Reviews – Page 52 – Everything Is Better With Dragons

Review: Hidden Wyndham, by Amy Binns

New biography explores the secret love life of celebrated author John Wyndham

Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters includes previously unpublished love letters from The Day of the Triffids author

The first biography of the life of science fiction author John Wyndham is now available. It includes the first publication of a collection of love letters to his long-term partner and later wife, Grace Wilson.

Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters, by Dr Amy Binns, author and senior lecturer in journalism at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), explores Wyndham’s wealthy but traumatic childhood. This was transformed by a spell at the first mixed-sex public school Bedales from 1915 to 1918, the source of the strange but fervent feminism of Consider Her Ways and Trouble with Lichen.

The biography covers his formative years as a pulp fiction writer, his experiences as a censor during the Blitz and his part in the Normandy landings. He described his struggles with his conscience in a moving series of letters to Grace, the teacher with whom he had a 36 year love affair.

After the war, he transformed the searing experiences of wartime London, France and Germany into a series of bestselling novels: The Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos and The Kraken Wakes. But he remained intensely private, shunning fame and finally retiring to live anonymously with Grace in the countryside he loved.

Hidden Wyndham is distributed by Gardners Books and is now available on the Waterstones and Amazon websites, in Kindle and in paperback edition.

Audiobook Review: The Wreckage, by Robin Morgan-Bentley

One fatal crash. Two colliding worlds. Three wrecked lives.

School teacher Ben is driving on the motorway, on his usual commute to work.

A day like any other…

Except for one man who, in a final despairing act, jumps in front of Ben’s car, turning the teacher’s world upside down in a single horrifying instant…

Wracked with guilt and desperate to clear his conscience, he develops a friendship with Alice, the dead man’s wife, and her 7-year-old son Max.

But as he tries to escape the trauma of the wreckage, could he go too far in trying to make amends?

How would you cope, knowing you’d caused someone’s death?

Audiobook Published: February 6th 2020 by Trapeze

My Review

I was sent a digital copy of this audiobook by the publisher as part of the blog tour and in return for an honest review. Not sure they’ll send me others because I’m not going to be entirely positive about this book.

I liked the premise, it’s a good ‘what if’, and the characters are very different from each other, different backgrounds and histories that are part of the text. The narration, and the voice actors, was very good. I got a lot from the intonation and pronunciation. A lot of background information beyond the text, from listening to the way the narrators embodied the characters.

The setting is very clear – middle class, middle of the road, middle England. The characters fit the setting. Ben’s parents are really quite funny in a ‘Mrs Bucket’ sort of way.

Unfortunately, the plot wasn’t as defined as the setting and characters. It didn’t seem to have a direction or any thrust, it meandered. Alice and Ben are deeply unlikeable people. Alice is damaged and unpleasant, and Ben is immature and stalkery. Now, normally I would have just found that fascinating and want to see how things would turn out, because complex characters are more interesting that simple ones and a good strong plot can do wonders with those, but they just didn’t interest me, it fell flat. That is, I think the author tried too hard to make them ‘complex’ and ‘interesting’. And Max is way too perfect to be real. And that ‘trying too hard’ put me off.

This book didn’t work for me. Might work for someone else and it certainly got a lot of 4 and 5 stars on GoodReads, so it could just be a personal taste thing.

Review: Beast, by Matt Wesolowski

Continuing the unique, explosive Six Stories series, based around
six podcasts comes a compulsive, taut and terrifying thriller, and
a bleak and distressing look at modern society’s desperation for
attention. Beast will unveil a darkness from which you may never
return…

In the wake of the ‘Beast from the East ’ cold snap that ravaged
the UK in 2018, a grisly discovery was made in a ruin on the
Northumbrian coast. Twenty-four-year-old vlogger, Elizabeth Barton, had been barricaded inside what locals refer to as ‘The Vampire Tower’, where she was later found frozen to death. Three young men, part of an alleged cult, were convicted of this terrible crime, which they described as a ‘prank gone wrong’.

