Hey everyone I know I havent posted in a considerable amount of time but I have been battling with illness for a while. I want to be completely transparent on here so here goes.
I have been suffering with a nuerological disorder for ten years, a disorder that has come to completely change me as a person and take away who I really am, after several tests I have now been diagnosed with fibromyalgia. It has taken so much from me that I refuse to let it take my books away as well.
We have also had a house guest that was unwanted and refused to leave – the rona or as I like to think of it the virus that shall not be named. Nearly 14 days in and still positive – but on the plus side ive got to read loads of books so I cant complain.
This page will soon be completely active again with lots of reviews and other bookish topics coming your way.
Conspiracies abound in this surreal and yet all-too-real technothriller in which a deadly underground alternate reality game might just be altering reality itself, set in the same world as the popular Rabbits podcast.
It’s an average work day. You’ve been wrapped up in a task, and you check the clock when you come up for air–4:44 pm. You go to check your email, and 44 unread messages have built up. With a shock, you realize it is April 4th–4/4. And when you get in your car to drive home, your odometer reads 44,444. Coincidence? Or have you just seen the edge of a rabbit hole?
Rabbits is a mysterious alternate reality game so vast it uses our global reality as its canvas. Since the game first started in 1959, ten iterations have appeared and nine winners have been declared. Their identities are unknown. So is their reward, which is whispered to be NSA or CIA recruitment, vast wealth, immortality, or perhaps even the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe itself. But the deeper you get, the more deadly the game becomes. Players have died in the past–and the body count is rising.
And now the eleventh round is about to begin. Enter K–a Rabbit’s obsessive who has been trying to find a way into the game for years. That path opens when K is approached by billionaire Alan Scarpio, the alleged winner of the sixth iteration. Scarpio says that something has gone wrong with the game and that K needs to fix it before Eleven starts or the whole world will pay the price.
Five days later, Scarpio is declared missing. Two weeks after that, K blows the deadline and Eleven begins. And suddenly, the fate of the entire universe is at stake. If I didn’t have such an affinity with wolves, I would absolutely be wanting my spirit animal to be a rabbit right now, and not just any rabbit oh no, no cuddly bugs bunny for me
I want a badass rabbit that wants me to follow it down a rabbit hole into some crazed wonderland that I may never return from.
So why the tangent on rabbits and not talking about the novel? Well buckle up.
This is a dark nerd gamers paradise think DBD meets D and D with masterful twists and turns that makes you feel more than any computer game ever did or could – yeah it is that good. If you love your games on the obsessive, intellectualy and highly playable side then you will love this book.
Imagine playing a game where the it is the world but more than that it takes over everything you have and becomes so much more than just a game.
I refuse to spoil it for people but OMG what a rollercoaster ride and I never wanted to get off, I was adoringly satisfied from opening page to finishing page and I just wanted it to keep going. 5 stars really isn’t enough.
In an alternative present-day Lisbon, a small percentage of the population have been diagnosed as Gifted – having telepathic or telekinetic powers. Along with the power comes a stigma and suspicion that Gifted Inspector Isabel Reis with the Lisbon Police Force knows only too well.
When Isabel is called to investigate a mysterious and violent death which hints at Gifted involvement, she knows it’s more than just her personal reputation on the line. In a society where Gifted individuals are already viewed with mistrust; Isabel is hiding her own secret and knows she has to tread carefully as a conspiracy emerges and the body count rises.
The first thing that I loved about this novel was that it was set in Lisbon – a setting that I have not encountered in many books so that was a refreshing aspect and the author gave so many vivid descriptions of both the setting and the food in the novel, that I genuinely felt like I was reading this sat on the streets of Lisbon. Some of the translation was slightly off but that did not bother me in the slightest and took nothing from the reading of the novel.
This sci-fi crime thriller – even just those words feel me with pleasure than I can say – is set in a present day yet alternate Portugal where a political party is leading the agenda to rid those of the gifted with telepathic or telekinetic abilities. It really is so refreshing to read crime fiction that has a fresh new twist. The characters are well written and I enjoyed getting to know them and see them develop as the story developed.
