation and the radicalisation of society's marginalized, lonely people that find assurance and community on these forums. The people who exploit and feed this fear, the places these theories and fantasies manage to penetrate. In a world so full of tragedy, sadness and random acts of violence, the temptation of that Rabbit Hole of conspiracy seems too much. These people seem to be offering answers, rationale, comfort. They promise the Truth.

The artwork is functional, but nothing more. It gives the story the stark, urgent storyboard quality that works so brilliantly. It contains the paranoia, the insular nature of the story's themes. It is not a story of soft edges and beautiful colours. It leaves you hollowed out. Painfully aware of what can lurk inside people that you see every day. Reminds you that you can never really know a person. That we are all capable of falling victim to these predatory spreaders of paranoia and misinformation. That it's not just career conspiracy theorists, it swallows ordinary people into the black hole of misery and fear.

It is essential reading. I hope this book is a way in to the world of Graphic Fiction for new readers because there are some truly era-defining stories being told in that medium.

Trashed by Derf Backderf

A brilliant "ode to the crap job of all crap jobs". Trashed, both funny and informative, documents the technically fictional but actually derived mostly from real life experiences of JB the garbageman, a stand in for author Derf Backderf. JB is a twentysometyhing college dropout resorting to an hourly paid gig on the back of his Ohio village's municipal garbage truck. An unglamorous job at the best of times, JB documents every filthy trashcan, every flattened roadkill and every interaction with the village's more 'characterful' residents. We see to the ladsy, banterous exchanges of the Village's facilities offices and its employees- an odd bunch of assorted jocks, racists and high IQ-low functioning brain types.

It's an eye opening book, reminding the reader that what we throw away might be out of sight and out of mind, but it is still *going* somewhere. Every disposable nappy ever used still exists out in the world. Every toothbrush that every person has ever used is lying in landfill somewhere, or on the sea bed. There's a lot of interesting nuggets about the history of waste disposal, current and former landfill practices and the scale of our current rubbish habit.

It's quite a bitter-sweet book really- engrossing the reader in the day to day lives of the trash team and their small town lives. To see the changing of the seasons and the unchanging quantities of furniture, packaging and other broken bits of property left out for disposal. At the same time it's quite grim in how aware they are of what their futures look like, the bleak generation Y future of deserted high streets, $30,000 degrees with no employment prospects and the thriving small towns of their youth dumped at the curb piece by piece and hurled off to be hidden somewhere people aren't going to complain about the mess.

An unusual story of a small town barely ticking over, about coming down to reality with a bump after adolescence has dissipated to adulthood, about the lifestyle choices we make and the habits we form as a society. It's about our unsustainable habits and our uncertain future.

The Lost World, by Michael Crichton

Enjoyable nonsense- adventure, dinosaurs, improbable happenings and lots of rocky descriptions of frantic action. The book does offer lots of musings on animal behaviour and isolated populations and how an ecosystem built out of creatures raised in total isolation, with no prior generation is in no way a functional thing or in any way indicative of a species' true behaviour. Makes you think about animal society, how something are taught and how some things are instinctively known and what happens when that gets changed.

Also, this is the best combination of dinosaurs. Parasaurolophus, Pachycephalosaurus and Maiasaura all get some page time, the bridesmaid dinosaurs that nobody ever remembers. It's not all about the toothy ones, the long necked ones or the frilly ones. The raptors in TLW are lawless thugs and the Rexes are adorable momma and papa rex and they are the best parents to their little fluff rexes.

Lots of Ian Malcolm Having Clever Thoughts, lots of irritating, cowardly rich kid Levine with all the expensive kit, badass-in-the-field Jungle Jane and animal behaviourist Sarah Harding, not of Girls Aloud fame, two not-annoying smart kid characters, Arby and Kelly that are very endearing and two Q type inventors/engineers Dr Thorne and assistant genius Eddie, building all sorts of equipment for this badly advised trip to Islar Sorna, Site B. The secret hatchery island of BioTech industries, the forgotten island where the dinos went free range that nobody is allowed to talk about. Villainy is bought to you in the form of egg-stealing Dodgson, right hand man King and shifty talking-head TV scientist Baselton.

Perhaps not as good as the first book, but certainly better than the film that got squeezed out of this novel.

Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim

Ohmygod.

I had never heard of this book until I saw a picture on Twitter of the handful of new Penguin English Library editions that had been published this month. I bought it based on 2 things 1- that gorgeous cover and 2- that it was about a woman and how much she loved her garden. For like 3 years I have been a casual gardener, but this year I have really *really* got into it to the point now that I have way more plants and flowers than what can realistically fit in my tiny ex-pit-terrace house and it is looking amazing and I love it.

Elizabeth and her German Garden takes the format of a year's diary of an eccentric aristocrat living in Germany as she wrestles with the estate's neglected grounds in an attempt to tame and mold the thorny wilderness into the garden of her dreams. The garden is her escape from her three unlikely children, surprisingly introduced out of the blue, and her tempestuous husband nicknamed The Man of Wrath. Elizabeth does not appear to enjoy a happy marriage and though she seems fond of her kids (April Baby, May Baby and June Baby) it does appear that she only had them because it never really was an option not to. The book documents her struggles with her household staff (not so much struggling *with* them, as struggling to care about them at all), her interactions with friends and her general attitudes to life and society of the time, particularly the role of women. It's funny, satirical, but makes excellent points about the expectations of women by men and society, their expected behaviour, function and apparently abundant intellectual limitations.

This skinny little book is exactly what I hoped it would be. It's billed as autobiographical fiction, but I can't imagine there is an enormous amount of fiction in there. I felt like I just completely understood Elizabeth, I felt I had found A Me in a previous life, a real kindred spirit. As she's lovingly describing her plans and designs for the garden, for the various flowerbeds and landscaping, I could honestly see it all unfurling in my head- the pansies carpeting the rose beds, the shady corner with the fir tree, the spring bulb bed with muscari and hyacinth, tulips and crocus. I loved how philosophical Elizabeth was about trial and error, about learning from her mistakes.

