tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1591225080497051712024-03-15T18:11:57.779-07:00Everybody's ReviewingBook reviews, event reviews, interviews with authors. Open to all!Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.comBlogger696125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-48767251699955971422024-03-07T04:01:00.000-08:002024-03-07T04:01:33.857-08:00Review by Tracey Foster of "Orwell’s Roses" by Rebecca Solnit<p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifQiC_BKb-70CmT5o-I-1GxCud2Sx-jymMGh7q3ClwRyHFOAN7KPfOJlep6u5t21HV7bORlhZftlqlHzw449VKyHOGu4U0sAXqS1Z94oKBgt-4V7_LbehSfT6xI9d-SVbUUwclK3oQ9hqgEjHm_3Nbecm2bu-0YSQuNuDfKiqmEZatIJn5oMg-Exzo7yE/s1000/Solnit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="648" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifQiC_BKb-70CmT5o-I-1GxCud2Sx-jymMGh7q3ClwRyHFOAN7KPfOJlep6u5t21HV7bORlhZftlqlHzw449VKyHOGu4U0sAXqS1Z94oKBgt-4V7_LbehSfT6xI9d-SVbUUwclK3oQ9hqgEjHm_3Nbecm2bu-0YSQuNuDfKiqmEZatIJn5oMg-Exzo7yE/s320/Solnit.jpg" width="207" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In the spring of 1936, a young author set about planting a garden in his rented cottage. Awaiting the arrival of his new wife and hoping to put behind him the experiences as a serving police officer in colonial Burma, Orwell turned to nature to heal both his lungs and calm his mind. His first attempts at recuperation saw him live in extreme poverty, which he later recorded in detail in <i>Down and Out in Paris and London</i> and <i>The Road to Wigan Pier</i>. These were places that were a source for great fiction, but it was in the little hamlet of Wallington where he decided to settle his mind.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Solnit begins with Orwell's essay from 1946, "A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray," that focused on the beauty of a mature yew tree which long outlived the vicar that planted it. After a lapse of time, all that is left of him is a comic song and a beautiful tree. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">From this spark of a thought, Solnit decided to track down Orwell’s cottage garden and see if his plants had also outlived the creator. He had mentioned revisiting his garden in that essay of 1946 and noted that that too had thrived in his absence. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Orwell was passionate about nature and the earth; he was a keen gardener and a naturalist. He took many long walks with friends who later commented on his knowledge and alluded to his fear for the future, drawing attention, with anxiety, to this shrub budding early for the time of the year. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Solnit urges us to revisit and look deeper into Orwell's prose, to seek out the passages of flora and fauna and promises us that if we do, the grey portrait will turn to colour. Even in his novel </span><i style="font-family: arial;">1984</i><span style="font-family: arial;">, deeply political and prophetic, there are moments of joy. Nature itself is immensely political, in how we imagine, interact with, and impact it. He was ahead of his time in this interpretation of our living world. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Extolling simple manual labour with direct visible results must have appealed to Orwell, a passion that led him to further expand his small holding with animals, an orchard and a vegetable garden. Finding predictability with effort that gardening promises was a complete contrast to the uncertain life of prose. He referred to gardening in his many essays, extolling the virtues of the simple, cheap Woolworth rose, the common toad and country life. He advocates for a simple life, in tune with our surroundings. Solnit sums this up with her phrase: "</span><span style="font-family: arial;">Even when the agenda was bread, what spills over is roses."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">This book takes us on a journey through culture and art to society and socialism to examine how roses have represented our desires, passions and goals through the centuries. Throughout these meanderings, Solnit discusses the written words of the essayist, his humour and humanity, his politics and passions to understand him better.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Orwell finally died of tuberculosis aged just 46 after suffering with bronchitis most of his adult life. His final request was for roses to be planted on his grave: "</span><span style="font-family: arial;">Outside my work, the thing I care for most is gardening – for like the rest of us, it’s beauty for today, hope for tomorrow."</span></p><p><br /></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, <i>Ayaskala</i>, <i>Alternateroute</i>, <i>Fish Barrel Review</i>, <i>Mausoleum Press</i>, <i>Bus Poetry Magazine</i>, <i>Wayward Literature</i> and The Arts Council. She writes on her own blog site <a href="https://poetry863.wordpress.com/">The Small Sublime</a>.</span></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-9840549807080640672024-02-29T09:42:00.000-08:002024-02-29T09:42:00.909-08:00Review by Peter Raynard of "The Remaining Men" by Martin Figura<p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHw1tze7eXTgLrBD75e_0WpRqV22cY_sEvlD6Wt07iidKTBnKIqNVl3Wx53Fz5EDpiFiWcwD5baKjQVmQrKnADBOMLDcX_YlZEj_TS1vBoqY-WkwKF7Wvw_pOVCPLgHpk2jct2E5vHO-lZDKoQ1Jbu-LsB0hmmaWCU7z58DJjzE7OrbVApT02GNYlRy5k/s487/Remaining%20men.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="487" data-original-width="316" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHw1tze7eXTgLrBD75e_0WpRqV22cY_sEvlD6Wt07iidKTBnKIqNVl3Wx53Fz5EDpiFiWcwD5baKjQVmQrKnADBOMLDcX_YlZEj_TS1vBoqY-WkwKF7Wvw_pOVCPLgHpk2jct2E5vHO-lZDKoQ1Jbu-LsB0hmmaWCU7z58DJjzE7OrbVApT02GNYlRy5k/s320/Remaining%20men.jpg" width="208" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The word that kept coming to mind when reading<i> The Remaining Men </i>was generosity. Figura writes about many lives: his own, of course, which would make for an interesting film, not just because of the death of his mother by his father, and its impact on him and his siblings, but also the soldiers, workers, and NHS staff, who are contrasted with our leading Prime Ministers, and their many follies.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">There can’t be many poets who were once soldiers, and there is a certain irony in Figura being a post-war child who joins the army; there’s always a conflict somewhere (Suez, Falklands, Iraq, etc.). Figura shows how the army is often the only avenue for working-class men and women to ‘see the world’ and are often ignored in the history books.</span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> After School came the coastal erosion of self<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> as to what is on offer. His grandfather’s<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> medal ribbons all lined up straight by the pull</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> of the weight</span></div><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">He also writes about the impact on one’s identity of leaving a birthplace, travelling abroad, living elsewhere in the UK, but being still marked by the place you were born:</span></p><p><span style="white-space: normal; white-space: pre;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> Ask where I’m from, and I’ll say<i> Liverpool</i><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> in my <i>woolly</i> Northern accent, knowing we’d left<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> for a<i> better life </i>when I was only two</span><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> We were only ever visiting after that<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> and I have no right to feel so proud</span></div><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Personal and political history runs through the collection in a linear narrative form but is wide ranging in the characters it portrays. All of this is complemented by a series of black and white pictures. Figura is also a photographer and has a book <i>This Man’s Army</i> about his young life in the service.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>The Remaining Men</i> will make you cry, make you angry, and make you laugh in all the right places. ‘The Mower’ is a standout gem in this respect (think Burt Lancaster’s <i>The Swimmer</i> as an enraged man ripping through neighbours’ gardens on his motorised lawnmower). </span><span style="font-family: arial;">The generosity of this collection is most poignant in the poem ‘My Name is Mercy’ about an NHS nurse, </span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> If you can hear me, squeeze my hand.<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> today is the nineteenth of January, <br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> it is difficult, I understand.</span></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Figura understands the importance of these people very well, and how unvalued they are by politicians who are supposed to lead us, and for that we must thank his generosity and their service.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Peter Raynard is a poet, who writes prose and edits <i><a href="https://proletarianpoetry.com/">Proletarian Poetry: Poems of Working-class Lives</a></i>. His latest collection is <i>Manland</i> (Nine Arches Press, 2022). He has a poetry pamphlet, after William Hogarth, and academic essay on the poetry of Fred Voss and Martin Hayes, forthcoming in 2024.</span></div><div><br /></div>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-92229322615325294912024-02-28T06:08:00.000-08:002024-02-28T06:08:52.212-08:00Review by Beth Gaylard of "God's Country" by Kerry Hadley-Pryce<p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyQYJRMMatLplaPA6TBnp9aP0_GRlZCUddwiPzPBiz0eVXmWSBHFbPu72XBFv1gFbTDZoDuQPRXl_ufrRVrwaM6NsWw6YpzKsxEfjZ4fyh-Vove_VU3M2VU1iCUf5xh3ncSK6vlwfljVZwdFSEu57OcQg2uTK_GdxDxVFBwRy3hnntCdW0TaMyhJI1Igk/s320/Kerry.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="208" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyQYJRMMatLplaPA6TBnp9aP0_GRlZCUddwiPzPBiz0eVXmWSBHFbPu72XBFv1gFbTDZoDuQPRXl_ufrRVrwaM6NsWw6YpzKsxEfjZ4fyh-Vove_VU3M2VU1iCUf5xh3ncSK6vlwfljVZwdFSEu57OcQg2uTK_GdxDxVFBwRy3hnntCdW0TaMyhJI1Igk/s1600/Kerry.jpg" width="208" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">‘Landscape is a cauldron for Kerry Hadley-Pryce’s intensely creepy and evocative writing’ (Georgina Bruce, <i>Black Static</i>). This blurb on the front cover of<i> God’s Country</i> should act as a warning, not just about the nature of the book, but the character of the setting – her own setting, the Black Country. Of the book, she says: ‘I think it contains part of my own DNA … It’s the paths I have walked.’ Of the landscape, she writes ‘there was more than just a smell about this place, there was a proper feel of it that she hadn’t expected. There was a stillness of air inside there that seemed to hold something primitive.’</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">If you are expecting that this ‘cauldron,’ a rural farm, will produce a novel resembling a wholesome soup or a nourishing stew, think again, because before you know it you are drawn (through the protagonist, Alison) into a family nightmare that you desperately, fervently want to end well, if only it can. Alison has just undergone a traumatic event which she cannot share, for the moment at least, and the whole book is told from her unsettled point of view. Her physical pain and discomfort – she is beset by a migraine all the way through the book, almost a character in its own right, and the weirdness of the migraine experience mirrors the disjointed personalities of other characters that she meets.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The family is not hers but her boyfriend Guy’s, and they are making their way to the Black Country farm where he grew up with his twin brother Ivan, who has finally died after a long illness. Their father, known only as Flood, is the God of God’s Country, an implacably cruel man who has somehow managed to destroy all his family as well as the farm. As soon as they reach their destination it is obvious that Guy hasn’t told Alison all the secrets it holds. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The narrative unfolds in a convoluted version of the conditional tense which addresses the reader directly, allowing an omniscient point of view and implying that some kind of interview with Alison will take place at a point in the future, after the end of the story. This stylistic device works surprisingly well, allowing the reader to see beyond the end of the story and enabling the unknown narrator to address the reader directly and at a distance: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">‘She’ll say she wants to tell you this story, and in the act of telling it, she knows she’ll probably leave some gaps, but in the act of you reading it, you’ll give it shape.’</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>God’s Country</i> is an important contribution to those strands of literature that bring landscape to life, but it is also compelling and unpredictable, as it unfolds past secrets which continue to affect a family in thrall to its most powerful member. One of the best reads this year.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: arial;">About the reviewer<br /></span></b><span style="font-family: arial;">Beth Gaylard is a PhD student of Creative Writing, currently in her write-up period. Her topic is solastalgia in rural England. She has a self-published speculative fiction novel, <i>Firebrands</i>, on Kindle. She lives in Leicestershire.</span></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;">You can read more about <i>God's Country</i> by Kerry Hadley-Pryce on Creative Writing at Leicester <a href="https://creativewritingatleicester.blogspot.com/2023/02/kerry-hadley-pryce-gods-country.html">here</a>. </span></p>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-64040740517266371532024-02-26T08:57:00.000-08:002024-02-26T08:57:56.991-08:00Review by Gus Gresham of "Pictures of Yukio" by Brian Howell<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy94ARHprMz2xMy6YQfzeKrNkFVTHdIUsmpDPW3TRbB6Hjodpy2OdkXUaiqod0uOM_Xh9wyBg0VWapsuqehNPVjCf0aBIblxC0VtjJPUP7nF62VneTTsCq9Ca7EVMrBwBg31z3jE0ITfwr8tCGbMu5davNIrPCVDGvHgpY0Hk3T-2Ykxi4SieO_DkIY-4/s2500/Pictures.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1250" data-original-width="2500" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy94ARHprMz2xMy6YQfzeKrNkFVTHdIUsmpDPW3TRbB6Hjodpy2OdkXUaiqod0uOM_Xh9wyBg0VWapsuqehNPVjCf0aBIblxC0VtjJPUP7nF62VneTTsCq9Ca7EVMrBwBg31z3jE0ITfwr8tCGbMu5davNIrPCVDGvHgpY0Hk3T-2Ykxi4SieO_DkIY-4/w400-h200/Pictures.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="font-family: arial;">While reading this chapbook short story, I had a sense of moving towards something mystical, poetic and subtly menacing. Three Japanese university students become enamoured of the work of Mishima Yukio, a writer who was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times in the 1960s. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In the modern day setting of the story, Yukio’s shadowy face appears on the wall of a university building, its clarity subject to changes in daylight and sunlight. <i>Pictures of Yukio</i> is driven as much by the pictures of Yukio on the wall as it is by pictures / vignettes of the three student friends, Yutaka, Kimie and Osamu.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">According to some sources, Mishima Yukio was a controversial figure, espousing right-wing views that mourned the loss of Imperial Japanese culture, and his writing was a flamboyant fusion of Japanese and Western styles. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">By contrast, stylistically, Howell’s prose is clear, spare and understated, but Mishima’s life and motivations are echoed in Howell’s story. There are parallel themes, including the theme of “manifesto.” The manifesto of the friends is also a call to arms for returning to the past, but this modern manifesto focuses around the idea of rejecting the globalised Western-driven trend of digital connectivity and the ills of social media that are in ascendancy in modern societies the world over.