Category: Review

Five Star Archives: ‘Ready Player One’ by Ernest Cline

I read this back in November 2011. I’d expected the author to have a whole string of other books out by now, but no. The follow-up, Armada, is due out this year. That’s a long wait between books. I wonder what he’s been doing in the meantime? Enjoying himself with the royalties, I hope. Anyway, I still think this is a great book. Flawed, but great fun. PS I’ve only just noticed the tiny pixelly person on the cover. 🙂 I loved every single word of this book. I actually read most of it with a silly grin on my face, even the seemingly boring info-dump bits that started off ‘X was born in…’ – it was just pure pleasure, especially the parts set in the OASIS (the avatar-populated artificial universe where most of the action takes place). I’m not even much of a geeky technophile – OK, I love […]

Posted March 5, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in Archive, Review / 3 Comments

Fantasy Review: ‘Forging Divinity’ by Andrew Rowe

Sometimes it seems as if every possible approach to fantasy has already been done a thousand times. So it’s lovely to find a new author capable of putting an original slant on the genre, whilst also having a lot of fun. In some ways this is a conventional story – young man with powers and a special sword, a monarchy under threat, active gods and goddesses – but it constantly took me by surprise, and combined some glorious punch-the-air moments with laugh-out-loud humour. Even the opening, which seems to be heading in one direction, veers straight off in a different one almost immediately. I love a book which surprises me, so this was a very good start. Here’s the premise: a young man wanders into town carrying a particularly striking sword, a religious artifact. He immediately becomes the focus for various factions who want to protect him or relieve him […]

Posted February 28, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Paranormal Fantasy Review: ‘Song of the Sea’ by Jade Varden

This book is way outside my usual sphere – YA, not-quite-human creatures, some romantic difficulties – but the opening is charming, and I ended up enjoying it a lot. Here’s the premise: Brenna is a high school student with a best friend, an almost-boyfriend, a fisherman father and a mother who likes to stand looking wistfully out to sea for hours on end. When Brenna discovers something unusual in the attic… at this point, I knew exactly what was going to happen. And when it does, and Brenna decides to head for the high seas alone in a small boat, frankly I wanted to sit her down and tell her just what a stupid thing she’s doing. But – teenager. There’s no reasoning with them, so I can accept this as part of her character. Out on the oceans, Brenna runs into the inevitable difficulties, plus a rather nice young […]

Posted February 18, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Fiction Review: ‘The Italian Girl’ by Iris Murdoch

What this book needs is more orcs. Or any orcs at all, really, but preferably a great horde of slavering, rampaging, hell-bent-on-destruction orcs. Failing that, zombies would do the trick. Or perhaps we could push swords into the characters’ hands and toss them into the gladiator arena. Frankly, they need something of the sort. A post-apocalypse world to shake them out of their fairyland and give them something serious to worry about. Because I’ve never come across such a snivelling bunch of whiny, self-absorbed morons who so badly need to just get over themselves. Here’s the plot, such as it is. Matriarch Lydia has just died, and son Edmund returns to the family home wherein reside his brother Otto and his wife Isabel, along with Otto’s apprentice and his sister, and the resident nanny-turned-housekeeper, the eponymous Italian girl. The story then unfolds with one melodramatic revelation after another, accompanied by […]

Posted February 12, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 2 Comments

Five-star archives: ‘The Lions of al-Rassan’ by Guy Gavriel Kay

I read this is 2011, as a follow-on to ‘Tigana’, and while it avoids the flaws of that work, it has a few all its own. I went on to read ‘A Song For Arbonne’, which I gave 4 stars, and haven’t read any Kay since. I do enjoy his work, but it is terribly over-wrought, and I have to get myself in the right frame of mind for it. My tastes nowadays veer more towards smaller, less ambitious tomes. Or perhaps just writing that doesn’t take itself quite so seriously. Well, this was a three Kleenex book and no mistake. That’s three boxes of Kleenex, of course. Not a book to read on public transport, unless you have no embarrassment gene. No one does grand tragedy quite like Kay. But I’m not totally sure what genre this is. It’s more fantasy than anything else, but the world-building is lifted […]