Aside from the lush, soothing garden talk, I adored Elizabeth herself. She was such a smart, demanding woman. I loved how uncompromising she was, how she refused to be ordinary, much to her husband's frustration. I assume he allowed her 'idiosyncrasies' due to the isolated, rural nature of their location...or perhaps her idiosyncrasies is why they moved to the middle of nowhere in the first place. I found myself constantly nodding along with Elizabeth and her musings. A few choice quotes that I think we can all agree make Elizabeth One Of Us:

"If you have to have neighbours at all, it is at least a mercy that there should be only one; for with people dropping in at all hours and wanting to talk to you, how are you to get on with your life, I should like to know, and read your books, and dream your dreams to your satisfaction?"
"It is much easier and often more pleasant to be a warning than an example"
"The people round here are persuaded that I am, to put it as kindly as possible, exceptionally eccentric, for news has traveled that I spend the days out of doors with a book, and that no mortal eye has ever see, me sew or cook"

I think this is going to be an annual re-read for me, perhaps at the beginning of Spring to get me in the garden mood. How can you not love a 19th century woman that decides to pretty much ditch her husband and her kids and live a reclusive, blossom and bee filled existence of drinking tea and reading books in the garden? She is my hero.

Driving Short Distances, by Joff Winterhart

I read this in about an hour and thoroughly enjoyed the sort of tragicomedy mundanity.

The artwork is a sketchy, watercoloury mixture of plain white spaces, browns and blues, with a whimsical eye for detail and the absurd. There was one spread of Reception Area bingo that had me belly laughing.

Sam is a 27 year old former art student, back home at his mum’s after several failed attempts at higher education and something of a breakdown.  An introverted, stretchy, somewhat mournful character, he struggles to commit to anything, leaving a series of unfinished projects and shelved ideas in his wake. Out of the blue, he has been offered a job with his absent father’s alleged second cousin, who approached his mum unprompted in a carpark and made an offer. An unspecific role, it seems, that involves a lot of sitting around in the car, listening to stories of the good old days and visiting a lot of industrial estates. Distribution. Clipboards. Filters. Just the sort of mindless, uninteresting occupation that Sam needs to ground him to reality right now.

Enter Keith Nutt, a character so recognisable and so absurdly tragic. Round of belly and hairy of nostril, Keith sees himself as a pillar of the local small business community. Filled with wisdom and advice, he pours his stories into the silent Sam, mildly boastful tales of his old boss and mentor, his bi-monthly carvery dinners with the boys, his spaniel, his influence in the town. Sam soaks them all up. Not a great deal happens. There are some amazing supporting characters, like Hazel-Claire in the bakery and the town ‘character’.

Sam and Keith seem to become fond of one another in their silent, closed-off ways. Keith gets someone to pass on his perceived legacy to, Sam gets a quiet, reflective space to rebuild his sense of self. Is it a story of the generation gap? Of older men struggling to maintain their places in society? Or about the younger generation failing to live up to the promises made through their academic careers? Is it about men, and the way they do (and do not) communicate? Sam describes his humdrum town as “A town of fathers, grandfathers, godfathers, uncles, councillors, garage-owners, newsagents, estate agents, possible freemasons, key janglers and coinshakers, tyre kickers, military memorabiliasts, card carriers and wearer of very strong aftershave”. Is it about depression? Masculinity? Or all the little ways we manage to disappoint ourselves?

I loved the slow burn of this novel, its commitment to the quiet desperation of its characters, the way they slowly altered throughout. It’s a strange transaction that takes place between these very different men. One is socially awkward and thoroughly self-conscious- the other filled with a misplaced confidence and a cast iron moral code. Their time together seems short and on the surface, unsuccessful. But both characters seem to be in better places by the end of the book, so is it a happy story? I don’t know.

It’s shrewdly observed, funny and touching and heartbreaking at the same time. It’s a quiet work of genius, a portrait of an odd couple from a boring old town that hints at all the ridiculous, small ways we manage to become absolutely ridiculous specimens of humanity. A possible masterpiece of contradictory, recognisable brilliance.

Needful Things, by Stephen King

The sun was out this week, so, as ever, this prompted me to drop my planned reading list like a hot potato and crack out a  Stephen King in the garden. This time is was Needful Things, the last Castle Rock story. 

What can you say about Stephen King that hasn't been said before? Yes his books are about 20% too long. Yes his metaphors are crafted with the subtly of a chainsaw. And it is a truth universally acknowledged that when King writes a dog, that dog gon' die. However, nobody understands the inherent potential for destruction, the suppressed darkness of the human animal quite like Stephen King. He knows exactly how to take ordinary, unremarkable people and pinpoint the precise thing that would drive them to murder. He knows how badly people secretly want to destroy each other, how badly they want to destroy themselves. Civilisation tries to tame it out of the populace, but there is a germ of carnage in everyone and SK knows exactly how to propagate that.

So. Needful Things is the name of a new store opening in the small town of Castle Rock- a town so small town-ish that this constitutes quite a big deal. A town so small that the Sheriff's office has about 5 members of staff whose duties involve escorting a few drunks home at the weekend and issuing parking tickets. Leland Gaunt, the shops gentlemanly proprietor seems to have *just the thing* for each and every individual that tinkles the shop's bell, that elusive last piece to finish their collection, an exact copy of a treasured item lost during adolescence, the one thing that they have always wanted- and at such a bargain price. Plus one, harmless prank to be played on another townsperson. This formula is replicated all over the town over the course of a week- a normal, ordinary person buys the one Needed Thing, they get possessive and sweaty over it, convinced their nemesis is lying in wait to steal it, just to spite them. Gaunt seems to have done his homework- he knows just how each person feels persecuted, he knows just which small town grudges are held between whom, which suspicions, resentments and hatred are being nursed around the Rock. He knows who the prank-ee will blame, he knows they will be frenzied enough to retaliate. Gaunt spends the majority of the book setting up seemingly unrelated characters to escalate simmering, petty grudges to their murderous boiling points. There are murders. There is madness. There is dynamite.

Trying to work out what the hell is unfolding in the Rock is the Almost Too Good To Be True Sheriff Alan Pangborne, who you might remember from such SK adventures as The Dark Half. He has his usual protagonist baggage (dead wife and son) and a kook that might make him annoying in another context- amateur magic, shadow puppets and lithe, almost supernaturally fast reflexes. He seems to be the fly in the ointment of Mr Gaunt, the incorruptible. Along with his girlfriend, the mysterious Polly Chalmers, debilitated by her painful arthritis, they are the investigative force of the novel. 