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Our narrator, Yutaka, offers an early prefiguring: “once you start texting, it becomes complicated. Misunderstandings pile on misunderstandings that can only really be sorted out in the real world of face-to-face communication.” And there are undertones of casual menace in the everyday: “I had noticed a samurai sword specialist shop adjacent to the love hotel.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Given that Mishima Yukio was an alumnus of the university where the three friends study – and that Yukio delivered an impassioned political speech followed by ritual suicide – a reader is at once beguiled and fascinated, and wonders where this absorbing story will ultimately lead.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Pictures of Yukio</i> is haunting and beautifully written. It lives on in the memory after reading. It made me want to know more about the inspirations behind it, and more about the author. Brian Howell lives outside Tokyo and teaches in Japan. He is also an established writer of short stories and novels. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">I have no hesitation recommending this forthcoming chapbook story and I’ll certainly be checking out more of Howell’s work.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the Reviewer</b> <br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Gus Gresham has an MA in Creative Writing (NTU) and has worked as a mechanical engineer, construction worker, fruit picker, environmental activist, writer, English tutor, audio-book producer, medical-scenario simulator/facilitator, civil funeral celebrant, and building surveyor. He’s had short stories published in literary magazines including <i>Brittle Star </i>and <i>Under the Radar</i>, and his most recent novel, <i>Kyiv Trance</i> – a dark, twisty, love story and crime thriller – is available on Amazon.</span></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-21798479328263874882024-02-23T13:12:00.000-08:002024-02-24T07:16:49.453-08:00Review by Martyn Crucefix of "Modern Fog" by Chris Emery<p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-F1Pk9cmeZVTmS1T02AnjPsiETqkn00o2acw3mGronUWjNAfWyHjDPMUltYA0bqZZ_H15QDHyETHV8HdLoWSZjEHQL5TL5dnoNRCDcIiB8RZSAYdHoCtUUe6s5weUwvyJMVbNRKbLtjY63bWs3ZFxQL-OR7UBZUPQfTKRaX8XXivzpwNYEPCIeGqUD-s/s800/9781911469544.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="511" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-F1Pk9cmeZVTmS1T02AnjPsiETqkn00o2acw3mGronUWjNAfWyHjDPMUltYA0bqZZ_H15QDHyETHV8HdLoWSZjEHQL5TL5dnoNRCDcIiB8RZSAYdHoCtUUe6s5weUwvyJMVbNRKbLtjY63bWs3ZFxQL-OR7UBZUPQfTKRaX8XXivzpwNYEPCIeGqUD-s/s320/9781911469544.jpg" width="204" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Chris Emery’s new collection presents, and intends to see beyond, the <i>Modern Fog</i> of its title. Here are walking poems, encounters with creatures, and images of modern life’s scruffy ‘dreck.’ ‘The Bay’ can be read as a condensed version of Larkin’s ‘Here,’ the walker arriving at a bay, dotted with ruined buildings. This image of transience, in effect a memento mori, is softened a little with Emery’s insistence that the homesteads ‘still hold their ounce of love.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In ‘Day Fox,’ the animal’s ‘living amber’ is seen against the green of grass, but its later death is also clear: ‘his pelt was tar black and slicked back.’ Emery goes beyond the fact of death as, in the corpse’s wasting away, ‘the world / relaxed into him with all its fiery prayers.’ To declare this an image of an afterlife is to lack subtlety, yet Emery is surely probing Eliot’s idea that ‘In order to arrive at what you are not / You must go through the way in which you are not’ (‘East Coker’). </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Emery’s images of our modern world – like an NCP car park, the final destination perhaps of the couple in ‘Newbies’ driving along ‘old roads, lobbed estates’ – function as foils to the ‘churchgoing’ side of his work. ‘The Wall Paintings’ – a visit to St. Andrew’s, Wickhampton – opens not with cycle clips, but with the equally evocative ‘thunk of a latch and then your eyes adjust.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The final poem, ‘The Legacy,’ records the removal of an empty wasps’ nest. In the transformative effect of genuine poetry, the nest becomes a human life, ‘gorgeously dented,’ from which the creatures that made it have departed ‘to drone in apple acres / elsewhere darkening / with sweet ruin now.’ Whether we believe in such a place is, with writing as good as this, hardly the point, appealing as it does, through powerful imagery to a human longing for continuation in the face of what we think we know of death. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Martyn Crucefix's <i>Between a Drowning Man</i> is published by Salt in 2023; his translations of Peter Huchel (Shearsman) won the 2020 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. A Rilke Selected Poems, <i>Change Your Life</i>, is due from Pushkin Press, Spring 2024. You can find his blog <a href="https://martyncrucefix.com/">here</a>. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">You can read more about <i>Modern Fog</i> by Chris Emery on Creative Writing at Leicester <a href="https://creativewritingatleicester.blogspot.com/2024/02/chris-emery-modern-fog.html">here</a>. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-65775039890071057872024-02-16T01:36:00.000-08:002024-02-16T01:36:54.113-08:00Review by Paul Taylor-McCartney of "Hollow Daughter" by Katherine Hetzel<p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvAPhPUuTusHujmZxp3IxwUgoWjHJYp1FPFAJAtvJ8EGK72qJvNsIBAKVDRlwcLjy8ais1xajY55SKZQm3KF9B3hgtLOo1UAc5L0Woe-I5KOBJDWiqCIkFmVaoMPDKt4H4rqJAT3wMg5wHFJLCu61OIb56ZgM6xXfSRkq04O90R8VcuXGwmf5Cnvjw4Kg/s500/Hollow.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="333" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvAPhPUuTusHujmZxp3IxwUgoWjHJYp1FPFAJAtvJ8EGK72qJvNsIBAKVDRlwcLjy8ais1xajY55SKZQm3KF9B3hgtLOo1UAc5L0Woe-I5KOBJDWiqCIkFmVaoMPDKt4H4rqJAT3wMg5wHFJLCu61OIb56ZgM6xXfSRkq04O90R8VcuXGwmf5Cnvjw4Kg/s320/Hollow.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Readers already familiar with Hetzel’s previous output as author of children’s fantasy fiction, including the epic <i>The Chronicles of Issraya</i> series of books, will find much to enjoy in this collection of short stories that are aimed at adult readers but also draw their inspiration from the fantastical. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The title of the collection, <i>Hollow Daughter</i>, is not only the story that opens proceedings, but also provides a unifying theme for the eclectic array of flash fiction and longer pieces that follow, chiefly, girls and women who face extraordinary situations that either serve to empower them or leave them at the mercy of more powerful forces. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The collection contains a dizzying array of characters, settings and narrative styles, many of which offer the reader a mere glimpse of an alternative universe. Hetzel’s trademark economy of form is able to relay both an entire society and a turning point in a character’s much larger story. There are the familiar shades of Atwood’s Gilead in the title story, "Hollow Daughter," whereby a parent seeks the help of Mother Alish when her daughter fails to menstruate. "'We need your help, Mother.'” The Mother indicated the daughter. 'If her situation continues, there will be accusations laid against her, that she’s preventing her own fruitfulness.'" Hetzel leads the reader to many a satisfying cliff-hanger, shown to devastating effect in the title story, but also elsewhere in the affecting "The Pink Feather Boa Incident," "The Memory of Amelia Maybelove" and "Red Moon Rising." The last of these, along with the stunning "Miss Aveline’s Summerhouse," are so convincing and well-executed they hint at a potential future direction for Hetzel to pursue – the full-length ghost story.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">I thoroughly recommend this collection. Hetzel’s stories surprise and delight in equal measure but are sure to leave readers reflecting on the nature of female identity and power, in its myriad forms. I look forward to seeing where Hetzel takes her readers next as she develops her skills as a writer of quality adult fantasy fiction. Any number of universes, as presented in this dazzling collection, would prove ripe for exploration. </span></p><p><b><br /></b></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Dr. Paul Taylor-McCartney is a writer, researcher and lecturer living in Cornwall. His interests include dystopian studies, children’s literature and initial teacher education. His poetry, short fiction and academic articles have appeared in print and electronic form, including: <i>Aesthetica</i>, <i>The Birmingham Journal of Language and Literature</i>, <i>Education in Practice & Writing in Practice</i> (National Association of Writers in Education), <i>Dyst: Literary Journal</i>,<i> Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine</i>, <i>The Crank</i> and <i>Bandit Fiction</i>. His debut children’s novel, <i>Sisters of the Pentacle</i>, was recently published by Hermitage Press.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-63912540938341867392024-02-13T05:30:00.000-08:002024-02-13T07:11:03.119-08:00Review by Jon Wilkins of "This Is Not a Science Fiction Textbook," ed. Mark Bould and Steven Shaviro<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja-WIANjHBhng3AEX1Xd3yVqKJA1ZcwPmvv1_bdcOowmOMJbPqujCSMjrB6FuVzSz970ZracJuATwYyvrjVTRaX2ETg4ZIr0ufHmb1VUr2dYe3NLDuWYEqklbbv9NTJ9kz3c63GAwILKwL9enuT3fgxcD8Q3NgmOWYURnq9OQdbucQZK2oPW5vsGz2cdA/s1000/This%20is%20not.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="778" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja-WIANjHBhng3AEX1Xd3yVqKJA1ZcwPmvv1_bdcOowmOMJbPqujCSMjrB6FuVzSz970ZracJuATwYyvrjVTRaX2ETg4ZIr0ufHmb1VUr2dYe3NLDuWYEqklbbv9NTJ9kz3c63GAwILKwL9enuT3fgxcD8Q3NgmOWYURnq9OQdbucQZK2oPW5vsGz2cdA/s320/This%20is%20not.jpg" width="249" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Well you could have fooled me! It is a textbook and then some. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">This is the perfect resource for a sci-fi fan. Excuse the trendy reduction. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">But it is also a wonderful introduction to the science fiction world for those not <i>au fait</i> with the genre. The book is an education. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The book is divided into three sections: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Theory, </span><span style="font-family: arial;">History, </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Key Concepts, followed by </span><span style="font-family: arial;">a fantastic bibliography and a list of further reading which deliver a smorgasbord of sci-fi delights that should be on any fan's reading bucket list.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">We can read highly researched and insightful articles on everything we need to know and on things we didn’t know we needed to know. Each page offers a fresh insight. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">What I love about the format is that with every essay we have a selection of films or books that the writer recommends. These suggestions unsurprisingly open up a whole world of different worlds - worlds we could have never imagined if we didn’t delve deeper into science fiction. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">If you follow the authors' advice you will see that the sci-fi genre is not something to be scoffed at, but an insightful world of imagination and invention. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Science-fiction writers have given us so much over the years, promoting ideas that seem to have come true, despite sometimes being ridiculed when they were written. A</span><span style="font-family: arial;">head of their time, these writers were inventive, perceptive, challengers of the status quo and magicians of the written word.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">I personally have not always really enjoyed science fiction writing, but I really did enjoy the articles written here and especially loved the hints as to what I should read next. This is advice I will now be taking. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">As a textbook this has really taught me a great deal in an easy-to-read format that encourages further reading of the genre - and what could be better than that?</span></p><p><br /></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Jon Wilkins is 68. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, <i>Utrecht Snow</i>. He followed it up with <i>Utrecht Rain</i>, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, <i>Poppy Knows Best</i>, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s. Next year he takes up the UEA Crime Fiction Creative Writing MA. The game's afoot!</span> </div><p><br /></p>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-25508788566882759182024-02-03T08:07:00.000-08:002024-02-03T08:07:00.882-08:00Review by Jon Wilkins of "Sublimity" by Mary Gilonne<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8kFMnN_HloWNAvcwLTHFGuezS_VdLUbxzsJSOai2NBin9-lfbjie1nLDZvhTmJ08mtlyY0REjdex2WEELMQwZHDM4yjGBlG_0YHktrZ56mInxgqcrVwpOQneb60l8ALnXzDRyqsY5sSe40mOVfEWGuC6Whk3cbL1QKyVzdlDdQ231W4nbdv9Q9Sh3zU8/s557/Sublimity.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="557" data-original-width="394" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8kFMnN_HloWNAvcwLTHFGuezS_VdLUbxzsJSOai2NBin9-lfbjie1nLDZvhTmJ08mtlyY0REjdex2WEELMQwZHDM4yjGBlG_0YHktrZ56mInxgqcrVwpOQneb60l8ALnXzDRyqsY5sSe40mOVfEWGuC6Whk3cbL1QKyVzdlDdQ231W4nbdv9Q9Sh3zU8/s320/Sublimity.jpg" width="226" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">I have to say when Jonathan Taylor said a collection of poems on Norfolk was available, I jumped at the chance of reviewing it as I love all parts Norfolk and was fascinated in seeing how Mary Gilonne would interpret a place I hold dear to my heart.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Throughout the pages of <i>Sublimity</i>, I could smell the sea, feel the sand between my toes, taste the fish and chips, hear the gulls crying out to each other and see the multi-coloured beach huts at Wells-Next-The-Sea. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">All of this was brought to life through the wonderful word pictures and images Gilonne paints for us all.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The collection was so easy to read and the poems transported me back to places I have visited. Each poem afforded a glimpse and nudged forgotten memories of Cley, of Stiffkey, of the freezing North Sea, Blakeney and Mundesley. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Painting pictures with words is such a skill and Gilonne has mastered this art.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The variety of different poetic forms in the collection is a joy. We are left guessing continuously as to what style Gilonne will use next to interpret her own vision of Norfolk and, as such, she challenges the reader to discover different routes to pastures new and old.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Throughout, Mary Gilonne captures the essence of what makes Norfolk different. This is a site of strange place names and mysterious habits, of arts and crafts, hobbies and employment: everything that makes an English county unique.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">As regards the few places in the verse that I haven’t visited, I am now intrigued to do so. If Gilonne can conjure up the past for me in places I do know, how wonderful must be the like of Scolt Head, Bloodgate or Welney? The very names seem to tease and invite. I can’t wait and I will be taking her words with me. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">What could be better in a windy February, a warm coat, scarf, a thermos of coffee, cake and reading <i>Sublimity</i> sitting by the beach at East Runton. Bliss!