However, in the small town of Ergarth, questions have been raised
about the nature of Elizabeth Barton’s death and whether the
three convicted youths were even responsible. Elusive online journalist Scott King speaks to six witnesses people who knew both the victim and the three killers – to peer beneath the surface of the case.

He uncovers whispers of a shocking online craze that held the young of Ergarth in its thrall and drove them to escalate a series of pranks in the name of internet fame. He hears of an abattoir on the edge of town, which held more than simple slaughter behind its walls, and the tragic and chilling legend of the Ergarth Vampire…

PUBLICATION DATE: 6 FEBRUARY 2020 | PAPERBACK ORIGINAL | £8.99 | ORENDA BOOKS

Children’s Picture Book Review: Oliver Doliver’s Dinosaur Comes to Stay, by Papa Perkins

Summary:

Oliver Doliver (who is really just Oliver but he does like having both names) will be mostly Oliver in this story. Oliver is six years (and one month) old and has a friend who is a Dinosaur called Aya Buddn.

This is the story of how they met!

And more adventures will follow.

Information about the Book

Title: Oliver Doliver’s Dinosaur Comes to Stay

Author: Papa Perkins

Release Date: 6^th February 2020

Genre: Picture Book

Page Count: 20

Publisher: Clink Street Publishing

Goodreads Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50655012-oliver-doliver-s-dinosaur-comes-to-stay

Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Oliver-Dolivers-Dinosaur-Comes-Stay/dp/1913136132

Audiobook Review: Never Look Back, by A. L. Gaylin

She was the most brutal killer of our time. And she may have been my mother…

When website columnist Robin Diamond is contacted by true crime podcast producer Quentin Garrison, she assumes it’s a business matter. It’s not. Quentin’s podcast, Closure, focuses on a series of murders in the 1970s, committed by teen couple April Cooper and Gabriel LeRoy. It seems that Quentin has reason to believe Robin’s own mother may be intimately connected with the killings.

Robin thinks Quentin’s claim is absurd. But is it? The more she researches the Cooper/LeRoy murders herself, the more disturbed she becomes by what she finds. Living just a few blocks from her, Robin’s beloved parents are the one absolute she’s always been able to rely upon, especially now amid rising doubts about her husband and frequent threats from internet trolls. Robin knows her mother better than anyone.

But then her parents are brutally attacked, and Robin realises she doesn’t know the truth at all…

Review: The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep, by H.G. Parry

48477032. sy475 — The ultimate book-lover’s fantasy, featuring a young scholar with the power to bring literary characters into the world, for fans of *The Magicians, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore,* and *The Invisible Library.*

For his entire life, Charley Sutherland has concealed a magical ability he can’t quite control: he can bring characters from books into the real world. His older brother, Rob — a young lawyer with a normal house, a normal fiancee, and an utterly normal life — hopes that this strange family secret will disappear with disuse, and he will be discharged from his life’s duty of protecting Charley and the real world from each other. But then, literary characters start causing trouble in their city, making threats about destroying the world… and for once, it isn’t Charley’s doing.

There’s someone else who shares his powers. It’s up to Charley and a reluctant Rob to stop them, before these characters tear apart the fabric of reality.

Paperback, 480 pages
Published January 23rd 2020 by Orbit (first published July 23rd 2019)

ISBN:0356513777
ISBN13: 9780356513775

My Review

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book to review, and to Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers for organising the blog tour. And finally, to the author, for this great read.

Got to be entirely honest, I haven’t finished reading this book yet, because I’ve been terribly ill with a cold. My energy levels have been used on my various support appointments, so I’ve only been reading in short spurts because I can’t focus enough to read for longer. That being said, what I have read, so far, has been very impressive. I will finish it soon, but for now I will review based on my experience so far. I’m halfway through, after some concerted reading this evening (Friday 7th February).

The characters of Rob and Charley Sutherland are brilliantly well-written, they are funny and so realistic in their frustrations with each other and life. Their conversations flow naturally. Millie is an absolute riot, very ‘Enid Blyton-ish’ with her ‘jolly good’s and brisk bossiness getting Heathcliff to behave.