Needful Things has a complex web of supporting and incidental characters, and whilst I struggled to remember some of them if they didn't appear for a while, they are all real and believable, each with their own flaws, secrets, jobs and resentments, eating away at them over the years. I really felt like this community was a solid, living and ancient thing. Something with its own rules, mythology and customs. Only SK could create such an apparently strange mixture of small-town normal and big-time evil working in harmonious conjunction with one another. My favourite I think was Norris Ridgewick, eventual hero of Gerald's Game and Andy from Twin Peaks doppleganger. I loved his simple goodness and commitment to his job, and the brilliant relationship he had with Sheriff P. Norris is the sort of small town good guy, unlikely hero you hope might just step up in times of crisis.

Needful Things falls into King's best category- the Supernatural Catalyst that Retreats and Lets the Humans Unleash the Havoc. It's his strongest formula- people are weak, and once they let the darkness in, the monstrous urges of human nature will out. Whether that's Demonic hotels that unlock that nature, murderous clowns, alien interference, telekinetic abilities or forbidden resurrection knowledge, the supernatural element just provides a gateway to the horror that was inside human nature all along. In this case, an omniscient demon with a repulsive touch and colour changing eyes.

Though it is not one of his strongest novels, I really enjoyed it and read it quickly. I felt invested in what happened to a lot of the characters and genuinely shocked at how quickly the dominoes fell down towards the book's firey conclusion. As a heavy handed metaphor for addiction, it works brilliantly. It demonstrates how obsession becomes all consuming, how I loved the themes of need and want, of when something stops becoming enjoyable and becomes a horrendous burden. I liked

Wed Wabbit, by Lissa Evans

Oh my god. A future classic of the "Plunged into a magical and confusing world and given A Quest" genre. A Wizard of Oz without all the ex machina. Alice in Wonderland without the creepy context. A modern great. I bloody loved it.

Fidge, an intelligent and practical 10 year old with problems expressing her feelings, has accidentally caused an accident that has resulted in her 4 year old sister, Minnie ending up in the hospital with a broken leg. She was mad at Minnie, the irritating little sister who always gets her way, because she makes her read the The Land of Wimbley Woos book every night, she is always dropping her toys and generally being scatty, and the combined faffing powers of their mum and Minnie has meant that the sports shop was shut and now Fidge can't get her flippers for the holiday tomorrow. Fidge is not handling her Father's death, 2 years ago, very well. Her clinging onto the ideas of order and organisation are her ways of keeping him close.

Riddled with guilt and anger, Fidge is bundled off to her useless, world-phobic cousin's house, a neurotic, translucent specimen named Graham that is so afraid of his own shadow and a sudden (unlikey) violent death that he spends most of his life in one room lying down and being stressed. In her emotional state and with a sudden flare of cruelty, Fidge hurls Minnine's toys (a purple elephant, Wed Wabbit, a fake phone) and Graham's Transitional Object, a plastic carrot down the cellar stairs, along with a Pop Up edition of the Wimbly Woos. He must go and get them. This assortment of objects, combined with some electrical storm magic, is about to get weird in the most gloriously anarchic way.

Fidge wakes in a strange, colourful world- super green grass, super blue sky, loads of different coloured bin-shaped characters that seem to have very specific skills and talk in rhyming couplets. She recognises the world. But it cannot possibly be so. The world of the Wimbly Woos has been turned upside down. The colours, with their specific skills and attributes have been divided. Most are in hiding. The blues, the strong ones, have become a ruthless army in the service of an evil dictator. Sweets have been stockpiled. The King has been deposed, tyranny reigns. Also, everybody speaks in rhyming couplets, no exceptions.

After linking up with the blubbering, terrified Graham discovered danging from a tree, a random, huggy Pink, the cool, rational Dr Carrot (human sized plastic carrot) and life coach Ellie (giant purple elephant with tutu), Fidge must set about getting to the bottom of what has happened in the Land of the Wimbly Woos. First stop is the Purples, who know the history of the land. This kicks off with a prophecy, some rhyming clues and an expedition the length and breadth of the Land of the Wimbly Woos, an expedition that will teach Fidge and Graham some life changing lessons about bravery, difference and fascism.

I LOVED Ella and Dr Carrot, the adult substitutes. Ella is a purple elephant, performance artist, life coach and free spirit. Dr Carrot is stiff and practical, the example, the ballast that keeps the group grounded. Together they were such a brilliant team and so incredibly funny. I love a band of misfits, and these really were a top quality selection of oddballs and kooks, the very best kind of protagonists and helpers.

Though Minnie is absent for most of the story, she dominates it with her imagination. Everything about the Wimbly Woo's world is directly from her imagination. The punishments, the riddles- all of Minnie's construction. It is so gloriously believable as a a world devised and created by the illogical mind of a four year old.

I loved the book's message- that differences are to be celebrated and embraced and that a team can be more than the sum of its parts. I really liked Graham's evolution as a character- he learned to control his fears, to take risks, to be present rather than afraid. He was much braver and kinder as a result of Fidge and Dr Carrot's influence. Fidge too needed to learn to open up a bit more, that she cannot control everything, that too much control is actually a very damaging thing (just look at Wed Wabbit).

It's a tall order to write a book with a 10 year old protagonist, set in the mind of a 4 year old and create a story that is so universally appealing. Wed Wabbit is so skillfully crafted, so identifiable, so positive and so enjoyable as a reading experience. It's a moving story about sisters and grief and emotions, about working together and being stronger for your collective differences. It's instantly recognisable as a Quest in Magical World narrative, but this particular story is reborn with brilliantly clever use of language (rhyme, speech impediments, the smiley smiley language of picture books), some very modern characters and an intelligent brand of humour that is pretty relentless.

Kids will still be reading this in 50 years, I'd bet anything on that. An absolute belter, one of the best books I've read in a long time.

La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust vol 1, by Philip Pullman

I was kind of apprehensive about reading La Belle Sauvage, because His Dark Materials holds an incredibly special place in my heart and revivals, retcons and prequels are rarely good. This is not the place for that list.

I was just so happy to be going back into this world, with young Coram and Sophonax, and the chugging of tokay, and the glow of anbaric light and the Daemons and Dust... I did get the unusual feeling, however, that despite LBS occurring earlier in the timeline, the world just felt more modern than the almost-19th-century of Northern Lights? Just the way people spoke and behaved felt much more contemporary. The "otherness" of Lyra's universe has always felt very palpable, but in this book I found that whilst many elements were the same, I got a much more modern vibe from the environment. It's hard to explain. The world of LBS felt both familiar and altered at the same time.