</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">I really enjoyed these poems. They brought crystal clear reminders of times past that were special, that are special, to me. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer</b></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Jon Wilkins is 68. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, <i>Utrecht Snow</i>. He followed it up with <i>Utrecht Rain</i>, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, <i>Poppy Knows Best</i>, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s. Next year he takes up the UEA Crime Fiction Creative Writing MA. The game's afoot! </div></span></div><div><br /></div></div>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-41739334947988798152024-02-02T09:27:00.000-08:002024-02-02T09:27:11.545-08:00Review by Cathi Rae of "Makeover" by Laurie Bolger<p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6x-rar5O8hMryfJZ3Pg11FGa4dF06NT8qakFXNi_h0SLTn4xkgumgR-dRl0eLvpma2mewYwcNQkgnG238ugelXzlmgmmFvxmju1ZMmWZdvj-WE9s5tUz8U_4pl0P3g5KKSvRe1q1ocOu3MgK9sN1Ql6XziRmQXx59WqbsG-eYouIvSSKmZC2q4ooLPnE/s320/Makeover%20Cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="208" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6x-rar5O8hMryfJZ3Pg11FGa4dF06NT8qakFXNi_h0SLTn4xkgumgR-dRl0eLvpma2mewYwcNQkgnG238ugelXzlmgmmFvxmju1ZMmWZdvj-WE9s5tUz8U_4pl0P3g5KKSvRe1q1ocOu3MgK9sN1Ql6XziRmQXx59WqbsG-eYouIvSSKmZC2q4ooLPnE/s1600/Makeover%20Cover.jpg" width="208" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Laurie Bolger is an award-winning poet, performer and founder of The Creative Writing Breakfast Club. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">It seems that the poet Laurie Bolger and I have things in common – Irish working-class roots, an interest in writing and thinking about fashion ... and we both found and read grown-up sex books at an impressionable age.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Makeover</i> is a collection of the domestic, the small, the lives of ordinary working-class women, the stories of mothers, daughters, grandmothers, sisters and friends, all described with film-still precision. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Her descriptive language is beautiful. She’s able to conjure up that moment, that childhood in ways that evoke a time and place even if you weren’t there and her pen portraits make me feel as if I know these women:</span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> Aunt Teasy all horoscopes and nails<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> cursing and coughing<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> like she emptying great bags of gravel<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> straight onto the coffee table </span></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Bolger finds beauty in the smallest things, city flowers, the go-faster powers of a frilly swim suit, and the unspoken, when women hold onto lives, make spaces for themselves and challenge society’s expectations of what a good woman is.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">This is a confection of a collection – easy to read in one delicious gulp and then return to again and again, always finding a new image, a justifiable blast of anger and defiance. It’s also the only collection I’ve ever read where Sylvanian Families get a name check.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Cathi Rae is in the final year of an M4C funded creative / practice-led PhD. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">A new pamphlet collection, <i>Just this side of sea-worthy</i>, will be available from Two Pigeons Press in March 2024.</span></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;">You can read more about <i>Makeover</i> by Laurie Bolger on Creative Writing at Leicester <a href="https://creativewritingatleicester.blogspot.com/2024/01/laurie-bolger-makeover.html">here</a>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-61028222544821892572024-02-01T12:40:00.000-08:002024-02-01T12:40:18.965-08:00Review by Sally Shaw of "The Erkeley Shadows" by Michael W. Thomas<p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfVQO1S_V5xx5EyZGOhIvlz-YdX8osjlnySpGCqoR7IN6iPTdAAimrcbriuhxAk6D3V3CK2nb7bHdf2dfP_Jb8A270V8fYm6MuYUBDwAk5M4LQcGM3D60WGZcimf97KLLh5cYUlFwBhMBKngKcT3YHPfLOoFSwH8qEoK-IYKgi-Gxs3lytXoyzi5gc8-0/s320/Erkeley.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="199" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfVQO1S_V5xx5EyZGOhIvlz-YdX8osjlnySpGCqoR7IN6iPTdAAimrcbriuhxAk6D3V3CK2nb7bHdf2dfP_Jb8A270V8fYm6MuYUBDwAk5M4LQcGM3D60WGZcimf97KLLh5cYUlFwBhMBKngKcT3YHPfLOoFSwH8qEoK-IYKgi-Gxs3lytXoyzi5gc8-0/s1600/Erkeley.jpg" width="199" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The novel begins at the end of one character's story, but at the start of another’s, albeit unknown to him. Will, a police officer lives in a place, Saskatoon in Canada, where familiarity acts as a blindfold to change: "Through the window he could see the last stragglers being exited from the City Library. He smiled. There was Grace Popescul holding open the door as she’d done forever. The lady had a way with her, no doubt of it. When he was twelve he’d tried bribing everyone in his grade to return his overdue books. At last Dad had driven him downtown, frog-marched him into the lobby, nodded at Grace and gone to wait in the car. He’d been left with her wrath and what felt like the whole province’s population looking on. Man, she didn’t look a day older than when she’d torn those strips off him. But of course she was older and so was he and so it would go on. Except for this Cumberland Avenue guy." Thomas’s writing creates atmosphere and hints at the turmoil within Will that draws the reader into the story.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In this novel, the guy found dead intrudes into Will’s life - firstly, by the strange calm of the death scene that conveys an undercurrent of evil. This nudges its way into Will’s mind and when he observes the evidence bag from the guy's apartment left on the front desk of the station, he takes it. Inside the bag is a folder in which Jonathan has recorded the reality of his existence. Will initially thinks reading it will pass the weekend while his wife and children are away for Halloween. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">As Will begins to read the folder he’s taken to England and Jonathan's teenage years of the 1960s. He is introduced to a boy being bullied by a gang whose leader’s name is Wiznuk, who only retreats when Jonathan’s friends, Bevvo and Gordy, are around. "Inevitably, when my departure for Canada became known, Wiznuk and his apes came after me with redoubled zeal." The words of Jonathan become embedded in Will’s thoughts and start to lead him to re-consider events of his own childhood.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Will is amazed by the number of pages Jonathan dedicated to that last summer in England and an area of land known as the Erkeley. "The Erkeley ran all around the school, almost, but was bounded on one side by a residential lane leading up to the main road. It must have been as impressive as Cannock Chase once, all ridged and hollowed." It becomes clear that the reason for there being so many pages about the Erkeley is that, as part of Jonathan's farewell, his mates arrange a last adventure there. "On the last Tuesday of term, Gordy waxed romantic: 'Hey, let’s come back here tonight, man. Mooch round the Erkeley after hours. Souvenir for you, Jon, golden memory: hanging loose, Erkeley-wise.'" During their exploration of the Erkeley the boys meet Old Tafler who was known as the Lord of Erkeley due to his having inhabited the land for years. Old Tafler is witness to a horrific event that last Tuesday evening, one that Jonathan hopes he can escape as he leaves for a new life in Canada with parents who barely register his existence, let alone sense all is not well.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Jonathan becomes a university professor. Outwardly to colleagues and friends he’s a good person. His true self hides deep in his mind, co-ordinating ways to right his wrong. "Often I felt like two people. One went into the world and did the living for the other, who was stuck in an endless moment of knowing." Jonathan’s life spirals out of control, as he is pursued by those on the Erkeley who become his "dark chaperones." They steal his present memory and dole out punishments.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The more Will reads and re-reads, he is drawn back to events of his own childhood, when his potential to harm his brother Mark is almost realised. Will becomes engulfed in the possibility of sorting Mark out. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">I find Thomas’s writing requires me at times to pause and uncover the different layers, before reading on. The title of the novel became clear as I witnessed the devastation caused by Jonathan’s decline into </span><i style="font-family: arial;">The Erkeley Shadows</i><span style="font-family: arial;">. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Sally Shaw has an MA Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. She writes short stories and is currently working on her novel based in 1950s Liverpool. She sometimes writes poetry. She gains inspiration from old photographs, history, her own childhood memories, and is inspired by writers Sandra Cisneros, Deborah Morgan, Liz Berry and Emily Dickinson. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">She has had short stories and poetry published in various online publications, including <i>The Ink Pantry</i> and <i>AnotherNorth</i> and in a ebook anthology <i>Tales from Garden Street </i>(Comma Press, 2019). </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Sally lives in the countryside with her partner, dog, and bantam. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Twitter @SallySh24367017</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">You can read more about <i>The Erkeley Shadows</i> by Michael W. Thomas on Creative Writing at Leicester <a href="https://creativewritingatleicester.blogspot.com/2023/11/michael-w-thomas-erkeley-shadows.html">here</a>. </span></div><div><br /></div>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-37126620124306145162024-01-30T05:40:00.000-08:002024-01-30T05:40:47.192-08:00Review by Laura Besley of "Jokes for the Gunmen" by Mazen Maarouf<p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfN7iO_IhtDPhLyw22NUi2FM_E5KYrsMjk0x51SkoBkV9DigBZ3lFS9GBsZv95S_VnStzKhnWvTNX6pqWQ_u8dZAENO2H_YLbp5JW9wlc1Chy49Itg0HMkPcwNBFVj-OqPS25FJFYtoa2XZdgTNwkHWLd6-R3fbev1kLCrnAVYZXpspaJ5x0N5Mk6To8A/s1000/Jokes.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="652" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfN7iO_IhtDPhLyw22NUi2FM_E5KYrsMjk0x51SkoBkV9DigBZ3lFS9GBsZv95S_VnStzKhnWvTNX6pqWQ_u8dZAENO2H_YLbp5JW9wlc1Chy49Itg0HMkPcwNBFVj-OqPS25FJFYtoa2XZdgTNwkHWLd6-R3fbev1kLCrnAVYZXpspaJ5x0N5Mk6To8A/s320/Jokes.jpg" width="209" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Jokes for the Gunmen</i> is a short story collection by award-winning Palestinian-Icelandic writer, poet, translator and journalist, Mazen Maarouf. It was translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">All the stories in the collection explore jokes and joking as either a means of exchange or a coping mechanism for the atrocities of living in a country at war. In the eponymous opening story, the father figure must make up jokes for the gunmen in order to avoid their wrath. ‘Of course, in front of a bunch of gunmen you have to be a good storyteller in order to win your freedom. Your story has to be convincing, enjoyable and very short, and it has to make people laugh.’ As a consequence, the withdrawn father and unruly son become closer as they both focus on the task of thinking up a new joke every day. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In the story ‘Jokes’ there is another young boy trying to make up jokes. ‘I don’t have ready-made jokes in my head and I don’t remember any details of the few jokes I’ve heard. So I’m trying to sketch out the scenario for a joke in my head.’ On the flipside, the main character in ‘The Angel of Death’ doesn’t ‘have a sense of humour … and [doesn’t] understand why people smile.’ Throughout the story, everyone around him is trying to make him smile or laugh or giggle, but he is resolute. In fact, he gets angry when a man laughs at something he said ‘since [he] hadn’t intended to make a joke.’ In the story ‘Gramophone’ the father loses both his arms when a vacuum bomb strikes the building he was in, but jokes that it doesn’t matter; the gramophone is broken, so he doesn’t need his arms anyway. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The sense of loss, both physical and emotional, runs throughout the collection. People lose limbs, eyes, loved ones; people are ‘pale, silent and thin’ and ‘hollowed out.’ Another theme rooted within the stories is violence, both inside and outside the home, and good use is made of the liminal line drawn between fantasy and reality.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In many ways this collection is a tough read; the depictions of war-torn families are heartbreaking. However, despite the losses these characters have to bear and somehow overcome, there are glimmers of hope on the horizon. <i>Jokes for the Gunmen</i> is a phenomenal collection. </span></p><p><span style="white-space: normal;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> </span></span></p><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;">About the reviewer</span></b></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">Laura Besley is the author of <i>100neHundred</i> and <i>The Almost Mothers</i>. She has been widely published in online journals, print journals and anthologies, including <i>Best Small Fictions</i> (2021). Having lived in the Netherlands, Germany and Hong Kong, she now lives in land-locked central England and misses the sea. She tweets @laurabesley</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-23338313678801073622024-01-27T10:40:00.000-08:002024-01-27T10:40:41.609-08:00Review by Thilsana Gias of "Dust Child" by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai<p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEAAXBJp8dMN8VT845Meez_vFkPngeWp_wvYkj_h2UCrtlpOChwFS8hovyAsvHBgOx16J1wF6TKSkwb66bAQWprZrg1lEhtd_-R0Gp6NNgOHx8mOVXQZt8K_06Q0_LvVAAxQDNsC0Y6qqOmXoXunAPru4TuF3NTpSAfLR93ZVrUSTRCoY_Bge19bSRkak/s724/dust%20child.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="724" data-original-width="474" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEAAXBJp8dMN8VT845Meez_vFkPngeWp_wvYkj_h2UCrtlpOChwFS8hovyAsvHBgOx16J1wF6TKSkwb66bAQWprZrg1lEhtd_-R0Gp6NNgOHx8mOVXQZt8K_06Q0_LvVAAxQDNsC0Y6qqOmXoXunAPru4TuF3NTpSAfLR93ZVrUSTRCoY_Bge19bSRkak/s320/dust%20child.jpg" width="210" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Dust Child</i> is a breathtaking novel which powerfully weaves together the stories of people affected by the Vietnam War. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The narrative itself is non-linear and told through multiple perspectives, allowing readers to simultaneously piece together the broken lives of the characters whilst untangling the complexity of what it means to have family in a time of conflict.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai particularly focuses on the struggles on Amerasian children, the women who bore them and the soldiers that left them behind. As readers, we find ourselves constantly challenging our own perceptions of duty, loyalty and honour as characters condemn each other's acts of survival whilst seeking forgiveness for their own wrongdoings.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Something significantly striking about this novel is the way that the writer allows characters to create a comforting, domestic bubble to protect themselves, only for it be abruptly punctured time and time again by trauma:</span> "'<span style="font-family: arial;">Don't cook anything red!' he screamed as he washed up in the bathroom.