The descriptions are very clear, almost poetic at times. I especially enjoyed the description of Charley’s house and the mysterious lane. I could see them, one a place I’d love to live, with books stacked everywhere, and the other like something from a Dickens tragedy, all cobbles and fog.

I love the idea of ‘reading characters out of the book’, and Charley’s need to experiment potentially getting him into trouble. I was intrigued by the idea that there’s a secret group of characters hiding behind the real world, having escaped from their books. And the mystery of who is reading out villains to attack Charley and Rob really got me. Who is the Summoner? Why does he have David Copperfield in a basement? What has Charlie’s first book of literary criticism got to do with everything? I need to know what happens next, who everyone is and why they’re doing what they are. I’m also scared for Charley and Rob. I also think Rob needs to tell Lydia everything, because that Eric is a scoundrel.

The way the characters change depending on who reads them, the description of the magic of ordinary reading, it all feels so good to read. That doesn’t make sense, sorry. I just utterly love Parry’s writing, it’s so richly descriptive. You don’t need to have read the books she draws on to understand the plot (or not so far at least) because Charley can’t help educating people.

I feel that, if I were well, I’d have curled up with this book and read it in a day or two. It’s not a small book, about 400 pages; even I would have needed a couple of days at my peak. In my current state, it’ll be a bit longer.

So, based on what I’ve read so far, I heartily recommend this book.

Review: Death Deserved, by Jorn Lier Horst & Thomas Enger, translated by Anne Bruce

Oslo, 2018. Former long-distance runner Sonja Nordstrøm
never shows at the launch of her controversial autobiography,
Always Number One. When celebrity blogger Emma Ramm visits
Nordstrøm’s home later that day, she finds the door unlocked and
signs of a struggle inside. A bib with the number ‘one’ has been
pinned to the TV.
Police officer Alexander Blix is appointed to head up the missingpersons
investigation, but he still bears the emotional scars of
a hostage situation nineteen years earlier, when he killed the
father of a five-year-old girl. Traces of Nordstrøm soon show up at
different locations, but the appearance of the clues appear to be
carefully calculated … evidence of a bigger picture that he’s just
not seeing…
Blix and Ramm soon join forces, determined to find and stop
a merciless killer with a flair for the dramatic, and thirst for
attention.
Trouble is, he’s just got his first taste of it…

PUBLICATION DATE: 6 FEBRUARY 2020 | PAPERBACK ORIGINAL | £8.99 | ORENDA BOOKS

Review: Keeper, by Johanna Gustawsson, translated by Maxim Jakubowski

38468901. sy475 — Whitechapel, 1888: London is bowed under Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror.

London 2015: actress Julianne Bell is abducted in a case similar to the terrible Tower Hamlets murders of some ten years earlier, and harking back to the Ripper killings of a century before.

Falkenberg, Sweden, 2015: a woman’s body is found mutilated in a forest, her wounds identical to those of the Tower Hamlets victims.

Profiler Emily Roy and true-crime writer Alexis Castells again find themselves drawn into an intriguing case, with personal links that turn their world upside down.

Published April 28th 2018 by Orenda Books (first published March 15th 2017)
Original Title: Mör
ISBN:1912374056
ISBN13: 9781912374052
Edition Language: English
URL : http://orendabooks.co.uk/book/keeper/
Series
Emily Roy & Alexis Castells #2

My Review

So, today I’m reviewing the second Emily Roy & Alexis Castells novel, and introducing Alienor, who I adored when I read Blood Song.

This book is as twisted as the first novel, Block 46, and just as tightly plotted. We learn more about Emily and Alexis, their backgrounds and neuroses. The Whitechapel Murders of 1888 were tenuously linked to the investigation as the background for the abusive family history of the murderers. The modern murders are confusing until you get to the revelations later on. The betrayal at the end was an unexpected twist but made the whole book make sense.