La Belle Sauvage charts the journeys and adventures of 11 year old Malcolm Polstead of the Trout Inn, near Oxford. Friend to nuns, clearer of glasses, canoe skipper extraordinaire. Whilst exploring the riverbanks one day, Malcolm and his daemon Asta accidentally intercept a coded message hidden inside a wooden acorn- apparently a method of passing information used by secret organisation Oakley Street. This leads him into a friendship with Alethiometer-reader and scholar Dr Hannah Relf, and to her engaging him as a sort of protégé scholar-spy-book-reader and eventually into inevitable danger and adventure. Malcolm has also befriended a baby in the stewardship of the nuns, a 6 week old called Lyra who is apparently unwanted by her mother and both  inconvenient to and endangered by her father. When a deluge unlike anything ever seen before is foreseen, most people choose not to listen. Once the river rises, taking much of the surrounding towns and villages with it, Malcolm, baby Lyra and Alice, a surly nemesis of Malcolm's from the Inn are stranded in the canoe, the Belle Sauvage. Nothing remains but to get Lyra to Jordan College, to claim Scholarly Sanctuary.

I did quite like this book's darker tone. The 1984-esque informant culture of Malcolm's school, of the teachers that refuse to tow the line disappearing overnight. The oppression and the creeping fingers of religious indoctrination, guilt and a sickening sort of righteous patriotism begin to strangle society. It felt like the beginning of something, a foreboding prelude to bigger, scarier things. The parallels with today's unsettling climate of Nationalism and a slide into dangerous far-right discourse and attitudes cannot be ignored. There is one of the creepiest, most skin-crawling villains in a long time, deeper exploration of the fantastical elements of the World, including an River God, a pretty terrifying baby-snatching, Rumpelstiltskin-esque enchantress and a mysterious twilight world of opulence and ignorance, and plenty of river-based adventure.

It was an unusually speedy read for me, I was absolutely swept up in Malcolm and Alice's endeavour. I loved their changing relationship and their familiarity as heroes- Malcolm is capable and mature, intelligent and curious, dependable and honest to a fault. He is a traditional Hero in the most complimentary sense of the word. Not invincible, but he pushes his homesickness and his doubts and any trepidation about being 11 and having too much responsibility here to the back of his mind and Gets Things Done. Alice is surly and bitter, she has weathered a less comfortable upbringing than Malcolm and sees little opportunity available to her. She too is competent and loyal, she is tough and courageous, capable of looking after herself and anybody she feels protective of. Though I read the book quickly and thoroughly enjoyed it, looking back I think I would struggle to fully explain what happened in any meaningful way- criticisms of it being episodic are difficult to deflect.

I think we are all lying to ourselves if we claim this is as good as His Dark Materials, but it is nonetheless an absolute joy to be permitted to revisit Lyras world, to spend some time with the people that were instrumental to her early life, whether she will turn out to remember them or not. Also, the concept of baby daemons? Cutest thing I've ever read in my whole damn life.

Rook, by Anthony McGowan

Nicky and Kenny live with their previously single father shift-worker dad and most of the time, his girlfriend Jenny. It seems that since Jenny's arrival, life has got easier in the household, with barren years of cold rooms, dirty clothes and beans on toast hopefully gone for good. Nicky, a year 11 pupil, is the narrator- a middle of the road kid of kid. Not popular, but not the absolute bottom of the pile. Money is tight, opportunities are few and he gets a lot of hassle about his younger brother, Kenny, who has a learning disability and goes to a special school.

Out walking their dog one day, Kenny and Nicky come across a half-dead Rook- the victim of a particularly powerful sparrowhawk. They take it home to nurse back to health, like they did with a badger one time. Kenny is relentlessly, tirelessly kind, and Nicky just wants him to be happy. The rook acts as a bit of a fable-narrative. A reminder that things can look desperate sometimes, and then they can seem hopeless entirely, but sometimes situations can be misread. Nicky learns, via the allegory of the rook, to have a bit more faith in the world.

I liked Nicky as a narrator, he seemed real and was very endearing. He has a bit of a tough time throughout the book- frustrated, wrongly blamed for something. He makes some bad choices, but it's easy to see how they might have seemed sensible or necessary at the time. He is angry, often very bottled-up and fiercely protective of his family. He's basically just your average, angry, mixed up  teen, languishing under the poverty line and left for collateral, trying to keep his head above water at home and at school.

The real strength of the novella is the relationship between Nicky and Kenny. Nicky is a very honest narrator, he talks about how he'd always imagined that Kenny only really ever existed in relation to him, like if he was out of sight, he ceased to exist. There's a refreshingness about somebody so candidly talking about something that the acknowledge was wrong of them. It's an interesting journey that Nicky goes on, in how he relates to the world around him. Kenny is a wonderful character. He's funny and stubborn and brilliant, and he loves Nicky to bits.

Reading this as accessible, low ability high interesting fiction, it is excellent. It's gritty and realistic, full of themes of injustice and poverty, and a good Coming of Age story about bullying and crushes and being a bit of a loser but resolving to be the best person you can be. Another cracker from Barrington Stoke.

The One Memory of Flora Banks, by Emily Barr

I didn't really know what to expect from this novel, and blew hot and cold whilst reading it, but came out very much on the pro side in the end. It was a cleverly constructed journey that makes very good use of the unreliable narrator trope to mess with the reader, the protagonist and the entire timeline of events.

The book is about 17 year old Flora, who has little to no short-term memory following the removal of a brain tumour as a 10 year old child. She remembers things for an hour or so, but cannot commit things to memory. She's basically human Dory and is using a very Memento-ish technique of writing herself notes and remainders (on her arms, hands, in notebooks and post-its) to keep herself up-to-date with her own life. Every day when Flora wakes up, she is 10, her best friend is Paige and they both wore pig-tails on the first day of school. Every morning Flora has to read about her operation, her anterograde amnesia her medication and the fact that she is actually 17.

Flora attends a party for Paige's boyfriend Drake (yes, Drake) who's leaving to study on Svalbard. She gets confused and leaves, making her way to the quiet of the beach. Drake follows her, and kisses her on the sand. The next day, Flora remembers. She remembers their conversation, remembers him asking her to spend the night with him, remembers their kiss and the black stone she put into her pocket as a keepsake. She has retained a memory. 