</span><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span><span style="font-family: arial;">She stared at the soup, made from ripe tomatoes she'd sautéed with finely chopped shrimps. Perhaps the colour resembled blood - blood that he'd seen or blood that he'd caused to spill."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Despite exploring such abject darkness, the novel is a multi-sensory delight for those who seek comfort in tropical settings. With references to sprawling markets, fresh rambutan, and expansive rice fields, you are rewarded with the richness of Vietnamese culture without crude romanticisation or the stench of death overpowering beautiful moments in the narrative. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Something that is also distinctly Vietnamese about the narrative is the dialogue - the author often has entire sentences in Vietnamese or transliterated English showing how characters are able to break and build bonds with each other despite cultural and linguistic barriers.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The vibrancy and colour in this novel is also drawn from the respect that the characters have for storytelling. Stories become a source of power, betrayal, comfort and healing, even if untrue. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">What is most compelling about </span><i style="font-family: arial;">Dust Child</i><span style="font-family: arial;">, however, is the way that stories give a voice to the displaced, discriminated against and deployed. Clearly, the author's personal experiences with uniting American veterans and their children in Vietnam is what gives the novel a distinctly human touch.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Thilsana Gias is an MA Creative Writing graduate from the University of Leicester and a secondary school English Teacher based in Luton. She doesn't have much time for reading these days but is making a conscious effort to read something other than <i>Macbeth</i>, <i>Jekyll and Hyde </i>and <i>An Inspector Calls</i>.</span></div><div><br /></div>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-74948158068857473902024-01-22T04:32:00.000-08:002024-01-22T04:32:47.478-08:00Review by Jon Wilkins of "Undisclosed" by Ruth O'Callaghan<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHlZhS74ozmJMn_FhBwnnv5e2eeyCfYfnFtKF2n5WZ50M9zfhQ4wykSGEFbiUZQslDj1Py0WrXuFHmRM_oo6xyOmDqYBTIWoVv2ozI8-cuju1S1U2ZPS73Og85uSFcO0LEYxdAeYtHQcWFZlAKYEkJwQR2OeOpZxFTdOjRGfvqWQ2jWAh-7M2t_MxlHWg/s512/Undisclosed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="341" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHlZhS74ozmJMn_FhBwnnv5e2eeyCfYfnFtKF2n5WZ50M9zfhQ4wykSGEFbiUZQslDj1Py0WrXuFHmRM_oo6xyOmDqYBTIWoVv2ozI8-cuju1S1U2ZPS73Og85uSFcO0LEYxdAeYtHQcWFZlAKYEkJwQR2OeOpZxFTdOjRGfvqWQ2jWAh-7M2t_MxlHWg/s320/Undisclosed.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">This is a beautifully written series of poems, broken up into four parts. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Each section invites the reader into a world of love, loss, the past and a search for freedom. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">We meet a variety of characters, ideas, images and reflections on life. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">There are myriad displays of different formats, each teasing us into O’Callaghan’s world - a world full of colour and provocations.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">O'Callaghan's poetry </span><span style="font-family: arial;">seeks answers to questions that are at times unanswerable in a real sense, a rhetorical device that plays with the readers' emotions, taunting them to find a path to the world that O’Callaghan describes. Is it real or a fantasy? You have to decide for yourself. You are given all the tools you need in the form of delightfully constructed lines of verse: it is up to you, the reader, to decipher them and make of them what you will.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The poet is not trying to trick us, far from it. But she does challenge us. She challenges us to read between her lines and make a truth out of her words. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">This is a delightful process for the reader as we enter worlds full of colour and imagination, images that shock and suggest that her world, our world is not as straightforward as it seems.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Read this with an open mind and an open heart. The poems are alluring and engaging, encouraging us to read on and on until alas, we come to the end of the book. The only good thing about finishing it is that we can re-read and find something new in the poems as we confront them again. This is what makes the collection so accessible, so inspirational, we are always seeing something new, something different in each and every poem.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The poems are wonderful as every reading gives a new interpretation, a new way inside the poet's mind, into the poet's world and isn’t that everything that being a poet is?</span></p><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">Jon Wilkins is 68. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, <i>Utrecht Snow</i>. He followed it up with <i>Utrecht Rain</i>, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, <i>Poppy Knows Best</i>, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s. Next year he takes up the UEA Crime Fiction Creative Writing MA. The game's afoot! </span></div><div><br /></div>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-24578554328678288852024-01-21T05:09:00.000-08:002024-01-21T05:09:30.364-08:00Review by Laura Besley of "Chasing the Dragon" by Kathy Hoyle<p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5ER3wRDKRJnwVBrsF_AgRda_StvumUN7p3cZeds1lHz0V3ejSN-YPb6DQOOfYGKeGLn9Zj4nec4fYYKJzzvlnZHSra1FXoyzw3cna_kdzz6KnL4WlPUaYHNHQF2qxL9_qwNpS-7_yfhJ_0QtMEzrclrLD2L-lV86Myl0gniwLQdFiM_IgS_cCyN_vUJU/s1000/Kathy%20H.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="647" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5ER3wRDKRJnwVBrsF_AgRda_StvumUN7p3cZeds1lHz0V3ejSN-YPb6DQOOfYGKeGLn9Zj4nec4fYYKJzzvlnZHSra1FXoyzw3cna_kdzz6KnL4WlPUaYHNHQF2qxL9_qwNpS-7_yfhJ_0QtMEzrclrLD2L-lV86Myl0gniwLQdFiM_IgS_cCyN_vUJU/s320/Kathy%20H.jpg" width="207" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Kathy Hoyle’s debut novella-in-flash, <i>Chasing the Dragon</i>, is an ambitious and compelling example of the form. The novella-in-flash is an emergent new genre operating largely outside mainstream publishing. It combines the concision of flash fiction standalone stories with the space in which to develop a novella-length narrative. In order to make the stories self-contained and unique, Hoyle has made good use of flash fiction techniques, such as stories written in the form of lists, letters and reports. This creates the variety and change of pace for the reader often found in novellas-in-flash while simultaneously ensuring each story adds to the overall arc. </span></p><p><span style="white-space: normal;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Despite its brevity – Hoyle’s novella-in-flash is sixty-five pages in total – <i>Chasing the Dragon</i> spans across generations, continents and cultures. It is told through multiple points of view and the main thread of the story is of Americans in wartime Vietnam, the difficulties they experience there and subsequently back home after their return to the United States. There is a single story written from the point of view of Bihn, a young Vietnamese boy. To create a deeper and richer understanding of these characters and their worlds, there are also stories set in an earlier time where we learn of the characters’ childhoods and childhood traumas. </span></span></p><p><span style="white-space: normal;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Hoyle is extremely adept at voice. The first story, which relays a Vietnamese proverb, opens with the sentence, ‘In Vietnamese legend, Lac Long Quan, the most noble king of all dragon-kind, lived near the water of the Dong Sea,’ and continues to be told in long lyrical sentences. The following story, from the perspective of Thomas Jefferson Scott or ‘[j]ust plain old JT,’ consists of much shorter sentences and a strong dialect: ‘Jacob don’t talk of it none. He don’t like guns none either. He says he’s a pacifist. That he don’t like hurtin no one nor nothin.’ The report and letter stories are both written in a more formal register befitting their forms and the list makes excellent use of repetition; each line starts with ‘He will’ or You will’ and a singular, heartbreaking, ‘They will.’ </span></span></p><p><span style="white-space: normal;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Through its seventeen stories – bookended with the Vietnamese proverb: <i>Children of Dragons, Grandchildren of Gods</i> – <i>Chasing the Dragon</i> sheds light on a largely overlooked consequence of war, as summed up by Willy telling his mama in the eponymous story: ‘Ain’t nobody won nothing.’ Kathy Hoyle’s novella-in-flash evokes a kaleidoscope of emotions, ranging from horror and outrage to compassion and awe. Each individual story is a fantastic rendering of flash fiction, but it is in its entirety that <i>Chasing the Dragon</i> really demonstrates Hoyle's range and ability for both the form as well as the depiction of characters and the worlds they inhabit. This is a truly stunning debut. </span></span></p><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer</b></span></div><div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">Laura Besley is the author of <i>100neHundred</i> and <i>The Almost Mothers</i>. Having lived in the Netherlands, Germany and Hong Kong, she now lives in land-locked central England and misses the sea.</span></div></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">You can read more about <i>Chasing the Dragon </i>by Kathy Hoyle on Creative Writing at Leicester <a href="https://creativewritingatleicester.blogspot.com/2023/06/kathy-hoyle-chasing-dragon.html">here</a>.</span></div><div><br /></div>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-79109100587427942802024-01-20T02:31:00.000-08:002024-01-20T02:31:39.722-08:00Review by Gary Day of "Balloons and Stripey Trousers" by Rennie Parker<p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf8Bno2CrVlITzV2PN9tKEN_l72mK7HmeGZpNyTVD42gmEuJYyfwAlRPuWjxZ6Wx5rTIKDat9gRjzYPpIkdlcQuKsygxGuQdMLkYZurRhgYU_j_wiKwaACXlHS5-JUZPVb7bhWKh05lOdUlB06xYpf2RO9F2OiwjY0W3dC2LVvm2VWmzB_DaGjanRggh4/s1556/front%20cover%20image%20(1).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1556" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf8Bno2CrVlITzV2PN9tKEN_l72mK7HmeGZpNyTVD42gmEuJYyfwAlRPuWjxZ6Wx5rTIKDat9gRjzYPpIkdlcQuKsygxGuQdMLkYZurRhgYU_j_wiKwaACXlHS5-JUZPVb7bhWKh05lOdUlB06xYpf2RO9F2OiwjY0W3dC2LVvm2VWmzB_DaGjanRggh4/s320/front%20cover%20image%20(1).jpg" width="206" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Anyone who has ever worked in a corporate environment would do well to keep a copy of <i>Balloons and Stripey Trousers</i> in their desk draw. It could very well save their sanity. Despite being an almost autobiographical <i>cri de couer</i>, this volume proclaims, to all who feel their souls withering in the arid air of office culture, ‘you are not alone.’</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The theme of quiet desperation is apparent from the outset with the speaker proclaiming, in ‘a warning to the curious,’ that she ‘is growing smaller and smaller as your version of me grows larger.’ Another trait that is apparent in the opening poem is the frequent nod to other writers, in this case Wordsworth and Lawrence, both of whom were appalled, in their different ways, by the plight of the self in industrial society. Judging from these poems, its condition has only got worse. At work people are expected to submit to ‘the tickbox of their little existence’ and at home they break down with terrible consequences as hinted at in ‘brand new management despair expression.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Parker knows that art is not going to save us but it has its little victories. Several poems show supervisors and interview panels patronising, belittling and disparaging the speaker. Her gender and class are both factors in this treatment though neither are foregrounded. The tables are turned in the poem ‘the international collective of artists say no’ where retiring managers are told, with barely suppressed glee, that they do not meet the criteria to take up painting or poetry and that ‘their rejection’ along with their ‘P45 is in the post.’</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The various literary and pictorial allusions give the poems a pleasing depth and resonance. The writing itself is witty, vivid and bright. A pleasure to read. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Gary Day is a retired English lecturer and the author of several critical works including <i>Literary Criticism: A New History</i> and <i>The Story of Drama</i>. His debut poetry collection, <i>The Glass Roof Falls as Rain</i>, published by Holland Press, is due out in February.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">You can read more about <i>Balloons and Stripey Trousers</i> by Rennie Parker on Creative Writing at Leicester <a href="https://creativewritingatleicester.blogspot.com/2023/12/rennie-parker-balloons-and-stripey.html">here</a>. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-44383450557298656352024-01-19T09:02:00.000-08:002024-01-19T09:02:01.578-08:00Review by Mike Gregory of "Our Friends in Berlin" and "London, Burning" by Anthony Quinn<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpYJGyBsnQDHyb7cfLndN3xroVYpoe5eKsFiZHYYzMYUWSu2-nOY3PmxK5XFq9enN-AhnnU-C4Vo4gx3fxJzqvFQxSMpkwT_DH4pRGPoPPiNvZp-LeZuNFGT7ikP5NPkJ_-F30lf4MLhpbZsUl5bEa3bxamJJ6KPR9bYeHbeyC3iGdhM5WT7SNce0vPRs/s1000/Quinn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="649" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpYJGyBsnQDHyb7cfLndN3xroVYpoe5eKsFiZHYYzMYUWSu2-nOY3PmxK5XFq9enN-AhnnU-C4Vo4gx3fxJzqvFQxSMpkwT_DH4pRGPoPPiNvZp-LeZuNFGT7ikP5NPkJ_-F30lf4MLhpbZsUl5bEa3bxamJJ6KPR9bYeHbeyC3iGdhM5WT7SNce0vPRs/s320/Quinn.jpg" width="208" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Our Friends in Berlin</i> (2018) is an intriguing, pacy, at times beautifully written espionage novel set amongst spies, fifth columnists, fellow travellers and innocent (or not-so-innocent) bystanders in London during World War 2. It covers, therefore, similar territory in many ways to Agatha Christie’s <i>N or M?</i> (1941) and Kate Atkinson's <i>Transcription</i> which, weirdly, came out the same year as <i>Our Friends in Berlin</i>. It's not quite as accomplished, clever or surprising as Atkinson's beguiling, bewitching spy saga, nor is it as delightfully daft as the Christie, but it’s very good. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The descriptions of war-torn London borrow some of the weariness of early T. S. Eliot but as if crumpled into a plot by Eric Ambler. The frequent switches in third-person point of view keep things fresh. You find yourself, strangely, quite liking the undercover Gestapo agent, Hoste. Plot reveals, when they come, are not always as surprising as Quinn perhaps intended, but they satisfy nonetheless. It's only in the last quarter where the writer sacrifices subtlety and wit to the dubious demands of action. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9c-NWOdvCv3IKlNdLT4dRc7-kLxSmVOCIOeaA5qLaWbHRRIjyCEJo86Vg3rif0-mbkEG24vWwdsSRBwKiehO9t_qUvnvo9zqMjxtpKekRvNMwxdK94-wtjVjV9mdKVmvxH5b9FE5qavVvhturp_jwu3FVASnbt6u5zU5Vs-eP2qUatIozcP86KMJnQ0s/s1000/Quinn%202.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="650" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9c-NWOdvCv3IKlNdLT4dRc7-kLxSmVOCIOeaA5qLaWbHRRIjyCEJo86Vg3rif0-mbkEG24vWwdsSRBwKiehO9t_qUvnvo9zqMjxtpKekRvNMwxdK94-wtjVjV9mdKVmvxH5b9FE5qavVvhturp_jwu3FVASnbt6u5zU5Vs-eP2qUatIozcP86KMJnQ0s/s320/Quinn%202.jpg" width="208" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>London, Burning</i> (2021) was even better, I thought. Set in the late 1970s, Quinn’s urban thriller trails the lives of a journalist, a theatre impresario, an academic and a young DC as they navigate a London crumbling under public service strikes, IRA bombing campaigns, the emergence of punk rock and police corruption. The young academic at one point is giving a tutorial on the role of coincidence in the fiction of Henry James; it's a clear signal of how Quinn wants the reader to treat the tragi-comic, often violent intersections of these disparate lives. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">As the story unfolds, we move from 1977 to the eve of Thatcher's 1979 election victory. Unlike other writers anchoring their stories to specific moments in socio-cultural history, Quinn never seems to put a foot wrong. (He certainly knows his Mott the Hoople, Clash, Kate Bush and disco). He even nails the precise smell of 1970s telephone boxes. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Mike Gregory is a 59 year-old who never quite recovered from a teenage addiction to the novels of Graham Greene. He spent a quarter of a century teaching English but has also been, at various times, a support worker, petrol station attendant, cinema projectionist, librarian, barkeep, civil servant and private tutor. Any job, basically, in which one might surreptitiously read. </span></div><p><br /></p>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-10010585246073292832024-01-18T08:45:00.000-08:002024-01-18T08:45:30.966-08:00 Review by Sue Mackrell of "Love Leans over the Table" by Rosie Jackson <p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9VVg7DVH8dpyTlAgUhm9dr5F4B5pmwllgOLtPYNzrqTiK8CV5FPvM6PIx7M2xd1jsAPWWAFlfJq9CUuc8tqEr28_uwV69L_JqIxdbxly9z-06V8r1-adpAoQOxfazAf6C_Rck9u1RzS00Ku-xBBfe5tZQAu_85FLausMM9jmdHnKdOfsC2TtDI3PajFI/s445/Jackson.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="445" data-original-width="286" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9VVg7DVH8dpyTlAgUhm9dr5F4B5pmwllgOLtPYNzrqTiK8CV5FPvM6PIx7M2xd1jsAPWWAFlfJq9CUuc8tqEr28_uwV69L_JqIxdbxly9z-06V8r1-adpAoQOxfazAf6C_Rck9u1RzS00Ku-xBBfe5tZQAu_85FLausMM9jmdHnKdOfsC2TtDI3PajFI/s320/Jackson.jpg" width="206" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="font-family: arial;">True to its title, this collection of poems is about love. But not the Hallmark card kind, this is the love of mothers separated from their children, the pain of loss, the anguish of an anchorite: "Love is not the right word. Love is too cushiony / for a woman who sleeps on stone, kneels on stone, / prays with the steadfastness of granite." But there is tenderness, transcendence, "let’s call it light."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Rosie Jackson is kind to her young self, reading Nietzsche, "striding over black oak sleepers thinking of trains that carried kids from our pit village." "Be good sweet maid and let who will be clever," her father "urged" her in his copperplate writing. The same words, written by Charles Kingsley for his daughter, were inscribed in my own autograph book by a primary school teacher. They were very different times, and self-reflection is a theme which runs deep through this collection, the shot-gun wedding where her father "sobbed like a widow," a woman who "looked / like Jean Shrimpton." "In another generation, we’d be together." She has compassion for herself; despite everything, "It astonishes you so much of your life has worked."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In "The Night I Grew Old," she recalls how she knew, somehow, "a new life had arrived inside me, / its invisible heft so huge…" "By the time / dawn bleached that shabby room, the child I was / had already started to turn into that woman on the wall – T<i>he Lady of Shalott</i> – her pre-Raphaelite hair trailing / into a boat which would carry her downstream, / her luscious mouth a terror of uprootedness."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The ekphrastic nature of many of these poems offers new perspectives on personal experience. In "Don’t Think these Doors will ever close, after <i>Maternity</i> by Dorothea Tanning" she writes "Loss of sleep has slipped you onto sand," but "You’re shocked by your heart / and its unspeakable love, love that stretches a heart beyond its limits." And then there is the visceral rawness of separation, the unanswerable question, "if / it would have been better not to give him life / so scratched and badly started. Better to have / sent him back before his cells rooted too deeply, / back to that pre-formed unsuffering place of stars."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Acutely sensitive to other stories of loss, in "Blue" Rosie Jackson describes her shock of recognition when she learns that "Little Green" is about Joni Mitchell’s child given up for adoption, "Now my loss sits in the next chair." She writes of Frigga, the Norse goddess mourning Balder, "what mother would not grieve for her lost child?" And she writes of mothers who lost daughters who became anchorites, dead to the world.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Her empathy reaches across time. She understands the ravages fourteen births must have taken on Margery Kempe’s mind and body, "And if she sobs before / Julian of Norwich it’s because she feels herself believed." She writes of violence - historical, "Is not the Bible full of women’s bruises?" - and contemporary, Nasrin Sotoudeh flogged for "A Piece of Cloth," "the Quran wedged beneath his armpit." </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">There are poems of darkness, enclosure, "One Little Room, An Every Where," and the longing for light, for colour. Rosie Jackson writes of a physical and emotional response to the power of art, "The Hunger of Colour," where "paint spills beyond the frame / in sheer exuberance / so I want my life / to eat my death / like <i>Harmony in Red</i> by Matisse." </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">She charts life changes through paintings; of Bosch’s <i>Garden of Earthly Delights</i> she writes "I lived here once," "And here’s my mother, half horse, half hollow / egg," "But now I go in search of El Greco’s lengthened bodies straining - / like Christ in that other garden – between this world and the next." Her poems are peopled with poets, artists, spiritual leaders, anchorites, Muslim saints and Sufi mystics. Their voices are heard in blank verse, couplets and tercets, the fragmented expression of trauma and the solid block of "Imaginary Prisons." There is metamorphosis and the metaphysical, medieval texts and "unfathomable language." </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Many poems occupy liminal space, like St Bede, "half here half not, caught / in this blue land between dust and light." There is "The pleasure and power of speaking other" of "Trying to write beyond words." And there is "The shock of mortality [which] changes things." "So now, this first spring without you, the earth struck by war again, / I’m learning to hear the beauty of stitchwort, / kindness, birdsong." </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Rosie Jackson writes of a beloved tutor and friend, cruelly lost to a stroke, "She described this world as a palimpsest, layer upon layer / of meaning waiting to be peeled away." The same can be said of this wonderful collection of poems.</span></p><p><br /></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Sue Mackrell has an MA in Creative Writing from Loughborough University and lectured in Creative writing there. Now retired from teaching and facilitating workshops, her work has been published in a range of English and Welsh print anthologies, and online, including in several editions of <i>Agenda</i>, <i>Ekphrastic Review</i>, <i>Whirlagust</i>, <i>Bloody Amazing</i>, <i>The Dawntreader </i>and <i>Prole</i>. In summer 2023 she won the Archaeology Festival Haiku competition – they were the most lucrative 17 syllables of her writing career!</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-88505805963728481512024-01-14T08:03:00.000-08:002024-01-14T08:04:54.732-08:00 Review by Kathy Hoyle of "These Envoys of Beauty" by Anna Vaught<p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0yht63QrFXP_2XEK8Jq7qWpdiB8GNgPnd6zRUS8jXZqfIza5kE28ZxTT1FOJOrJtiZzyM1Ek7jNlxKXvy5gzTFrKRfH51nW7BNPG7guEl4CyB9T97VfiXA3OW3AtmDylbumfimwDpDUYT0GXkBefWxnfdPVI0PEhe-7A3e1CIvyUO_II1d4egv7jGG_k/s1000/Vaught.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="652" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0yht63QrFXP_2XEK8Jq7qWpdiB8GNgPnd6zRUS8jXZqfIza5kE28ZxTT1FOJOrJtiZzyM1Ek7jNlxKXvy5gzTFrKRfH51nW7BNPG7guEl4CyB9T97VfiXA3OW3AtmDylbumfimwDpDUYT0GXkBefWxnfdPVI0PEhe-7A3e1CIvyUO_II1d4egv7jGG_k/s320/Vaught.jpg" width="209" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>These Envoys of Beauty</i> is a stunning memoir in which Anna Vaught’s prose sparkles with detailed observations of the natural world, contrasting sharply with a deep-rooted emotional response to childhood trauma. "</span><span style="font-family: arial;">When I was very young, and would run out or just stand and stare, I would look to plants and trees to help me explain to myself a bewildering world."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Structured as twelve separate essays, this memoir is journey of learning and discovery for both the writer and the reader. Vaught shares her vast knowledge of the natural world throughout, and by structuring the work in this way, the memoir becomes all the more manageable for the reader, especially when we must also traverse the deep, emotional revelations in each section. In the pause between each essay, we are able to breathe, process and decompress before beginning again, entering into the next deeply absorbing experience. And have no doubt, each essay is a completely immersive experience, exhilarating yet emotionally arduous in equal measure, a vivid sensory delight, juxtaposed with the trauma discussed. Vaught protects her reader wisely: much is implied throughout, and though Vaught writes with vital honesty, she is never brutal. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In her opening essay, Vaught declares, "My mother said mental health problems were an indulgence," and each essay delves further into a child’s journey through a world of shadows and unspoken truths, a world of fear and shame, where a girl is made to feel as though she is nothing but a "sufferance." But this is also the story of a child who is curious, and despite her harsh reality, she finds beauty in the natural world around her, in the landscapes and seascapes, in dens and hollows, caves and cliffsides, in the trees and flowers, the roaring weirs and crashing waves. The child deftly slips between reality and imagination, between nature and dreams. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">This memoir embraces the wildness of nature and its cyclical patterns, and the writer truly finds comfort in the both the darkness and the light that nature provides: "</span><span style="font-family: arial;">One of my favourite things to this day is the nimbostratus, whose effect you feel and see: imagine the sun on your skin and light illuminating the sand. Then darkness and everything changes colour. This sudden shift is a moment of ecstasy for me in its drama. I also like sudden, powerful belts of rain, never more so than when I am by the sea. Standing in the water while being pelted – assuming you are not too cold – brings me to myself."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Despite the terrible echoes of Vaught’s past running through this memoir, there is also hope and a certain defiance in the writing which I found hugely admirable: "</span><span style="font-family: arial;">Epilobium angustifolium. My maternal grandmother called it fireweed, and my father said you could not kill it – which was exactly what I liked about it. It thrived."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In this examination of her "self" and her childhood memories, Vaught brings great comfort and hope to others with her resilience. I cried often when reading the essays, but I smiled too, at the beauty of them, at the hope within them. I wanted to champion the curious little girl Vaught once was, stroke her hair and lay in a meadow with her as the clouds scud above us and tell her that, one day, she will be okay. But I sense that Vaught is already one step ahead of me. In writing these essays, Vaught has reclaimed both her "self" and her power, and with her ongoing connection to the natural world, she has fashioned a protective shield. I love how Vaught has defiantly built new associations with natural world, casting off many of her childhood fears and associations, as she moves through adulthood, creating newer, safer memories: "</span><span style="font-family: arial;">But here was determination, and I wonder if it is strongest in those who are repeatedly told they should not survive or deserve to, who are told it would have been better if they had not been born."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">I found <i>These Envoys of Beauty</i> such a beautiful and deeply moving memoir. It is one which will stay with me for a very long time. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Kathy Hoyle is a working-class writer of short fiction. Her stories have appeared in various literary magazines including <i>Northern Gravy</i>, <i>Lunate</i>, <i>Ellipsiszine</i>, <i>Fictive Dream</i> and <i>The Forge</i>. She is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. She lives in a sleepy Warwickshire village and when she's not writing, she enjoys singing Dolly Parton songs to her long-suffering labradoodle, Eddie. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;">You can read more about </span><i style="font-family: arial;">These Envoys of Beauty</i><span style="font-family: arial;"> by Anna Vaught on Creative Writing at Leicester </span><a href="https://creativewritingatleicester.blogspot.com/2023/04/anna-vaught-these-envoys-of-beauty.html" style="font-family: arial;">here</a><span style="font-family: arial;">. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-53002885818338596972024-01-13T02:36:00.000-08:002024-01-13T02:37:11.073-08:00Review by Richard Byrt of "The Truth at the End of the Night" by Malka Al-Haddad<p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVrA7PzlyOa1SutaWOFsqpHy2HWK8DT4jIgqI-LlynW_0fOagaOB7OjTO_w9GbSfGtiKni1OgxLf_cpu0MbowxFDoKP-wVqCYj6q655naTfOZZiMOVnGg_Dnq0Vrp0LRkBRRNf7XsxbxZIOCZEvNTZdZWYL0k8aiwHAyPd2bDa4tS4I_jvnK3_QBaEIFM/s400/Malka.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="285" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVrA7PzlyOa1SutaWOFsqpHy2HWK8DT4jIgqI-LlynW_0fOagaOB7OjTO_w9GbSfGtiKni1OgxLf_cpu0MbowxFDoKP-wVqCYj6q655naTfOZZiMOVnGg_Dnq0Vrp0LRkBRRNf7XsxbxZIOCZEvNTZdZWYL0k8aiwHAyPd2bDa4tS4I_jvnK3_QBaEIFM/s320/Malka.jpg" width="228" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The poems in Malka Al-Haddad’s collection, <i>The Truth at the End of the Night</i>, are powerful and very moving, as noted by Emma Lee in her Foreword, and by three reviewers at the start of the book. A strength of the collection is the inclusion of short and long poems. The shorter poems often include moving ideas and images, described with admirable brevity and economy of words. There are poems about the wars and atrocities in Iraq, as well as love, home and hope. Some of the poems (for example, "American Propaganda" and "Love and War") include interesting juxtapositions of opposing ideas.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Black and white illustrations by George Sfourgas complement the poems movingly and effectively to portray the "pain, struggle, bravery and sorrow," which Malka so vividly describes. There are striking images throughout the collection. For example:</span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> I was told in secrecy that the land I loved<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> does not want me to grow wheat or fruit here,<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> I only grow cacti.</span></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Vivid, surreal images are used to describe disturbing experiences: </span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> Put my head in the chimney<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> To speed up the burning of waiting and scattered memories,<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> Put the spoons in the fridge.