As with books 1 and 3, Gustawsson alternates between the investigation and the personal history of the murderers. I like the insight I got into the background to the crimes but was frustrated that I didn’t put the clues together. I’m not very good at that, clearly.

Another fantastic book from Gustawsson and Orenda.

Audiobook Review: The Wives, by Tarryn Fisher

**Imagine that your husband has two other wives.**

You’ve never met the other wives. None of you know each other, and because of this unconventional arrangement, you can see your husband only one day a week. But you love him so much you don’t care. Or at least that’s what you’ve told yourself.

But one day, while you’re doing laundry, you find a scrap of paper in his pocket—an appointment reminder for a woman named Hannah, and you just know it’s another of the wives.

You thought you were fine with your arrangement, but you can’t help yourself: you track her down, and, under false pretenses, you strike up a friendship. Hannah has no idea who you really are. Then, Hannah starts showing up to your coffee dates with telltale bruises, and you realize she’s being abused by her husband. Who, of course, is also *your* husband. But you’ve never known him to be violent, ever.

Who exactly is your husband, and how far would you go to find the truth? Would you risk your own life?

And who is his mysterious third wife?

Published by: HarperCollins
Published: December 2019

Review: Block 46, by Johanna Gustawsson, translated Maxim Jakobowski

34734963. sy475 — In Falkenberg, Sweden, the mutilated body of talented young jewelry designer Linnea Blix is found in a snow-swept marina. In Hampstead Heath, London, the body of a young boy is discovered with similar wounds to Linnea’s. Buchenwald Concentration Camp, 1944. In the midst of the hell of the Holocaust, Erich Hebner will do anything to see himself as a human again. Are the two murders the work of a serial killer, and how are they connected to shocking events at Buchenwald? Emily Roy, a profiler on loan to Scotland Yard from the Canadian Royal Mounted Police, joins up with Linnea’s friend, French true-crime writer Alexis Castells, to investigate the puzzling case. They travel between Sweden and London, and then deep into the past, as a startling and terrifying connection comes to light.

Paperback, 300 pages
Published October 1st 2017 by Orenda Books (first published February 5th 2017)
ISBN:1910633704
ISBN13: 9781910633700
Series
Emily Roy & Alexis Castells #1

My Review

Last year I reviewed Blood Song, the third book in the Emily Roy & Alexis Castells series. It was so good that I ordered the first two and I’ve just read them so I’m reviewing both, but in separate posts. Today it is book 1, Block 46. Tomorrow I will review Keeper.

This was a rather fantastic novel, linking events in Buchenwald Concentration Camp (where the author’s grandfather had been a prisoner for being a French Communist?/Resistance member) and murders in modern Falkenburg, Sweden and London, UK.

The main characters are introduced, although it is clear they have a past relationship and complex personal histories. Their backgrounds and personalities are slowly revealed. Emily Roy could be an unsympathetic character but for the pieces of vulnerability Gustawsson reveals in the narrative. I wasn’t sure about Alexis Castells, she seemed very self-involved, although that changed as I read, again her past was revealed in little bites that made her more understandable. They are both very complex, slightly damaged characters.

The plot was sufficiently twisted that I didn’t see the truth coming, even though the clues were there, looking back. I enjoyed the way the life of the criminals and the investigation intertwined throughout the novel, shifting between perspectives and giving clues to the reader while still hiding the truth. It didn’t feel contrived that a writer and a profiler would know each other or become involved in the investigation (even if I personally have reservations about the scientific validity of profiling) or that they would both end up in Sweden.

It was fascinating to learn about the Buchenwald Camp via fiction, I didn’t know that the prisoners and International Resistance had cached weapons and fought the SS as the Allied Forces got closer to them. I wonder how many SS officers escaped by pretending to be prisoners? *shudder*

Not having read the original novel, because my French is not great and Swedish non-existent, I can’t comment on the translation’s fidelity, but Karen Sullivan, who runs Orenda Books, wouldn’t allow a dodgy translation so I’m going to run with it being accurate.

I highly recommend this book, and the series actually, Also, the publisher, who is an absolute delight.