This was a thrilling, highly inventive and incredibly gripping novel and I really don’t want to give anything away by going into more detail but you really need to read this book whether you like thrillers, crime, sci-fi, dystopian or just something new then this book really needs to be in your TBR pile. 5 stars.
Faking a love story is a whole lot easier than being in love . . .
The world can see that international A-list actress Whitman (“Win”) Tagore and jet-setting playboy Leo Milanowski are made for each other. Their kisses start Twitter trends and their fights break the internet. From red carpet appearances to Met Gala mishaps, their on-again, off-again romance has titillated the public and the press for almost a decade. But it’s all a lie.
As a woman of colour, Win knows the Hollywood deck is stacked against her, so she’s perfected the art of controlling her public persona. Whenever she nears scandal, she calls in Leo, with his endearingly reckless attitude, for a staged date. Each public display of affection shifts the headlines back in Win’s favour, and Leo uses the good press to draw attention away from his dysfunctional family.
Pretending to be in a passionate romance is one thing, but Win knows that a real relationship would lead to nothing but trouble. So instead, they settle for friendship, with a side of sky-rocketing chemistry. Except this time, on the French Riviera, something is off. A shocking secret in Leo’s past sets Win’s personal and professional lives on a catastrophic collision course. Behind the scenes of their yacht-trips and PDA, the world’s favourite couple is at each other’s throats. Now they must finally confront the many truths and lies of their relationship, and Win is forced to consider what is more important: a rising career, or a risky shot at real love?
If you’re looking for a bit of escapism, this could be the book for you. It’s a bright and sassy novel about celebrity and social networking and it will certainly transport you from your day-to-day life, that is, unless you happen to be a rich and famous film star, or one of those celebs who’s just famous for simply being rich and famous – think Paris Hilton.
You’ll have fun trying to work out who Win Whitman Tagore and Leo Milanowski are based on. I was certainly reminded of a few celebrity stories.
Win is a young British Asian film star who has to deal with the casual racism and prejudice that comes her way on a daily basis from people in the film industry in which she works. Her mum is being treated for cancer, her father died before she became famous, and she relies on her assistant and her publicist for support, as well as her best friend Shift, who’s a musician who’s written a top 40 hit.
Leo is a rich and famous young man who has a vast trust fund to fall back on, and who is basically looking for an easy path through life. He gets drawn into a pretend relationship with Win which is purely for the benefit of the media, so that Win can maintain a screen presence that will make people want to see her films and make her studios rich.
So, Win and Leo embark on a seven year long carefully choreographed “relationship” that will keep everyone wanting to see her in films. And it works. She’s nominated for an Oscar.
I suppose you might have guessed that surely the twist will be that one of the two falls genuinely in love with the other. It doesn’t happen the way you expect. Win and Leo spend a lot of time fighting and hating each other. If you want to know if they finally get together, you’ll have to read the book!
There’s a lot of name dropping in here of sites like TMZ, Buzzfeed, the Daily Mail, and so on. It’s right up to date with contemporary references, so it feels very modern and spicy. There are some sex scenes.
There are also some literary references including Jane Austen, Infinite Jest and Middlemarch.
The racism strand of the story is what I found most engaging. Win’s struggles to be seen as an actor who can be successful as well as British Asian feels very accurate, and very timely. I found it so frustrating that Win had to put up with seemingly innocent remarks – for example the use of the adjective “exotic” to describe her. She doesn’t tell Leo about this, because she’s trying to find her own way through, and in spite of the fact she is a bit spoilt and selfish, she’s also a strong character who I wanted to succeed. Leo’s character felt less rounded to me, but I liked the characters of his mums, and of Win’s mum too. They felt real.
I completely loved this. So much tension, angst, humour, and atmosphere, and stellar writing. So, all in all, this struck me as a great read for when you’ve had a busy day and you want to escape to the bright lights of Saint Tropez and Hollywood.
On the eve of her twelfth birthday, Beatrice Crosse runs away from her adoptive home only to encounter the ghost of England’s most famous prophetess. The witch offers her treasure, but can she be trusted?