<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> Put shoes to sleep on the pillow.</span></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Some of the poems are redolent with memories of home – contrasted with the starkness of war:</span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> Remember if Tony Blair had not stormed my country<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> With his war chariot<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> I would now be drinking cardamon tea<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> With my brothers and the children of my neighbourhood.<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> If he had not occupied my country<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> I would have fallen asleep<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> On my mother’s pillow smelling of incense.</span></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Malka’s "Introduction: Author’s Journey" provides an additional vivid account of her experience of war in Iraq over several decades, and its devastating effects on herself and her family. Malka describes how "discovering poetry was life-changing" and how she "</span><span style="font-family: arial;">confronted [her] ... pain by working as an advocate in human rights issues in order to raise the voice of the oppressed, and that of [her] ... family." </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Malka also refers to ten years of rejected applications for asylum in the UK, and being moved by "the Home Office … from place to place":</span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">After ten years of Home Office challenges,</span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><div style="text-align: center;">still their hands are spiders mapping</div></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><div style="text-align: center;">bullets in the walls of my sanctuary.</div></span></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Another poem describes the unpleasant experiences of being detained in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre ("Yarl’s Wood"). This poem is a contrast to the images of hope in "Psychiatrist’s Prescription":</span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> At sunset<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> I go to the sea to complain about my bad luck.<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> Feed the birds.<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> Write poetry.<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> Butterflies invite me to dance with them.<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> The doctor said: All this is beautiful<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> You do not need medicines …<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> Keep singing with birds.<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> This gives you eternal happiness.<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> And you feel completely free.</span></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Elsewhere, there are expressions of hope. I really like the lovely lines: "</span><span style="font-family: arial;">Exile is the place / </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Where the light releases your voice" and</span><span style="font-family: arial;">:</span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> My heart is a dark room<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> And as I fell in love with you<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> The wind opened all the windows and the sun entered me.</span></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Malka’s collection ends with the lines: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">“and there the bird without sky was able to nest / </span><span style="font-family: arial;">And the bird rose soaring through the sky." </span><span style="font-family: arial;">As Pam Thompson writes at the start of the collection: "</span><span style="font-family: arial;">Love will always be home and family for Al-Haddad, yet in their absences, marriage and love of nature and the solace of specific memories, their images shining brightly within the poems: schoolbooks, birds, a grandmother’s song, a wooden table.” </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Some of Malka Al-Haddad’s verse is majestic and reminds me of the language of the 1611 King James Bible. I particularly like the stately cadences of:</span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> A campaigner against the madness of the military<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> A speaker to liberate the inhabitants of other villages<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> From the intensity of the horror of the moment<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> He and his soldiers froze in their place like statues<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> From that day on, he and his generals became statues.</span></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;">A few lines later, Malka writes: "That’s why all birds now poop on the heads of statues" – a great and unexpected contrast to the lines above! </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In conclusion, I strongly recommend <i>The Truth at the End of the Night</i>. The collection includes moving, powerful and vivid descriptions and images of the pains of war, exile, and an appallingly difficult and long process of seeking asylum, as well as of hope, love and family. All proceeds from purchases of the collection are "donated to City of Sanctuary UK." </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Congratulations to Malka Al-Haddad, to George Sfourgaras for illustrations which complement the poems so well, and to Camilla Reeve and Palewell Press for publishing the collection and making Malka’s work available to a wider audience. </span></p><p><br /></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Since retirement from his "day job," Richard Byrt has tried to develop his writing of poems. He facilitates Creative Writing at SoundCafe, Leicester: a charity for people with many diverse backgrounds and talents, who have experienced homelessness. </span></div><p><br /></p>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-77718583459664400872024-01-12T03:13:00.000-08:002024-01-12T03:14:52.838-08:00Review by Teika Marija Smits of "The Alchemy: A Guide to Gentle Productivity for Writers" by Anna Vaught<p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlq36Rr3CMhCdYN2jPJ0Dgvp-MLCXJu0fAVFkArjC8arcmYYBTkBY-OnzYCTFOrP8nP95wzvmktJDl5TAIymjdQPKFryXkbl86a4h-_e2PmM9GtR2CQTCQQS8AUs2AjKEhAZfeKb6iyhyMid9oRW1pQaxU1n_pFUFWxATSWRzZFYLGNH53vi0Ohh_P7aA/s1024/Alchemy.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="667" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlq36Rr3CMhCdYN2jPJ0Dgvp-MLCXJu0fAVFkArjC8arcmYYBTkBY-OnzYCTFOrP8nP95wzvmktJDl5TAIymjdQPKFryXkbl86a4h-_e2PmM9GtR2CQTCQQS8AUs2AjKEhAZfeKb6iyhyMid9oRW1pQaxU1n_pFUFWxATSWRzZFYLGNH53vi0Ohh_P7aA/s320/Alchemy.jpg" width="208" /></span></a></div><div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">In the ‘Welcome’ to <i>The Alchemy</i>, Vaught writes that: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">“This is a book for everyone, but with a particular eye on those who are tired and lacking in confidence; those who are disabled, chronically ill or perhaps care for a loved one who would struggle without them.” </span><span style="font-family: arial;">And that, in a nutshell, summarises the two major hurdles to the creative process of writing: a lack of self-confidence and enough time / energy. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">Vaught, in all honesty, explains that “I had been raised to think poorly of myself” which led to a delay in getting going with her writing. But once she did get going, the words came thick and fast. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">Refreshingly honest, Vaught, in her own unique voice – which is full of love, encouragement and some sweariness – shares her own struggles with the reader, and offers tips and suggestions for gentle productivity – an idea that I really like. For although my own two hurdles to writing are relatively small compared with the hurdles of some other writers, time is not an infinite resource for anyone. Neither is an unfailingly “zen” and positive attitude to the publishing industry, which (as Vaught says) can sometimes feel like a brutal place. By placing an emphasis on gentle productivity, Vaught reminds us that thinking is also writing; that living in and observing the world from wherever you are is also writing; and that penning any number of words is an achievement. She is also keen for writers to use any kind of small creature comfort – be it a hot chocolate, snuggly blanket or set of fancy pens – to encourage us to make progress with our writing goals. (Another idea I like very much!)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">I read this book relatively quickly since the chapters are short and Vaught’s breezy, chatty style of writing is thoroughly engaging, and I found it to be an inspiring and comforting read. I am sure that many writers will find it an invaluable resource.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">Teika Marija Smits is a Midlands-based freelance editor and the author of the short story collections <i>Umbilical</i> (NewCon Press) and <i>Waterlore</i> (Black Shuck Books), as well as the poetry pamphlet, <i>Russian Doll</i> (Indigo Dreams Publishing). A fan of all things fae, she is delighted by the fact that Teika means fairy tale in Latvian.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">You can read more about <i>The Alchemy</i> by Anna Vaught on Creative Writing at Leicester <a href="https://creativewritingatleicester.blogspot.com/2023/11/anna-vaught-alchemy-guide-to-gentle.html">here</a>. </span></div><div><br /></div></div>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-85268516669514702662024-01-10T05:58:00.000-08:002024-01-10T05:58:04.169-08:00Review by Rennie Parker of "Eleanor Among the Saints" by Rachel Mann<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlkiEsGujNWlr1pt9O-EhDK0Zm34Dfuo9tBkY6gG1z4GppUB-P2Dki0t2WyH9iD9WH_kGZwtVKLlpvVW3ifUmpcMldPmDjXdKhegiVEb0WYR4Pz7vvKjqtWYFN1pkYpPtazK7VvFHIAXHd0Z5jR6UthLN6uhOEwstfsXNoJqfL4CL4JpzDGSrsfc7R5kc/s425/Eleanor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="425" data-original-width="266" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlkiEsGujNWlr1pt9O-EhDK0Zm34Dfuo9tBkY6gG1z4GppUB-P2Dki0t2WyH9iD9WH_kGZwtVKLlpvVW3ifUmpcMldPmDjXdKhegiVEb0WYR4Pz7vvKjqtWYFN1pkYpPtazK7VvFHIAXHd0Z5jR6UthLN6uhOEwstfsXNoJqfL4CL4JpzDGSrsfc7R5kc/s320/Eleanor.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Rachel Mann writes the kind of poetry which says: 'don't be lazy, think about this and check up the references you don't understand.' At the same time, she pitches us headlong into all the big questions about identity as she examines and acknowledges the pain and terror of being between lives. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The Eleanor of her title is Eleanor Rykener, a transwoman from the Middle Ages who (in Mann's expert rendition) becomes a vehicle for other lives and women-divines, rather like an alternative Magdalene. However, the focus is on the journey and the difficulty, at times luridly so, like a vision from Hieronymous Bosch. If you like your poetry strong and without sweeteners, this book is for you.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Her lines are densely-written, often omitting 'a' and 'the' to give each phrase more otherness; and there is a deliberate sound and formatting which recalls Anglo-Saxon riddle poetry. Echoes of Hopkins are also evident, particularly in the piled-up race to embody experience; I can hear a hybrid Geoffrey Hill / T.S. Eliot at times, but that's no bad thing and probably my fault as a reviewer, reading through other poet-Anglican texts.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">What's most impressive is the passion behind the lines. Mann is a poet of conviction (rather than the traditional 'faith and doubt') meaning that her world becomes our world as we swim further into the state of all those Eleanors. Her excursions into the present day are no less forceful, even alarmingly so; 'Eleanor as a sixteen year old murdered trans girl' appears to reference the recent case of Brianna Ghey, yet the typical book production schedule would surely place its composition before the case appeared in the media.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">I heartily recommend this rich collection to anyone, not only for its fabulous wrangling of character, medieval history and lived experience, but as a reminder of how we too should step up to the plate with the same courage as the poet. The self as transformed into female is nearly always a metaphor for suffering, but the end result is also victory, like the resurrection of Christ. It's okay, Rachel / Eleanor, I want to say. We believe you. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Rennie Parker is a poet living in the East Midlands, published by Shoestring Press. She studied for a PhD at Birmingham University and currently works in FE. Blogs at rennieparker.wordpress.com; also on Twitter @rennieparker. You can read about her latest collection, <i>Balloons and Stripey Trousers</i>, on Creative Writing at Leicester <a href="https://creativewritingatleicester.blogspot.com/2023/12/rennie-parker-balloons-and-stripey.html">here</a>. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-70173003603356612422024-01-09T13:26:00.000-08:002024-01-09T13:26:57.396-08:00Review by Laurie Cusack of "Encounters with Everyday Madness" by Charlie Hill<p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8Mn3s51zpySRIS2_8iiGLey3qltV6cWwNwZuojCT535H5jOMyCRRvlqmXvgvV7tl3PqnTGAqMQcdnX1WTJaAiyK1UfPby53Tp0T8KqF6Rl6IXMwZEvOsMBZlQANBJpaNmr7daHLXG4tIdsHRBg0sr_q2MeNiKDCYy_Et242czsgNemz2Um4SPOQqx4mU/s1344/Encounters%20front%20cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1344" data-original-width="909" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8Mn3s51zpySRIS2_8iiGLey3qltV6cWwNwZuojCT535H5jOMyCRRvlqmXvgvV7tl3PqnTGAqMQcdnX1WTJaAiyK1UfPby53Tp0T8KqF6Rl6IXMwZEvOsMBZlQANBJpaNmr7daHLXG4tIdsHRBg0sr_q2MeNiKDCYy_Et242czsgNemz2Um4SPOQqx4mU/s320/Encounters%20front%20cover.jpg" width="216" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Charlie Hill’s fascinating collection is a tidy reminder that we are all on the mental health spectrum. Every day one sees madness or experiences it in one form or another, as we go about in the world − I know I do!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Opening these splendid off-kilter stories is ‘A walk by the river’ that’s written in the second-person perspective, which grabs the reader’s attention straight away. Hill magnifies a family outing with a nod to the film <i>Deliverance</i>. I have to confess that the frenetic ‘Duelling Banjos’ twanged in my head when I perused this passage: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">‘The fish wriggles in the father’s hand and, holding it by its tail, he smashes its head against a stone and tosses its unwanted body into the water. The boy laughs. It is not a pleasant laugh.’</span><span style="font-family: arial;"> What should be a halcyon walk turns into a brooding ordeal for our detached protagonist and kicks Hill’s collection off, majestically.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In Hill’s captivating ‘Stuff,’ existential angst and anxiety disorder are tackled with humour and aplomb. The nullifying grind of the everyday is deftly realised in elegant style. Hill’s Kafkaesque protagonist gets a dose of inner-city blues over seven days. I loved the hilarious interior monologue conducted whilst he’s walking to the shops on Monday, concerning the fascist household on his route: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">‘I think there must be all manner of social-anthropological connections between garden centres and fascism.’ M</span><span style="font-family: arial;">oreover, Hill’s authentic portrayal of anxiety disorder is spot-on, too. It is well defined and captures someone in mental freefall, exquisitely. In this respect, Hill’s text reminded me of an Akira Kurosawa’s quote: 'In a mad world, only the mad are sane.'</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">There are no weak narratives within Hill’s collection. Whether flash fiction or short story, all hold the reader throughout. I found this collection, with its superb West Midland detailing, very compelling. ‘The man in the churchyard’ exemplifies this: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">‘Through Highgate and into Balsall Heath there is an Islamic Centre and the Moseley Road baths – Men First and Second Class; Listed, with Victoria in its bricks – and a carpet warehouse and shuttered curry houses and then fruit and veg shops with shopkeepers arranging plastic bowls of fruit out front like a market, oranges and tomatoes and mooli and chard. Then there is Zaffs.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Hill’s urban sensibility inhabits every inch of <i>Encounters with Everyday Madness</i> and this is truly standout writing, which deserves an audience. Highly recommended.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Laurie Cusack (PhD) studied Creative Writing at Leicester University. He writes from the gut − from the underground − about the underdog. His collection of short stories <i><a href="https://everybodysreviewing.blogspot.com/2023/11/review-by-gus-gresham-of-mad-road-by.html">The Mad Road</a></i> was published in September 2023. He is now an actor-simulator, writer and community advocate.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">You can read more about <i>Encounters with Everyday Madness</i> by Charlie Hill on Creative Writing at Leicester <a href="https://creativewritingatleicester.blogspot.com/2023/11/charlie-hill-encounters-with-everyday.html">here</a>. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-91834536656748131812024-01-08T09:27:00.000-08:002024-01-08T09:27:45.574-08:00Review by Paul Taylor-McCartney of "Autodrive" by Jordan Crandall<p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3ElDeX0uLhNlS30p4zc_LVtgqY2X3LtsqjeKTuGLajZ1JSE620ZWdXemmOAgwkYTmrnyX0cq7IXZpu4jY6mElUQ9faKY6xWHKoUSz47AodDy98cFS9yitCNpCRCw4bEaNaGyRfeJA78MOwZ4jX7HOdNYdV-O6QaEjcyXkr0Kk5Y6wCOTd_9WwbYGoJG0/s1000/Autodrive.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="652" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3ElDeX0uLhNlS30p4zc_LVtgqY2X3LtsqjeKTuGLajZ1JSE620ZWdXemmOAgwkYTmrnyX0cq7IXZpu4jY6mElUQ9faKY6xWHKoUSz47AodDy98cFS9yitCNpCRCw4bEaNaGyRfeJA78MOwZ4jX7HOdNYdV-O6QaEjcyXkr0Kk5Y6wCOTd_9WwbYGoJG0/s320/Autodrive.jpg" width="209" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Jordan Crandall’s speculative fiction, <i>Autodrive</i>, is a thought-provoking and highly-experimental read that imagines a world in which a new form of super-intelligence has become so embedded in our lives it has taken centre stage and relegated humans to a peripheral role. This is not entirely new ground for the genre, of course, with evident nods being made to the likes of Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick, whereby the human-machine interface has become so stifling and so much a part of everyday reality, it has transformed the very meaning of ‘collective consciousness.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Structurally speaking, the novel is composed of a series of discrete, partially-connected chapters with each one focusing on a different character or scenario, onto which the author etches a fleeting scene or moment - often done with great humour and pathos - before moving onto the next vignette. This was initially disorienting, particularly as Crandall commits to a second experiment with language itself – creating a hybrid of human and machine expression. So jarring is the effect, it felt almost as if parts of the novel had been created by AI and then fashioned by the author to create a consistent voice across the whole piece. Stylistically, I was reminded of the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose seminal work, <i>Jealousy</i>, is akin to a Cubist painting, with a single day repeated over and over from different angles. It is a testament to Crandall’s compositional skills (himself a renowned artist and media theorist) that he manages to evoke similar feelings to those I felt when encountering Robbe-Grillet for the first time all those years ago.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Autodrive </i>is a short, intricate novel, and is for anyone who enjoys the challenge of drawing together the disparate parts an abstract, literary experiment - especially one that is centred on the highly topical theme of human over-reliance on AI and technology. Crandall’s true skill here is in employing art to help us make sense of this brave new world of technocracy, even if we are unable to navigate it without the consent of those machines we once created to serve us. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Dr. Paul Taylor-McCartney is a writer, researcher and lecturer living in Cornwall. His interests include dystopian studies, children’s literature and initial teacher education. His poetry, short fiction and academic articles have appeared in print and electronic form, including: <i>Aesthetica</i>, <i>The Birmingham Journal of Language and Literature</i>, <i>Education in Practice </i>& <i>Writing in Practice</i> (National Association of Writers in Education), <i>Dyst: Literary Journal</i>, <i>Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine</i>, <i>The Crank</i> and <i>Bandit Fiction</i>. His debut children’s novel, <i><a href="https://creativewritingatleicester.blogspot.com/2022/09/paul-taylor-mccartney-sisters-of.html">Sisters of the Pentacle</a></i>, was recently published by Hermitage Press.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">You can read more about </span><i style="font-family: arial;">Autodrive</i><span style="font-family: arial;"> by Jordan Crandall on Creative Writing at Leicester </span><a href="https://creativewritingatleicester.blogspot.com/2023/06/jordan-crandall-autodrive.html" style="font-family: arial;">here</a><span style="font-family: arial;">. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-34844280611827331652024-01-07T02:09:00.000-08:002024-01-07T02:12:37.574-08:00Review by Sue Mackrell of "Desire Lines" by Jess Mookherjee<p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhJwrEyNr06H3fwf58hvdFwGNbtbTVq4p3Ll-tDxUIu0OCkfWzcGb05-Ig-U8vyy2eqHjD8XBZyFVxemz6J1IffHUElf2cjIZSrBDzVrc4Z5YSJ09wEEJVhJFjLKibVM-iKDDoCfRC-qTN98jGaEM4oi1v-m2dibL9pViX7hqUXlZqJfBavV2cWX7hcgI/s308/Desire%20Lines.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="308" data-original-width="197" height="308" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhJwrEyNr06H3fwf58hvdFwGNbtbTVq4p3Ll-tDxUIu0OCkfWzcGb05-Ig-U8vyy2eqHjD8XBZyFVxemz6J1IffHUElf2cjIZSrBDzVrc4Z5YSJ09wEEJVhJFjLKibVM-iKDDoCfRC-qTN98jGaEM4oi1v-m2dibL9pViX7hqUXlZqJfBavV2cWX7hcgI/s1600/Desire%20Lines.png" width="197" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In<i> Desire Lines</i> Jess Mookherjee leads you through city streets like Dickens on speed - the taxi driver warns ‘don’t you get smart green girl – like the hicks from the sticks / who in no time think London’s not so clever-clever.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">But this is more Angela Carter-esque – ‘Green Girl’ goes ‘Pitter- / patter down the Holloway in ruby slippers.’ She is told, ‘I’ll turn you / hoofer, prancer, get in with the chancers.’ She is ‘urchin, doxy. Cut purse, foot pad, felon, they’ll never / catch you alive on the run.’ She is street smart, always on her guard; a kerb crawler backs off when she ‘grins him down with the knife in her / smile,’ ‘She sees the nasty man off in the dark roads.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Green girl is a shapeshifter, she is all and none of the characters who inhabit streets, ‘blind alleys and dead ends,’ ‘tributaries and deltas … tube lines and tunnels,’ the place where ‘canal joins slum/and cemetery.’ She is a nature spirit, ‘all the wells spring as she / runs step by step, Clerkenwell, Baggnigge Well … Sadlers Wells.’ She knows the ‘Green of London’s secret paths,’ calls ‘come with me to the forest.’ The city is a living being – like the London of Peter Ackroyd’s <i>Biography</i>, it is a palimpsest: ‘Stories bubble up from the old river, fleet foot, dam the river, curse the/ground.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The prose poetry in this collection is pitch-perfect, an exuberant chatter of language, as the poet herself explains, ‘notably Romani, Polari, Cant, Rhyming Slang, back slang,</span><span style="font-family: arial;">’</span><span style="font-family: arial;"> Victorian ‘Gobbledygook’ and other ‘anti-languages.’ Quotations and allusions to literature, poetry, fairy tales and nursery rhymes bump up against each other. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Like the Booth maps of London, places and postcodes are defined by poverty and affluence; ‘on the eighteenth floor, SE18, Tanya’s got two kids, / at seventeen’ … ‘She knows who killed that black kid / in Eltham.’ In the Yuppie society of the eighties. debts to ‘gangster landlords’ grow, while home-owners are ‘Mortgaged up in the long game’ … ‘She moves her lips from Upton Park to six pound pints in Hackney Wick.’ This is a city of cappuccino, pasta, Young British Artists, ‘Imax, BFI, the embankment, and OXO tower, the Barbican and Lumier … and good restaurants.’</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">But it is also a city of ‘Benylin and acid,’ ‘Brit-pops and cider,’ rough pubs and drug deals on back streets. These are the modern precariat under a Hogarthian ‘gin-green sky.’ ‘People are Skint, even though they tell things can only get better.’ There are ‘Bombings, racists, anti gays, anti black.’ There are lost and unwanted babies, abandoned mothers, the shadow of Coram Fields: ‘He gets her a foetus, look after it for me, he says, and disappears.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Personal incidents time check the narrative – a mugging in New Cross on the ‘day of the Twin Towers,’ a kiss ‘by the traffic lights on Fore Street’ … ‘The moon’s big / the night of Lady Di’s crash.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">And there is the enigmatic ‘blue boy,’ ‘A lover she doesn’t think / he’s who he says he is,’ her own role ambivalent, ‘I’m not your absinthe mother, I’m not your absent mother.’ There is domesticity and aspiration. ‘She can’t afford a sofa in Habitat,’ but ‘He cooks her Sunday dinner after Sunday dinner. See what we’ve become / he says puts a computer on the landing, play house on / the fire escape.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In this new age of technology she finds ‘Family in India she never knew living on the inter- / net, her baba says, They’re strangers to you. you’re made of composite / mass movement and abrasion. Looks in the mirror to see/who she’s become.’</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Recurrent themes run through the poems: metamorphosis, development, finding identity, finding where you belong, movement, restlessness, change: ‘you’ll never call this home you’ll be the never-be-loved.’… ‘She wants / to cross the river and go, he won’t go…’ She ‘packs the cat into flatpack,’ it is </span><span style="font-family: arial;">‘</span><span style="font-family: arial;">Time to Grow up tall as Canary Wharf.’</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">‘The city becomes one of ‘mixers, fixers and demol / ition, compulsory purchase orders.’ ‘The filchmen / knock Angel cottage down, oldest house in the East end, survived / the Blitz, it won’t win a medal in the next Olympics.’ She is wounded, like the city, ‘hobbled, ankles and hip broke, crushed under wrecking and knock / down’ and knows she must leave, ‘let the children / she never had go, where she wrote their names on London / roads.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">‘The story is bigger / than her and flows despite her’ and she takes her London self ‘into the garden, to the orchards, to the deep deep green where she can never be / seen, never be sussed, hidden away by the plains of her sights, with / a cat on her back, cut purse, felon, Moll.’</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The poems in this collection are a story of a personal journey, of love and loss, of London, innocence, relationships, identity, children who never were. I read it in one sitting, enthralled and enchanted by the quest through the labyrinth.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">For me there are so many moments of recognition and authenticity. I grew up in London of 1960s and 1970s and I have ancestors who were Covent Garden costermongers, street traders, and a Pearly King and Queen. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Like the Black Cab drivers being usurped by uber, Jess Mookherjee has the knowledge and the language. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>About the reviewer<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Sue Mackrell has an MA in Creative Writing from Loughborough University and lectured in Creative writing there. Now retired from teaching and facilitating workshops, her work has been published in a range of English and Welsh print anthologies, and online, including <i>Agenda</i>, <i>Ekphrastic Review</i>, <i>Whirlagust</i>, <i>Bloody Amazing</i>, <i>The Dawntreader</i> and <i>Prole</i>. In summer 2023 she won the Archaeology Festival Haiku competition which made them the most lucrative 17 syllables of her writing career!</span></div><p><br /></p>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159122508049705171.post-29331237220379612462024-01-04T07:41:00.000-08:002024-01-04T08:15:47.639-08:00Favourite Reads of 2023<p><span style="font-family: arial;">At the end of every year, we ask readers to submit a micro-review of a favourite book they've read in the last twelve months. The book can be from any time or genre - the only qualification is that it has to be a book the reader found particularly memorable, striking or enjoyable. Here are the responses for 2023. Everybody's Reviewing wishes all its readers a happy new year of reading in 2024!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Kirsten Arcadio</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijwpgqQynapLIHt7pEbxzPDwwaHWIGinE0YYX33c4Sd5cgRgCc2ZC9LKnGazu4zbYtRptd7diRx5AIQCL5JVT9IyAyrB8PYB9lbFhqPilgCX-GaKgpeyKX2h7i1_lQPz0u3Kb29aoVeeEUePsDZmOVdODDmEnTbC6KBuWvgWB-4DLwYNK5ebXOnwFcXKw/s1000/Galbraith.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="672" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijwpgqQynapLIHt7pEbxzPDwwaHWIGinE0YYX33c4Sd5cgRgCc2ZC9LKnGazu4zbYtRptd7diRx5AIQCL5JVT9IyAyrB8PYB9lbFhqPilgCX-GaKgpeyKX2h7i1_lQPz0u3Kb29aoVeeEUePsDZmOVdODDmEnTbC6KBuWvgWB-4DLwYNK5ebXOnwFcXKw/s320/Galbraith.jpg" width="215" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>The Running Grave</i>, by Robert Galbraith: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Not normally a fan of long, overly wordy novels, I've made an exception this year for Robert Galbraith's <i>The Running Grave</i>. This was a highly enjoyable, complex thriller with terrifying yet believable cult leaders and a damming insight into the psychological inner workings of its followers. If you think you'll never get sucked into a cult, think again. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Joe Bedford</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGjwqVyhNviWu6m9NdMHIgp_Sz3J0tvd3BsKmR6BMFsV7ZG5295lDHf6xoB1fbLtMRsr5KDy3Z_voHrIML1sJqMoXLKgAhyw0BqDQ1tPlM08QfSfUt8xUgSG6FywNTDxYJXenfuh5UhDt00_VsWcTG0f_eOCRo00hz996_6ymxGFG02fLJeN12LGlIklQ/s425/Local%20fires%202.