When Flora's parents are called away on an emergency to Paris, Flora is left home with Paige. Only Paige skips out on the gig because she's mad, so Flora's incredibly protective parents don't know that she's alone. Fixated on her new memory, she sets off to the Arctic to find him, convinced that he is the answer to unlocking her memory.

Once Flora gets to Svalbard with the help of a Passport she didn't know she had, a notebook full of notes and her one memory, she really begins to develop as a character. She's a lovable, spontaneous, infectious person, a person that makes friends easily, does what she thinks is right and makes up her own mind. She's endlessly resourceful and determined and brave, and funny and warm. She has to grow up 7 years every day, but she's firey and independent and pretty much unstoppable. Aided by emails from her older brother in Paris, she starts to piece together her own past and Paige's dastardly betrayal begins to look like pretty small fry in the grand scheme of things. (LOVED Paige's brother Jacob, effective having him on paper only in the story, never in person. Really emphasizes his absence)

Initially, this books tricks the reader into suspecting that it could be in danger of fulfilling so many damaging tropes about disability and mental health- that True Love Cures All, that taking medication changes you as a person and suppresses the True, Authentic You. But the novel cleverly subverts those ideas and makes for a much more robust character and a more fulfilling depiction of a young woman living with neurological injuries. It's not the boy she is chasing but the memory, it just takes some new context to know that. It's not *medication* that alters personalities, but there are some things that do.

A very unique, compelling book with a wonderful main character, the Worst Parents, Worst BFF, Worst Boyfriend and Best Brother. It asks questions about memory and identity and how much we take it for granted, how much memory builds the people that we are and the decisions that we make. Also, interesting plot point about the gas-lighting of vulnerable people and on a related note, trying to seduce a woman that believes she is 10 and hopefully won't remember tomorrow is probably the creepiest move I have seen in YA fiction all year. Just wanted to get that in.

Sophisticated, carefully crafted and brilliantly characterised. Very much recommended.

Release, by Patrick Ness

I will read anything that Patrick Ness writes and I will love it because I am predictable and he is wonderful. I love his characters, his style, his general ability to just make you understand and feel absolutely everything his characters think and feel.

Release, like Mrs Dalloway that partially inspired it, takes place in one day (also, wonderfully, with the protagonist mentally resolving to buy the flowers themselves). This is Adam’s Worst Day. A catalogue of Objectively Bad Things happen, but it is also the day that it begins to dawn on him that the golden (though not always plain sailing) time of his youth is drawing to a close and there are unknown, scary, grownup things looming on the horizon of adulthood.

I did feel bad for Adam. Heartbroken, rejected Adam. Adam, harassed by creeps. Adam that knows he’s not being completely present with the people that care for him. Adam that is examining his romantic life and his home life and is beginning to form the conclusion that maybe he just doesn’t deserve to be loved. He’s lost and in pain and vaguely aware that he is hurting people that don’t deserve it, so hating himself a bit more. It sounds a bit melodramatic, but doesn’t feel that way on the page. It just feels painful and raw and exhausting. I loved how authentic Adam felt- it was a very real sort of anguish that any reader would connect with.

I LOVED Adam and Angela, the BFFs relationship that really, this book is about. Tiny statured, pizza toting, bouncy Angela who is so completely honest and refreshing and fun. Such a good, wholesome, platonic love. I loved that they both really wish they were attracted to each other so could just get solve the “Finding a Life Mate” problem but no, it doesn’t work like that and you both have to suffer instead and trial and error your way through the relationship minefield like every other chump. This is where the Forever inspirations are a bit more evident. Angela is fairly open about her sexual experiences and how disappointing and unremarkable they were, how something so apparently culturally significant could just be a bit of an awkward but not particularly regrettable episode that is un-noteworthy in almost every way. Adam too is open about his sexual history, ranking somewhere between a Monk and Byron, his recollections are frank and kind of informative, without being traumatic or sensational. It’s some incredibly skillful writing.

I can’t not mention Linus, Adam’s current boyfriend. I wish we saw more of him. He was sweet and attentive and understanding, he got mad enough at the way he was being treated to show he has integrity, but was understanding enough to show that he is a Genuinely Nice Person and I just hope it works out for the two of them and what this book lets us see is a reasonably rocky day in what will become a solid and loving relationship. I liked that it is not at all a Coming Out Story, which there are approximately 3 million of. There’s unspoken knowledge that Adam’s parents know he’s gay- he knows they know, and he knows that they don’t approve and believe that it’s a choice and a sin. It doesn’t build up to a big, dramatic revelation. He isn’t learning to live with his sexuality or coming to terms with how people treat him because of it. He’s just kind of getting on with life in spite of the unfortunate reality of Religious parents who are very hypocritical in the way that they dish out carefully portion-controlled helpings of their love. It's Coming of Age, not Coming Out and it is much more complicated than who you are attracted to.

I will say that I could have 100% done without the super hench Faun and the trippy Meth Murder victim and her identity struggle with the Pond Queen, but I read this a couple of weeks ago and my brain has sort of revised the whole thing to just be Adam and his Bad Day which works much better for me.

It's such a well crafted book that wears its influences on its sleeve, features complex, crisis-surviving teenagers that feel real and authentic, and though it is bittersweet and painful, the reader does kind of come away from it feeling that things will get better.

S.T.A.G.S, by MA Bennett

S.T.A.G.S is a prestigious, elite boarding school, founded when there were still three numbers in the year by a Saint that once made a stag turn invisible. Greer MacDonald, ordinary girl and film enthusiast has won a scholarship to study there for sixth form and after one term is finding herself lonely and isolated. She sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the old money student body, the kind that are all either minor royals or 25th generation minted, have family crests and heirlooms older than Hadrian’s Wall, and know what each of the 1,000 utensils are for at a formal table setting.

Needless to say she is baffled and curious when she receives an invitation to spend the Michaelmas weekend (October Half Term, for normal people) at Longcross, the ancient country pile of Henry de Warlencourt, the Country Life poster boy king of the school, for a weekend of Huntin’ Shootin’ and Fishin’. Despite apprehensions due to never having done any of these things before, Greer accepts, thinking that this is finally her being recognised as ‘One of them’, and a chance to get to know (and possibly join) the Medievals, the unofficial kings and queens of the school. Despite her Buzzfeed feminism, Greer still wants to fit in, something that she kind of despairs at herself for.