Bea must wrestle her past to discover the witch’s secret and find her way home.
The book is full of excitement, pathos and magic. The descriptive and colourful writing vividly evokes each scene in the reader’s mind. The reader is carried alongside Bea feeling her emotions, fears, anger and sadness and hoping and praying that she will be able to work through and come to terms with her young problematic life. I love the idea that everything and everyone, good or bad, past and present are connected, influential and important. Themes very poignant in these present times.
I have had a lot of experience with both adopters and adoptees and so I am more aware than most of the difficulties that these young people have been through previous to their adoption, most of which would seem impossible to many people. Therefore, this novel plays a very important part in literature in the fact that it brings attention to the struggles that these young people go through.
The novel is a stunning read which beautifully weaves reality with story, myth and magic. Fully transportive, it sensitively approaches themes such as identity through the eyes of an adopted child. It provides a valued, reflective and positive nudge towards recognising inner resolve, power and strength, while painting a vivid landscape surrounded in empathy.
It is an immersive and powerful book which highlights struggles with identity, time and place, and is an important read for young people today. As well as adults! I would therefore recommend this book to young people and adults alike. A fantastic story with a vital message.
For centuries, residents have foretold the return of the Dreamwalker—an ominous figure from local folklore said to lure young women into the woods and possess them. Yet the boundary between fact and fable is blurred by a troubling statistic: occasionally, women do go missing. And after they return, they almost always end up dead.
When Kai wakes up next to the lifeless body of a recently missing girl, his memory blank, he struggles to clear his already threadbare conscience.
Miya, a floundering university student, experiences signs that she may be the Dreamwalker’s next victim. Can she trust Kai as their paths collide, or does he herald her demise?
And after losing a young patient, crestfallen oncologist, Mason, embarks on a quest to debunk the town’s superstitions, only to find his sanity tested.
A maelstrom of ancient grudges, forgotten traumas, and deadly secrets loom in the foggy forests of Black Hollow. Can three unlikely heroes put aside their fears and unite to confront a centuries-old evil? Will they uncover the truth behind the fable, or will the cycle repeat?
This debut novel is filled to the brim with folklore and analysis of the characters is masterfully subtle yet effective in that the reader believes they are reading a story about a crazed and demonic woman that is terrorizing a town but in actuality it is an examination of anxiety, grief, loss, identity crisis and everything else you go through in fantasy realms.
The writing is beautiful and the author develops a beautiful visual scene in an extraordinary way. She has developed scenes that are so real it is almost overwhelming and can almost play with your emotions and mind.
The narrative is the point of view of three different characters and each one had a different tone/voice which really gave the impression of different characters talking and was an aspect that I love but is often rare in fantasy books.
As well as the characterisation and the narrative I also like the romance aspect. It was only a small aspect of the novel but an important part because it allowed the reader a moment of desire and a break from the darkness.
Overall, I loved the book and would give it a solid 4 stars due to the pace at the beginning being a bit slow for me.
It’s Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans for personal redemption. With weeks to go until her due date, tough, ebullient Angel has fled her mother’s house, setting her life on a startling new path.
Vivid, tender, funny, and beautifully rendered, The Five Wounds spans the baby’s first year as five generations of the Padilla family converge: Amadeo’s mother, Yolanda, reeling from a recent discovery; Angel’s mother, Marissa, whom Angel isn’t speaking to; and disapproving Tíve, Yolanda’s uncle and keeper of the family’s history. Each brings expectations that Amadeo, who often solves his problems with a beer in his hand, doesn’t think he can live up to.
The Five Wounds – which refer to the five wounds of Christ – takes place during Holy Week in New Mexico, where a religious brotherhood called the Hermanos Penitentes recreate the crucifixion. Amadeo Padilla is a most unlikely Jesus, who has experienced the five wounds of the soul, including rejection, betrayal, and humiliation. His young and immensely pregnant teenage daughter, Angel, whom he deserted as a child, arrives at his door as he prepares feverishly for the role.
