Category Archives: Book Reviews

Review: Timesplash by Graham Storrs

Originally: 2010 – Lyrical Press

Edition reviewed: 2013 – Momentum

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In forty years a new underground craze will start – splash parties. Time travellers known as ‘bricks’ will be thrown back in time, ‘lobbed’, and their actions in the past will cause a ‘splash’ as their presence disrupts the timelines. The back wash from the ‘splash’ mixed with the new drug tempus causes a high. It’s marginally illegal; police forces concentrate on controlling the drugs and noise caused by the splash parties, after all the timeline can’t be changed because it fixes itself.

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Review: ’So that others may live: A Fethulleh Gulen Reader’ Edited by Erkan M Hurt

 

3rd July 2013

Blue Dome Press (The Light Inc.)

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This is a compilation of the Turkish scholar Fethulleh Gulan’s essays. Gulan is an incredibly influential man and his ideas are the guiding light behind a movement for peace, education and social justice – the Gulan Movement.

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ARC Review: ‘Local Customs’ by Audrey Thomas

22 February 2014

Dundern

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In 1838 the writer Letitia Landon married the governor of Cape Coast Castle, Captain George MacLean while the captain was on leave. It was a whirl-wind romance. They sailed for Cape Coast a few days later, arriving safely after five weeks. Eight weeks later Letty was dead. Initially her death was recorded as accidental – an overdose of prussic acid, but events surrounding her death caused a storm in London’s literary crowd, her husband was accused of neglect or cruelty, and there were rumours of suicide. The mystery remains – how did she die? Award winning writer Audrey Thomas first heard Leticia Landon’s story in 1964 while visiting Ghana. She visited Cape Coast Castle during the two years her husband taught at the University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana. Their guide told her about the famous English lady who wrote books and who’s death was surrounded by mystery. This is her answer to that mystery.

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Review: ‘Dead Ever After’ by Charlaine Harris

 

2013

Gollancz

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The final adventure of Sookie Stackhouse begins the day after the penultimate novel ended: Sam the Shapeshifter lived and Eric the Vampire is not happy that Sookie used the fairy gift from her great-grandfather to bring Sam back and not to get him out of a sticky political situation. Everyone is upset. And then an old enemy comes back in to Sookie’s life, an instrument of unknown enemies. When she is murdered the police would quite like it if Sookie were the murderer. It all gets very stressful for Sookie as more enemies come out of the woodwork and Eric divorces her. Sam is distant and confusing, Bill a little too friendly.

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Review: ‘My Brief History’ by Stephen Hawking

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10th September 2013

Bantam

Stephen Hawking has written several popular science books that have been incredibly well received. And now he has written his own story. I have read an uncorrected e-book and am now able to review it.

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Review: ‘Happy women live better’ by Valorie Burton

 

2013

Harvest House Publishers

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America’s ‘Happiness Queen’ Valorie Burton wants to start a conversation between women about why they aren’t happy and provides thirteen ‘happiness triggers’. Ms Burton is a professional counsellor I understand, from this book, and has made a career of helping others find happiness; so just the person to write this sort of book. I have a review copy, which is incomplete, so I shall confine my comments to structure and available content. I would have liked to have seen the contents of the projected appendices and conclusion; I’m sure they would have been very interesting.

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Review: ‘Did I Say That Out Loud? Conversations About Life’ By Kelly McDermott Harman

Wegost Press

2013

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This e-book is 87% true, 13% blarney, according to the author; a collection of humorous personal anecdotes. I couldn’t help but laugh as Kelly described conversations with her family and friends, including the one with her sister about getting concussion from a drunk man three weeks before a further head injury in a car accident, or the time she had to help said sister explain to their parents why she had left her husband, the conversation she had with her family paediatrician about her sons being serial killers in training (creative cricket death was involved), or her mother’s story about quilt shops and concealed weapons permits.

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Review – ‘The Black Lion: Satan’s Kingdom’ by Anthony Karakai

 

2013

A modern spy thriller set in Hungary

Jackson is one of an elite covert force, ‘The Black Lions’, recruited from the CIA and ready to deal out violent justice. His team mates are a mixed bag of ex-security services from around the world.

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Review: ‘Improbable Women’ by William Woods Cotterman

 

2013

Syracuse University Press

Augusta Zenobia ruled Palmyra in the mid to late third century and made a terrible nuisance of herself to the Roman Empire. Eventually she lost her fight and after being taken to Rome a prisoner disappeared in to obscurity. Sixteen hundred years or so later the first of five remarkable English women explored the Middle East inspired by her and the romance of the east.

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