Togged up in very worn but obviously once expensive Country Clothes, think tweeds and Hunters, installed in one of the suites, Greer is surprised to discover that there are no adults on site, just some surly but incredibly compliant servants. Greer, Shafeen and Chanel, the other outsiders selected for the weekend are at the mercy of their gracious, generous hosts. Each of them is committed to ingratiating themselves, despite occasional derision and vicious attacks from the Medivals. As the three bloodsports, the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ take a very accident prone turn, it becomes increasingly apparent that the stags, the pheasants and the brown trout aren’t the only things being hunted.

I liked the idea of this novel, it was unique and it kept that question mark hovering over exactly what was going on- it reminded me of e. lockhart’s We Were Liars in that respect. In one instance because it’s a book about privileged white kids doing whatever the hell they want to and hang the consequences, but also because it dangles the truth just above the reader’s head the whole time. It’s there to see, but the prejudices and the hopes, the bias and the objectives of the narrator sort of conceal it. In this case, Greer and the ‘I think he likes me’ vibes she is picking up off Henry, lordling of the manor. Can somebody that charming, that friendly and someone so committed to showing her a good time be as evil as they suspect?

I liked how Shafeen, Nel and Greer grew closer through their plotting and their sneaking, developing more in the last third of the book than in the first parts. I feel like this was the first glimpse we got into the deeper workings of any of the nine characters. I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but the three ‘Sirens’ and the two boys that weren’t Henry seemed pretty interchangeable.

I was not a fan of the tacked-on feeling ending and I felt that it needed just a little too much disbelief suspension to buy. Though it was an easy enough read, I found my attention drifting quite often. I quickly felt frustrated with the constant film references. I get that it was Greer’s *thing*, and that’s okay, I guess, but I think that particular pudding was marginally over-egged, with a reference on literally every other page. Like, it’s fine to make just a Hannibal Lecter reference. You don’t need to say Hannibal Lecter, from that film Silence of the Lambs. There is only one Hannibal Lecter, we know which one you mean. Assuming you are not an *actual* teen, in which case you probably haven’t seen Silence of the Lambs anyway, so never mind. I also thought that if this Michaelmas ritual had been going on for as long as suggested, maybe the perpetrators would be a bit better at *the objective*, rather than going about it in the half-hearted way that the Medievals demonstrate in the 2017 season. I didn’t feel that there was enough threat, no commitment to the actual cause, so the whole thing lacked the necessary tension…

All in all, it’s a bit of a mixture, is S.T.A.G.S. I really liked the combination of rich kids, boarding schools, privilege, class structure and cults, but I just felt that the whole book failed to deliver what it promised. I was expecting something more Until Dawn, with tension and desperation and gore. I like the insanity of the idea that people are too superior for the act of murder to affect them in terms of finance, morality or prosecution, it was very Rope. Or, as Greer would say, “Have you seen the Alfred Hitchcok film, Rope? Where a character considers himself to be so mentally superior that it makes him capable of pulling of a random, perfect murder? It was like that, but with a class motivation.”

Moonrise, by Sarah Crossan

A beautifully written, emotional story about broken families, fragile hope, the legal system, the trap of poverty and being *present*. I love Sarah Crossan, I love her gorgeous verse and her carefully chosen words that can be so fragile one minute and devastatingly fatal the next. Verse just seems to suit her stories so well.

Moonrise is the story of Joe and his family. When Joe was seven, his brother was arrested.  Now Joe is 17 and alone in Texas, and he is seeing his brother, Ed for the first time in 10 years. Nobody has seen him since he disappeared with their aunt’s car a decade ago. Since then Joe and his sister Angela have been raised by their Aunt, after their drunk, pharmaceutical addicted mother walked out on them.  Since that time Ed has been in a high security prison, convicted of murdering a young police officer. A death penalty offence in Texas.  Joe has a couple of weeks with the brother he barely knows before he is put to death for something he claims he never did. Nobody has visited, they have barely written. Joe’s aunt has insisted all along that the best thing to do is forget all about Ed- he’s the reason the family fell apart.

I liked the portrayal of the broken Moon family, and Joe’s struggles seemed really real. We start off by thinking that the brothers barely know each other. But the flashbacks that occur throughout fill in some of the brothers’ history: Ed, wayward as he is, was basically both parents to his kid brother- a responsibility that it seems was just too much for someone so young. The story is emphatic that no matter how broken and dysfunctional a family, there is something that holds you together, for as long as you want to be held. No matter how wobbly, no matter how imperfectly. It makes you recognise that it’s a family that brings you up, even if it isn’t parents specifically.

Joe has a lot to work through whilst in Texas; the realisation of his brother’s future, the prospect of being the only family member there when it happens. He struggles with finances, with loneliness. He reflects a lot on his upbringing and who has and has not been there. He also meets a girl at the diner, Nell, that he becomes friends with that helps him through his impossible summer. I liked the presentation of this relationship too- it was fragile and precarious, temporary but significant, kind of unreal. The whole town had a feeling of unreality, a town that wasn’t really anything beside a place that was close to a prison.

The verse really suited this story. It made the narrative seem immediate, considered, bursting with feelings and so honest. Every word seems carefully selected and lovingly curated. Every line feels important, just like every day feels important to somebody on Death Row.

With every Sarah Crossan novel I read, I am more in awe of what she is able to do with words. Though her characters and narrators are often private, insular people, people that are vulnerable and lost, she manages to project them so clearly and so precisely into the reader’s mind that they kind of stay there forever. They are so distinct and so affecting, and I think it must be the verse that does that.

It Only Happens in the Movies, by Holly Bourne

I love Holly Bourne. She is part of the UKYA quadrant that I’m always kind of expecting to see secreted away in an eavesdropping corner of the school that I work at, because her teen characters, the way they act and speak and coexist are so 100% percent accurate that she obviously has some sort of secret pipeline into schools. When you, a sensible, nearly 30 YO official Grown Up Person reading Holly Bourne, it's *creepy* the way the years fall off and you're 17 again and there's boy drama and UCAS and Leeds Festivals and staying on sixth form because college seems too scary and HOW DOES SHE DO IT??