The story is beautifully powerful and the author has really filled out her story with wonderful narrative and introduced us to characters so raw and real that they stayed with me long after I finished the book.
The theme is love both as a wonderful thing and an intense challenge and this is evident in the presentation on Angel’s baby who is both a happy baby who brings joy but also presents with a fair share of challenges in more ways than one.
I adored this book, I adored the writing, I adored the characters and their gritty authenticity tried to slow down but I just could not stop reading. 5 stars
In the cold, wet summer of 1960, 11-year-old Joy Henderson lives in constant fear of her father. She tries to make him happy but, as he keeps reminding her, she is nothing but a filthy sinner destined for Hell . . .Yet, decades later, she returns to the family’s farm to nurse him on his death bed. To her surprise, her ‘perfect’ sister Ruth is also there, whispering dark words, urging revenge.
Then the day after their father finally confesses to a despicable crime, Joy finds him dead – with a belt pulled tight around his neck . . .
For Senior Constable Alex Shepherd, investigating George’s murder revives memories of an unsolved case still haunting him since that strange summer of 1960: the disappearance of nine-year-old Wendy Boscombe.
As seemingly impossible facts surface about the Henderson’s – from the past and the present – Shepherd suspects that Joy is pulling him into an intricate web of lies and that Wendy’s disappearance is the key to the bizarre truth.
The Silent Listener is the first novel by Australian editor and author, Lyn Yeowart. George Henderson, a respected member of the Blackhunt community, is dead. His daughter, Joy, called back after a seventeen-year absence to care for her dying father, might be expected to grieve, but does not. Senior Constable Alex Shepherd, summoned to the scene by George’s doctor, is suspicious: did Joy murder her father? If so, why?
In 1942, after a very short courtship, Gwen marries George Henderson and is brought to his newly-purchased dairy farm at Blackhunt in rural Victoria. From his detailed instructions, his rigid rules, his tight control of every aspect of her life, and his physical abuse, Gwen understands that this marriage will never be what she had expected.
Having no alternative, Gwen works hard to keep George happy and seeks refuge in her chooks and her flowers and the tiny room where she makes bouquets and wreaths to earn a few pounds. Within a decade, Gwen has given birth to a son, Mark, and two daughters, Ruth and Joy. She tries to protect them, but without a clear example of mothering in her own life, is less than successful.
Her children grow up learning to fear their father’s mercurial moods, which might deteriorate from the amount of rain that falls or the size of the butter factory cheque or the vet’s bill, or the perceived breaking of one of his countless arbitrary rules; they live in constant fear of the corporal punishment he seems to relish in dishing out to his “dirty, filthy sinners who are going to rot in Hell”.
George is a pillar of the community: An Elder of the Church, active in Rotary, a member of the High School PTA, the Fire Brigade, and the Shire Council committee, always helpful to neighbours, loved and lauded by all. When nine-year-old Wendy Boscombe goes missing two days after Christmas in 1960, no one in the town of Blackhunt could imagine he would have anything to do with it. But Wendy is never found, and Alex Shepherd is plagued by his failure to find her.
The story plays out over three time periods and is told from three perspectives. Readers are likely to wonder from the start about reliability of Joy’s narrative, and will feel vindicated about certain aspects as the facts are revealed, but there are still plenty of red herrings, distractions and twists to keep the pages turning.
The building tension in the story is sometimes relieved by neighbour Robert Larsen’s amusing word confusions (fire distinguisher, a quick trump call, obliviously, a fine lemming meringue pie), Joy’s insidious little acts of revenge, her musings about God, and the images and feelings that certain words convey to her. The easy acceptance of Gwen’s search of the Death Notices for “good ones” highlights the distortion of normality in this family.
Yeowart’s portrayal of setting and era are faultless, and the mindset of this small Australian rural community in each of the time periods is likely to strike a chord with many. Her character development is particularly skilful, and her depiction of coercive control is chilling. Her cop, if tenacious, is not terribly clever, but he does get there in the end. This is a slow burn thriller that richly rewards the reader’s patience. 4 stars.