Posted February 8, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in Archive, Review / 2 Comments

Fantasy Review: ‘Watersmeet’ by Rachel Cotterill

Some stories keep you on the edge of your seat with non-stop drama, and some are gentler tales, of people learning about themselves and each other, quietly resolving their problems with thoughtful research or experimentation or negotiation, instead of reaching for the swords every time. This book is in the latter category, which makes it very much my kind of story. The opening of the book is a nice introduction to the background, one of a basically illiterate population, where both magic and writing are frowned upon. Ailith can read and write, but she has to keep that secret. However, a meeting with a mysterious older man, Malachi, reveals that she has another secret – she is a mage. Ailith is one of twins, with several other sisters and (maybe?) a brother, too. Her twin is about to be married to a man three times her age, a match arranged […]

Posted February 4, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 2 Comments

Fiction Review: ‘One Fine Day’ by Mollie Panter-Downes

This is a book from another era, in every sense. Written in 1946, it shines a light on a different age, a brief moment of history, and quite a narrow aspect of history, at that. In the aftermath of the war, an upper-class couple in southeastern England adjusts to the reality of life without servants and wealth. The main character, Laura, is the slightly dippy wife whose day we follow as she goes about her chores. No longer able to sit idly at home, or gad about the countryside visiting or walking, she shares the household chores with her sole remaining ‘help’, queues for food at the shops with other matrons, tries to arrange for a gardener and cycles off to retrieve a missing dog. Meanwhile, husband Stephen and daughter Victoria are going about their equally mundane lives. And if this sounds dull, indeed it is, as a story. The […]

Posted February 2, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Five-Star Archives: ‘The Name of the Wind’ by Patrick Rothfuss

I thought it might be amusing to dig out some of my old reviews from the mists of time. This is one I read and reviewed in February 2011, and despite the glowing five star review, I haven’t yet got round to reading the follow-on. Hmm. Maybe I’m just less interested in wordy, doorstopper books these days. This is a debut book, and inevitably the first in a trilogy (‘The Kingkiller Chronicles’), by this author, and it is quite stunning. It is focused quite tightly on just one character, for it is his story, told largely in autobiographical form, from the perspective of a point in his life when he is still relatively young but has already become something of a legend. Unlike many fantasy books, the reader is not dropped headfirst into a morass of names and places and customs. Rather it builds very gently and precisely, a step […]

Posted January 27, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in Archive, Review / 0 Comments

Fiction Review: ‘See You’ by Dawn Lee McKenna

I hardly know what to say about this book. I cried almost all the way through, yet I couldn’t put it down. Actually, I laughed almost as much as I cried. So be warned – unless you’re made of much sterner stuff than I am, you’ll need a good supply of hankies nearby while you read. This is an extraordinary book. It’s a love story, and no, that’s not a euphemism for romance, this really is a story about love. And not your conventional couple, either. Jack was raised by his best friend’s mother, Miss Margret, and returned every year to visit her and her granddaughter, Emma Lee. When Miss Margret died, the visits stopped but now Jack’s back, and finds Emma Lee still living in the same house, and raising her own daughter. Jack has some secrets to share, but Emma has a secret of her own – she’s […]

Posted January 22, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 4 Comments

Fantasy Review: ‘To Whatever End’ by Claire Frank

This is an unusual book in a couple of ways. For one thing, the main protagonists are a happily married couple. When Daro is kidnapped, Cecily sets out to find and rescue him. No, no, that’s not the other unusual thing. Surely it’s not unusual for a woman to rescue a man? The second unusual thing is that this story is set some years after a major upheaval in the kingdom. The old king was overthrown and his son and heir killed in a bloody war which Daro, Cecily and their friends helped to orchestrate. The first section of the book, where we meet the companions in ones and twos, and they mull over the previous events and remind each other of this or that close shave or dramatic moment, made me wonder if I’d strayed into the second part of a trilogy. Actually, no, this is the first part. […]

Posted January 20, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 2 Comments