It Only Happens in the Movies is about sixth former, amateur actor, cinema employee and professional cynic Audrey. She is done with love. Recently dumped by her ex-boyfriend after a minor bedroom mishap and major betrayal of trust, she has spent the last year watching her family implode after her dad walked out on her mum for a younger woman and won’t stop rubbing their noses in it, another major betrayal of trust and of love in general. Audrey is so absolutely done that she is going to write an A Level Media Studies essay about how damaging and unrealistic and dangerous romantic comedies are, with their perfect couples and their clichés and their airport dashes and declarations and kisses in the rain. Real life is not like that and the world needs to know.

There were a lot of things I loved about this book. I shall nebulously list them.

I loved Audrey. Caring for her mum alone, whilst her dad coos with his new, better family, and her brother is off at uni, she is struggling to manage her mum’s depression and irrational behaviour. It shouldn’t be down to Audrey to cope with it, but here we are and she endures in an incredibly realistic way- resentful, bitter, but with love. Because nuance, people. I loved that she tried to keep that line open to her dad, it shows she’s a good person. But it was good for her to confront her anger too. She was resolute and vulnerable, smart and honest and I would absolutely have been friends with her as a teen. I am also a very big not-fan of romance films (10 Things being the exception, I’m not a monster) but I loved how in tune with, and also disgusted and outraged by the tropes and expectations of both cinema and society she was.

I loved how all of Audrey’s friends were nice and supportive, and no matter how much she isolated herself from them or felt that she didn’t deserve them so she’s doing them a favour by cutting them off, they were still waiting for her when she figured something out. They didn’t intrude, but let her grieve and be angry and waited. Leroy was lovely and hilarious, and I would absolutely read the Spinster-esque spin off with him as narrator. LouLou was incredible, with her pink hair and her sass and everyone was just a part of a drama-free, supportive friend network and that was brilliant. More please.

I liked Harry. I did not love him. He was charming and funny, he was capable of being serious and a talented filmmaker that saw Audrey’s talent. I loved that he made her see her worth, and that it was a value that existed separately from relationships and men and love- it was a talent and a value that was just hers. I liked their relationship. I liked that Audrey knew he was a cliché bad boy, and that it was both futile and formulaic for her to believe that she would be any different than his other many conquests, or for her to even think that she could try and change him. She is also aware of the irony that being aware these things does not mean that she will not attempt them anyway. And then be mad at herself for being predictable and stupid. Audrey is a contradiction, like us all. She knows at the outset that she’s falling into to plot of a rom com, but, aware as she is, she is powerless to stop it. Until she does stop it.

I loved the uncommonness of the ending. I don’t want to spoil it, but it is so unusual for a romantic heroine to get to choose. To not have a guy foisted on her. She gets to put herself first, and to make a decision based on what is going to be the best for her long term, averaging out the ups and the downs of a relationship. 

*spoilery* The “I love you but you are bad for me, so I am going to decline even though it will hurt very much for a long time” is so rare and refreshing and, to prove Audrey’s point, it’s something you rarely see in the movies.

If you love romance films, read it.

If you hate romance films, read it more.

If you like hilarious, realistic stories with awesome, smart, tough young women in them, then definitely read it.

The Immortalists, by Chloe Benjamin

Four New York siblings visit a Romany fortune teller during the hot summer of 1969. A word of mouth rumour, she is reputed to be able to tell you the exact date of your death. Daniel, Klara, Varya and Simon, all under ten (ish) the Gold children scrape together their pocket money to visit this mysterious woman, drawn by their desire to Know.

They are fascinated and horrified by what they learn. Torn between dismissing it as nonsense and clinging onto the superstition, concealing their dates from one another and never mentioning it until adulthood…the Gold siblings are burdened with a knowledge that hangs over every hour of every day, a knowledge that threatens to make their choices for them and forces them to make the most of every opportunity

.

The book scrolls through the lives of the four Gold siblings in the order in which they die. We start with Simon, youngest Gold and heir to the family’s drapery business. Knowing that he will die young, he runs away to San Francisco with his wayward sister Klara and throws himself head first into living fast; the famous Gay Scene, night clubs, drugs, ballet, sex and hedonism and eventually romantic love. His date turns out to be true.

Essentially estranged from the rest of the family through a mixture of distance and flighty waywardness, Klara dedicates herself to becoming an illusionist and vaudevillian like her Hungarian grandmother. Perfecting her signature death-defying stunt, the Jaws of Life, the trick is that there is no trick, just strength and will and guts. Her secret shame is the guilt she feels at being the one that convinced Simon to come to San Francisco, she feels responsible for his death and that guilt plays a large part in the road to her death.

After Klara's death, unsure if her unknown date was accurate or not, Daniel, the sensible Army doctor sets off to find the fortune teller- gradually  becoming more and more obsessed with making her pay for the deaths of his siblings. This section ends with a slightly out-of character Thriller--esque showdown...The final Gold standing, a genetic researcher and OCD sufferer Varya is the last to narrate, the only one granted the gift of old age. Her life’s work is to extend the natural human life, but the price to pay is that her (long) life is fairly miserable, a grey existence of controlled calories and hermetic environments. Like her sister she too is defying death, but through a microscope rather than on stage. She's probably the hardest Gold to warm to- somewhat passionless and calculated, she resented her siblings their freedom and now finds herself without any of them.

I love multi-narrative books and books about siblings, so this ticked a lot of boxes for me- I loved the themes of self-fulfilling prophecy versus fate, how knowing what’s around the corner might influence and affect the decisions we make and the direction that our lives take. It’s fairy usual to discuss what we’d do if this was our last day on Earth, and we’re all familiar with the saying of “Being here for a good time, not a long time”, and this book asks whether we’d live differently, make different choices, take risks, set goals, try harder if we knew when we were going to die.

It’s concerned too with the idea of free will, and whether by setting a date in stone and obsessing over it, a person inadvertently fulfils these prophecies with their obsession, or whether it is in fact pre-determined, and the only unusual factor is the awareness of the date, a date and an event that cannot be deviated from…

The Immortalists a wonderful story about family and loss and choices, and how we decide on our life’s priorities. Is it better to live a short life full of joy and love and impact? Or is it better to live a long, safe life, controlled and protected. The dynamics of the family as they grow apart and are forced back together, a smaller circle every time is heart breaking and relatable and tragic. They are all so tortured by the awareness of their own failures; failure to act, failure to reach out, failure to try and understand. People are strange creatures and whatever we choose, we can never really win.

Very much recommended.

Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

Having read a reasonable amount of Neil Gaiman (Very much liked it) and not very much Terry Pratchett (and really not liking it at all), I have finally gotten around to reading Good Omens, despite taking it on holiday twice and never managing to even start it.