In the summer of 1973, Ruth and her four friends were obsessed with pre-Raphaelite paintings—and a little bit obsessed with each other. Drawn to the cold depths of the river by Ruth’s house, the girls pretend to be the drowning Ophelia, with increasingly elaborate tableaus. But by the end of that fateful summer, real tragedy finds them along the banks.
Twenty-four years later, Ruth returns to the suffocating, once grand house she grew up in, the mother of young twins and seventeen-year-old Maeve. Joining the family in the country is Stuart, Ruth’s childhood friend, who is quietly insinuating himself into their lives and gives Maeve the attention she longs for. She is recently in remission, unsure of her place in the world now that she is cancer-free. Her parents just want her to be an ordinary teenage girl. But what teenage girl is ordinary?
Alternating between the two fateful summers, The Ophelia Girls is a suspense-filled exploration of mothers and daughters, illicit desire, and the perils and power of being a young woman.
The novel is both atmospheric and moody and the beautiful imagery and dreamy prose left me blown away. Jane Healey’s writing absorbs you in both timelines, you can almost feel the heat of the sun and smell the flowers being wilted by it.
I loved the medium pace of the book, it flowed really nicely and kept me engrossed. There were no big twists, you know where the story is heading from the beginning but that didn’t take anything away from the story. The character interactions were so well written, the intensity between them was palpable and I would have liked there to have been a little more focus on the character of Camille and found out more of her back story.
This is an incredible story with so many layers which slowly unfold keeping the full details of Ruth’s secrets safe from being revealed right up until the end. It is also rather unsettling as it raises lots of questions over the relationship between Maeve and Stuart. This book is a rollercoaster of emotions as it battles, embraces and tests boundaries of an array of subject matter and once I was committed, it was difficult to put down. I wish I could give it more than 5 stars.
This was my first book by author Mimi Matthews and it definitely will not be my last.
Yorkshire, 1843. When disgraced former schoolmaster John Eyre arrives at Thornfield Hall to take up a position as tutor to two peculiar young boys, he enters a world unlike any he’s ever known. Darkness abounds, punctuated by odd bumps in the night, strange creatures on the moor, and a sinister silver mist that never seems to dissipate. And at the center of it all, John’s new employer—a widow as alluring as she is mysterious.
Sixteen months earlier, heiress Bertha Mason embarked on the journey of a lifetime. Marriage wasn’t on her itinerary, but on meeting the enigmatic Edward Rochester, she’s powerless to resist his preternatural charm. In letters and journal entries, she records the story of their rapidly-disintegrating life together, and of her gradual realization that Mr. Rochester isn’t quite the man he appears to be. In fact, he may not be a man at all.
From a cliff-top fortress on the Black Sea coast to an isolated estate in rural England, John and Bertha contend with secrets, danger, and the eternal struggle between light and darkness. Can they help each other vanquish the demons of the past? Or are some evils simply too powerful to conquer?
I don’t even know where to begin honestly, I have always loved historical fiction – its part of the reason I’m an English Literature and History major but I have not read a book like this for a while. It was a delightful Victorian gothic drama that Bronte herself would have been proud of, intertwined with gender reversal roles, romance and a theme of light and hope. It moves between thriller and mystery that had me gripped and completely riveted at the relationship that starts to form between John Eyre and Mrs Rochester and I really enjoyed following this through the novel.
This book provides so much more than just a retelling of the classic novel Jane Eyre – it also retells a second story but I don’t want to give an spoilers just trust me when I say it is an intriguing mix and it really works.
There is absolutely nothing to dislike about this book the characters are extremely well written, the setting is perfectly described and deliciously gothic and I would go as far as to say that it is even more gothic in setting than Jane Eyre is. Every chapter in the novel poses a question that leaves the reader literally begging/devouring the chapter to get an answer only to start all over again in the next chapter. Everything that I adored in Jane Eyre was in this novel but Mimi Matthews also elevated it to a new level.
I read this so quickly and has now become a new favourite book of mine as well as Mimi Matthews becoming a new favourite author. Please pick up this book and give her some love, I wish I could give more than 5 stars but sadly I will have to make do with 5.
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