So. It tells the story of an angel and a demon, Aziraphale and Crowley respectively, who have been kicking around together since the times of literal Eden and have since gone a bit native on Earth. Both have their indulgences; wine, books and tailoring, and classic cars, booze and sunglasses indoors. They have grown fond of Earth and humans and more importantly, their nice comfortable lives amongst them. Crowley is tasked with switching a human baby for the antichrist in order to bring about the Apocalypse, the End Times, the big, season finale of WAR between Heaven and Earth, Good and Evil and so on. Aziraphale is there too because the two of them are kind of unlikely BFFs. The Antichrist is destined to be raised as Warlock, son of a prominent US diplomat. Aziraphale and Crowley resolve to work their saintly/demonly influence on him as he grows up, essentially postponing the end of the world as Warlock, hopefully, struggles to choose between good and evil. At least that is the plan. However. The problem is, there’s a bit of a mix-up with the Satanic nuns and the Antichrist is actually an ordinary, but unusually charismatic boy from the suburbs, Adam, who likes playing in the quarry with his mates, reading comics and messing about with his dog, Dog. Meanwhile, Warlock is just a normal kid with a weird name.

It’s if the Omen and Life of Brian got blended.

The rest of the story is Aziraphale and Crowley tearing around the country in an on-fire Bentley trying to conceal their vast mistakes, to track down Adam, the real antichrist before the various emissaries of Hell get there first and reveal the boy’s true powers to him. Adam's power so far extends to righting some environmental wrongs that he's read about in hippy conspiracy theory magazines. There’s a nth generation witch living her life from a book of prophecies, a witch hunter that falls in love with her, the four horsemen of the apocalypse and Adam’s three mates thrown in for misunderstandings, declarations and revelations, culminating in a planned and relief-inducing anti-climax at a Nuclear Power Station.

I can see why people love this book. It’s funny, it’s all about the inherent goodness of people, Aziraphale and Crowley are hilarious and adorable. I can see how a frequent re-reader could just slide back into the world easily and just hang with the characters. However. It just didn’t strike a chord with me and I found myself just wanting to be finished with it. I struggle to identify exactly what failed to resonate. As much as I loved Aziraphale and Crowley, I found most of the other characters to be forgettable and was always a bit annoyed when the narrative swung over their way.

It’s been on my TBR list for years, so I’m glad I read it, and I didn’t really know what to expect, but I honestly don’t think this kind of fantasy is my thing. I kept convincing myself I could cherry pick the Terry Pratchett jokes and they irrationally annoyed me. The flavour of humour just doesn’t do much for me, despite the very comedic prose. Like, I can tell it’s funny, but it doesn’t make me laugh, if that makes sense.

I don’t know. Just not my thing I guess.

The New York Trilogy, by Paul Auster

A proper head scratcher.

The New York Trilogy comprises three apparently separate stories about people going missing, being searched for or possibly not actually existing in New York City. Apparently separate but also possibly connected. I'm not sure I got it TBH.

The first, City of Glass, is narrated by an isolated writer called Daniel Quinn who adopts the identity of Detective Paul Auster in order to take on a case. He writes under a separate pen-name, just for added layers). The case involves tracking a recently released abusive father and ensuring that he stays away from his psychologically damaged adult son. It sounds quite normal when you say it like that. But the narrative becomes a murky, confusing sequence of events that ends with Quinn's descent into a type of madness. An invisibility. The segment ruminates on themes of identity, authorship and the ease with which a person can remove themselves from the world (in a non-death sense). Quinn becomes obsessed with the released father, mapping his movements through New York, divining messages in his routes, basing his theories on obscure readings of Classic Literature and scripture. The name Henry Dark, who may or may not be fictional, is floated for the first time. Paul Auster shows up in his own novel with his real life (then) wife and actual kids. As you do.

The middle section, Ghosts, is about a private eye called "Blue", former protégée of "Brown", who is tailing a man named "Black" on Orange Street for a client named "White". Orange Street doesn't get air quotes because that seems to be a real actual street in Brooklyn. Blue, who starts the story as a regular detective, stakes out Black's apartment, composing written reports to the unknown and unseen White. White pays with regularity and keeps Blue installed in an apartment on the other side of the street to his target. Black seems to mostly read books and write at his little desk. After weeks and months staring at the ordinary, secluded Black, Blue begins to lose his grip on his identity, spiralling into madness and falling out of his old life, becoming obsessive about the increasingly mysterious Black.

The last story, Locked Room, features an unnamed narrator, a critic, who is unexpectedly contacted by the wife of an estranged childhood friend. Her husband, Fanshawe, has disappeared and left instructions to contact the narrator. After a certain amount of time has elapsed, he has instructed them to publish his life’s works- poems, plays, three novels. As the narrator smoothly installs himself into the home, marriage and family of the missing writer, tracing the lost years of his former friend becomes an obsession.

I can't work out if Auster (the author, not the fake detective OR the on the page Auster from the first book) is reusing names, or if there really is some connection between Henry Dark, a name two characters adopt and a third claims to have invented, if the Paul Stillman in Paris is either of the Paul Stillman (Stillmen?) from the first story...or if they're all the same person? I fell like I don't have the mental stamina to connect all the dots. If there are dots. It's possible he's just messing with us. It's possible it's vastly important. The paranoia!

The books are excellent at making the reader question everything they've read. The narrators are unreliable to the EXTREME, so you develop a constant cagey-ness to everything. They make for incredibly unsettling reading, but so atmospheric. I loved the recurring themes of authorship, of the act of writing and recording daily lives and how this meshes or clashes with our notion of identity and self. Such themes feature heavily in all three segments, as does the central idea that it is in fact incredibly easy to just remove yourself, or simply fall out of your own life. To ghost your own existence. In the latter third, how easy it is to just insert yourself into the life of another, to take up their still-warm space when they unexpectedly desert it. Perhaps this ghosting is especially easy in a city as enormous and as impersonal as New York.

Though I’m pretty sure there was much more going on in the book than I was able to grasp, I massively enjoyed this unique take on the PI genre. As a reader, I rarely read crime thrillers, but these slow burn, research and investigation heavy old school Maltese Falcon style detectives doing loads of legwork stories I am here for. It kept me guessing. It kept me wondering. It exposes something about people and the inexplicable, contrary, self-destructive little creatures that we are.