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="425" data-original-width="277" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGjwqVyhNviWu6m9NdMHIgp_Sz3J0tvd3BsKmR6BMFsV7ZG5295lDHf6xoB1fbLtMRsr5KDy3Z_voHrIML1sJqMoXLKgAhyw0BqDQ1tPlM08QfSfUt8xUgSG6FywNTDxYJXenfuh5UhDt00_VsWcTG0f_eOCRo00hz996_6ymxGFG02fLJeN12LGlIklQ/s320/Local%20fires%202.jpg" width="209" /></a></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Local Fires</i>, by Joshua Jones: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">In this collection of interconnected short stories, Jones’s treatment of his hometown (Llanelli, Wales) is by turns sensitive, evocative and ultimately mournful for a place, and a moment, which is fragile enough to vanish forever. In that sense, its resonance carries far beyond the borders of Llanelli, into those quiet parts of ourselves which know that what once was – our people and our places – can never be again. </span></p><div><br /></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Kathleen Bell</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmMvIv4gPCRNFKVV57xSOAxH7-elYDdVVmOQOX3jSGEA7oUQhYtx5QPF8wJztWtSpl01G9Rfw73OnsA87xxlqPWM3kLLL_jRvHdwK6QSaFEY_vs5cxB7xwPqXbsj80e_6l-WzS_Dzh4rS37OCH4ljrof0JDSs-tq5ukSCn4EQUCU8ACNFfrRWcPl9FPyI/s500/Daisy%20J.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="327" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmMvIv4gPCRNFKVV57xSOAxH7-elYDdVVmOQOX3jSGEA7oUQhYtx5QPF8wJztWtSpl01G9Rfw73OnsA87xxlqPWM3kLLL_jRvHdwK6QSaFEY_vs5cxB7xwPqXbsj80e_6l-WzS_Dzh4rS37OCH4ljrof0JDSs-tq5ukSCn4EQUCU8ACNFfrRWcPl9FPyI/s320/Daisy%20J.jpg" width="209" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Favourite non-fiction book: <i>Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age</i>, by Daisy Hay: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">I delved delightedly into <i>Dinner with Joseph Johnson</i>, which is centred on the remarkable career of one eighteenth-century bookseller and publisher (the two roles overlapped). Every few pages I would learn something new whether about the evolution of children’s literature, the risks of printing or selling radical pamphlets, or the tricky class status of booksellers. Many famous people knew and were published by Joseph Johnson; he employed Mary Wollstonecroft as a full-time writer while William Blake was one of his engravers. But there are numerous other characters outlined in this history who deserve to be just as well known.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7zD10kbXnYExdjXWhrEkda7TD8hQQoCjl41G4m_I_Dy5kCUfwL7IzAgYwsM7uLs-w_YaxVWsFH2_J8UkteSYt09eGbpclLtHxXpf3TzOi-6BXeQCDSPgQbJcJa_DitPUNSvGCtNtMoJhYYlyeZA0zhpipDKhfh1Fyi5AjHwvvSt3R5hl5u6g-MGiwrxM/s500/Maud%20Martha.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7zD10kbXnYExdjXWhrEkda7TD8hQQoCjl41G4m_I_Dy5kCUfwL7IzAgYwsM7uLs-w_YaxVWsFH2_J8UkteSYt09eGbpclLtHxXpf3TzOi-6BXeQCDSPgQbJcJa_DitPUNSvGCtNtMoJhYYlyeZA0zhpipDKhfh1Fyi5AjHwvvSt3R5hl5u6g-MGiwrxM/s320/Maud%20Martha.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Favourite fiction: </span><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Maud Martha</i>, by Gwendolyn Brooks, was first published in 1953 but I only came across it this year. It’s the shortest novel I read this year and many of the chapters are only one or two pages long but I spun out the reading for weeks, often relishing a single chapter at a time. As might be expected, Gwendolyn Brooks has a poet’s skill with language as well as a sharp observation, here turned towards the details of African-American life. Maud Martha - perhaps drawing on Brooks’s own experience - is full of dreams, hopes and ambition even as she contends with grating humiliations from people who see her only in terms of her social class and darker skin colour. I started reading this hoping to gain insights into Brooks’s poetry, which it certainly provided, but this is a great and perceptive novel in its own right.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Laurie Cusack</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFiBNxnyiXA0PyDc12FEwMekXMIW3caU3uG5kAaHxkhhCEFG9wTbEmFhorcZAUoxAjvbUGbjCX75weldFMrqMDiEwYEbK252LkXf9PWVZN6RSsLVCtwo7xqMLD7xB25rEjgHMh1w6KacdcpKGJ_BjCGmJMkCHY8B1d5nZQox4F0K-bXoKYJj7o__gxX2o/s1000/Cixin.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="651" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFiBNxnyiXA0PyDc12FEwMekXMIW3caU3uG5kAaHxkhhCEFG9wTbEmFhorcZAUoxAjvbUGbjCX75weldFMrqMDiEwYEbK252LkXf9PWVZN6RSsLVCtwo7xqMLD7xB25rEjgHMh1w6KacdcpKGJ_BjCGmJMkCHY8B1d5nZQox4F0K-bXoKYJj7o__gxX2o/s320/Cixin.jpg" width="208" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>The Three-Body Problem</i>, by Cixin Liu: Cosmic Rentokil: Complete Experts in Galactic Pest Control – Distance, not a problem! Competitive … oh, yes! </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Gallows humour aside − Cixin Liu’s mighty doorstoppers <i>The Three-Body Trilogy</i> blew me away! Frenzied page turning. Unputdownable. I could hear my head squeaking. Scared? we should be ...</span></p><p><b><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></b></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Sam Dawson</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAT3FlHKltji885KfkdW8DeC2yvqdGP0_TpLP_3sVmiw_biuVbDKIZC2Qc1VhhWT2AGqwHJRz-vhPT2c05cP0nyP6mOROamSpeHiwlUrMpHt44e6tM9_6MyGpb0414k6d0ZTjMAE-AMIqW7MmjeOWdbr8pzjSeZzQ6RZ1oyZiNMLZj7ITXJXZt8LUbBCQ/s1000/Stephen%20King.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="550" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAT3FlHKltji885KfkdW8DeC2yvqdGP0_TpLP_3sVmiw_biuVbDKIZC2Qc1VhhWT2AGqwHJRz-vhPT2c05cP0nyP6mOROamSpeHiwlUrMpHt44e6tM9_6MyGpb0414k6d0ZTjMAE-AMIqW7MmjeOWdbr8pzjSeZzQ6RZ1oyZiNMLZj7ITXJXZt8LUbBCQ/s320/Stephen%20King.jpg" width="176" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>11.22.63</i>, by Stephen King: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Somewhere, out in the netherworld of possibility, a story exists about a time-traveller stopping the assassination of JFK on the 22nd of November 1963. Thankfully, <i>11.22.63 </i>by Stephen King is a whole lot more. <i>11.22.63</i> is a time capsule, a love story, an ode to the uncanny. At over 700 pages, it somehow never outstays its welcome. Brilliant! </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Kristy Diaz</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i><br /></i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5YoejslghBYgilKU5Hm4AYLwUs8AsoOt08VOd9RVpteWZmCIULRF0KYDRBLWpP7tFm-UmS99BlP8otuzq8qWA5lKv3acPSf2ldgQQE46VttOEHPURh5jR-ClWWf7HIYesjTrNIhLx6Q0HAfbxFEiqzhwMEN4efe7olkaBpwzz-j3pmfS2I_gSF5ONKgY/s1000/Clark.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="659" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5YoejslghBYgilKU5Hm4AYLwUs8AsoOt08VOd9RVpteWZmCIULRF0KYDRBLWpP7tFm-UmS99BlP8otuzq8qWA5lKv3acPSf2ldgQQE46VttOEHPURh5jR-ClWWf7HIYesjTrNIhLx6Q0HAfbxFEiqzhwMEN4efe7olkaBpwzz-j3pmfS2I_gSF5ONKgY/s320/Clark.jpg" width="211" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Penance</i>, by Eliza Clark: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Examining both the morally ambiguous explosion of society's fascination with true crime and the esoteric world of 2010s Tumblr culture, this ambitious novel brings you to a northern seaside town with a dark history and a horrifying murder case—a thrilling glimpse inside the mind of the 'extremely online' teenage girl. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Rosa Fernandez</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUoolKKdrEeHq9L27nUFooRbExFnBF2mVf71_AmUoH6NbeZbD_KLYYud8TXVThwTBYldb8bfLcDT4ukmN1Z8_H976_ze1BzdxVX031huZI8va2RKpY72xCkrEV0h2qnDfS7xh4UR6qsLEDPBByV-ONgXW7bSPRLIqbygXYSGf24iiLHs1coKQknBfJw6Y/s1000/Aidt.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="645" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUoolKKdrEeHq9L27nUFooRbExFnBF2mVf71_AmUoH6NbeZbD_KLYYud8TXVThwTBYldb8bfLcDT4ukmN1Z8_H976_ze1BzdxVX031huZI8va2RKpY72xCkrEV0h2qnDfS7xh4UR6qsLEDPBByV-ONgXW7bSPRLIqbygXYSGf24iiLHs1coKQknBfJw6Y/s320/Aidt.jpg" width="206" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back: Carl's Book</i>, </span><span style="font-family: arial;">by Naja Marie Aidt (translated by Denise Newman): </span><span style="font-family: arial;">This is a moving, poetic, tragic, beautiful text; an incredible document of the absolutely unthinkable. A masterclass in writing about grief, one you stay up to finish, it's that good. The resilience to make art out of awfulness is a real feat and this is a great demonstration of that.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Mellissa Flowerdew-Clarke</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVqBSUvQpl7ukxxRzimEK3taV64DLCbw6JwkQdh9cjh14XqzdddCWYpdyo8_XxXveNp_NXqrG4zyZ4uD0Yk6eqwWsGWJkuznrPaStoCK7_DrfIRZPdkgtrTivTk1ASUg9CcmftuRVLvxZYRlrnO8D34sPpdd_xa69xggInjmfRpvrerzYoXq4GUoyFUk4/s2473/Camilla%20Bruce.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2473" data-original-width="1611" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVqBSUvQpl7ukxxRzimEK3taV64DLCbw6JwkQdh9cjh14XqzdddCWYpdyo8_XxXveNp_NXqrG4zyZ4uD0Yk6eqwWsGWJkuznrPaStoCK7_DrfIRZPdkgtrTivTk1ASUg9CcmftuRVLvxZYRlrnO8D34sPpdd_xa69xggInjmfRpvrerzYoXq4GUoyFUk4/s320/Camilla%20Bruce.jpg" width="208" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /><b><br /></b></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>You Let Me In</i>, by Camilla Bruce,</span><span style="font-family: arial;"> reads like a horrific fairytale. It entwines folklore with reality, slipping between the two to create a surreal world where dark sexual awakenings, abuse, and murder flit between the real and unreal. Sinister, cruel, and totally enthralling, it encapsulates the complexity of trauma, and how the escapism we construct for ourselves can be equally as horrifying as what it is we’re trying to forget.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Neil Fulwood</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAZArWHaDaQrnzXCwd3gGabIa8ZM_UzVRA2YuK3QQzpMZwK7iEwAJlx6zFFiKanBKXFIqgav6NcTIcDkuH66VYlhRKPQFkmUkRiHNVDov4A-AA_59Us5rteR0llyRhTHXZ7F1z6-K9RluFo0O4EUadGr-2Kzhky3pcKAYs-LIH-ioZCvJciO3wGUIG1SY/s1500/Erotic%20Vagrancy.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="981" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAZArWHaDaQrnzXCwd3gGabIa8ZM_UzVRA2YuK3QQzpMZwK7iEwAJlx6zFFiKanBKXFIqgav6NcTIcDkuH66VYlhRKPQFkmUkRiHNVDov4A-AA_59Us5rteR0llyRhTHXZ7F1z6-K9RluFo0O4EUadGr-2Kzhky3pcKAYs-LIH-ioZCvJciO3wGUIG1SY/s320/Erotic%20Vagrancy.jpg" width="209" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor</i>, by Roger Lewis: Assiduous, acerbic, scabrous, highbrow, lowbrow and all the brows in between, <i>Erotic Vagrancy</i> swings from passages of blazingly passionate declamation to grumpy-old-man irascibility. It’s a work that simultaneously wants to hymn a certain period in pop culture and start a fight with the modern age. Unlike any other biography or film-related title out there, it is easily the book of the year.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Beth Gaylard</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOgCkHaWhR4XNnD-8aj4VHzMcKKyXZ1G76YfCEEnxb_F72x52rvQRxcMvQ-z29_EWMQjPvm6l9dhyUkqaTuV-IRHNoxkI3iHEYyC-sFZFLl8OvJpH5lQ9om5JLhyphenhyphen4F5_Vk1E1KT786ER_qVYKCYUeRlNuDD8-iUrqj8I45MRtTqFCsQ4jtrgKW3W31qk4/s500/Moyes.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="326" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOgCkHaWhR4XNnD-8aj4VHzMcKKyXZ1G76YfCEEnxb_F72x52rvQRxcMvQ-z29_EWMQjPvm6l9dhyUkqaTuV-IRHNoxkI3iHEYyC-sFZFLl8OvJpH5lQ9om5JLhyphenhyphen4F5_Vk1E1KT786ER_qVYKCYUeRlNuDD8-iUrqj8I45MRtTqFCsQ4jtrgKW3W31qk4/s320/Moyes.jpg" width="209" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>The Giver of Stars</i>, by Jojo Moyes: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Set between two world wars in the Appalachian Mountains, this is the story of how a dedication to enabling readers in remote areas leads to near disaster for Margery and Alice, two women who definitely don't fit the expected feminine mould. Together with other local misfits they form an intrepid band of librarians, travelling into the hills to deliver books to outlying homesteads, a mission that is not always well received at home. The story entwines two heartrending love stories, a childbirth scene that will have you on the edge of your seat, and a murder mystery to solve. Oh yes, and lots of horses. The horses are amazing. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Timothy Grayson</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFK-4cO9KOP7-XlT3MP1jB3VRBA4T12R8BlTgIwPVCb-dARJlJc5UmvXIABBWA9CIKV0ZoRYeE_LFe74tCIgkC_7f3emSsW1RPmnIR8vn8oXO7E94w-CmgD-m5eFIOaVnVnNZvCyMDsBqX8Gfd7Oex34CAZrz0HTmz0uukrALbSZzeuacYUlWPRcT3wbU/s1000/Spider.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="625" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFK-4cO9KOP7-XlT3MP1jB3VRBA4T12R8BlTgIwPVCb-dARJlJc5UmvXIABBWA9CIKV0ZoRYeE_LFe74tCIgkC_7f3emSsW1RPmnIR8vn8oXO7E94w-CmgD-m5eFIOaVnVnNZvCyMDsBqX8Gfd7Oex34CAZrz0HTmz0uukrALbSZzeuacYUlWPRcT3wbU/s320/Spider.jpg" width="200" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>The Black Spider</i>, by Jeremias Gotthelf: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">A Faustian novella from 1842. To prevent her village from starving, a woman makes a pact with a mysterious stranger for his assistance (in exchange for something priceless), but when the village goes back on their word, something terrible awaits them all. My goodness, this was dark. Horrifying, but excellent.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">And also ...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMwQnoKzQduUUTbem5RaNr9bN6-m3BbxBFUouPae5089z9vgs3frim3Rtn2V-d3uAJPIZVZ49RGz6fq9Lz0WninsHRCqzyAZ3cK3aVk72BhXxybBMSlhGusBe77uQzDpzrxUFaRmlPcUJlBjTbfSBPprE8jx0JHWnnRttb5xC4kOVPMBHGszOaJKLIFDw/s1000/Mackenzie.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="630" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMwQnoKzQduUUTbem5RaNr9bN6-m3BbxBFUouPae5089z9vgs3frim3Rtn2V-d3uAJPIZVZ49RGz6fq9Lz0WninsHRCqzyAZ3cK3aVk72BhXxybBMSlhGusBe77uQzDpzrxUFaRmlPcUJlBjTbfSBPprE8jx0JHWnnRttb5xC4kOVPMBHGszOaJKLIFDw/s320/Mackenzie.jpg" width="202" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain</i>, by Victoria Mackenzie: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">A magnificent book. It brings fresh eyes and vitality to the lives of two real, medieval women of faith: Margery Kempe, and the anchoress Julian of Norwich. It is a work of fiction, but takes its inspiration from <i>The Book of Margery Kempe</i> (the first autobiography written in English by a man or woman) and Julian's <i>Revelations of Divine Love </i>(the earliest surviving book in English written by a woman). Interestingly, these women did meet in real life, and the latter part of the book deftly imagines their conversation. At times, I found myself moved beyond words, as if it was speaking to my soul. It may be classed as fiction, but the author has worked wonders here; it's almost as if she's assisted Margery and Julian in creating a new holy book. Outstanding. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Gus Gresham</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8Ix1zFA3nVWZeirEEYS4RPo5SNyrOSxyBByPaW1tTJg9EAhpBOKII5n3vSSpBuLKaJu33l1mfCaMed3lIF34HaTKBi87JVpZrAwBxtp3Bxn8BItk9f9OrsB3EN6t-FoQTMoQn9oBQufk7dLLRubE_QmZC3Cld2hVT-UhdCQJNf57nd1ptMNzlSbJZByI/s1000/Murphy.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="669" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8Ix1zFA3nVWZeirEEYS4RPo5SNyrOSxyBByPaW1tTJg9EAhpBOKII5n3vSSpBuLKaJu33l1mfCaMed3lIF34HaTKBi87JVpZrAwBxtp3Bxn8BItk9f9OrsB3EN6t-FoQTMoQn9oBQufk7dLLRubE_QmZC3Cld2hVT-UhdCQJNf57nd1ptMNzlSbJZByI/s320/Murphy.jpg" width="214" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Murphy</i>, by Samuel Beckett: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">I challenge anybody to best the humour and profundity of the opening line: 'The sun shone, having no alternative …' From this point on, Murphy's life is a tragedy shrouded in an absurdist daymare.</span></p><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>David John Griffin</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg28tmQc9Q1gDaf6WCjMafF_vUwHYqAn25D2J0fA_g6Hz3Rcgx6RiqzW9oBtn1cuzbGhFuqqOIYwi2W8k2N9mJOyuDe45ESI3i1GwzVSKSCcQIvQeAaJaF9Yox0pd73LY3k_E83UPokyhgMaiXijcK4Z7zsqk9pDn_kGFKysgKFLcRewQYmaQnN5GNQXj4/s1000/Barnum.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="653" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg28tmQc9Q1gDaf6WCjMafF_vUwHYqAn25D2J0fA_g6Hz3Rcgx6RiqzW9oBtn1cuzbGhFuqqOIYwi2W8k2N9mJOyuDe45ESI3i1GwzVSKSCcQIvQeAaJaF9Yox0pd73LY3k_E83UPokyhgMaiXijcK4Z7zsqk9pDn_kGFKysgKFLcRewQYmaQnN5GNQXj4/s320/Barnum.jpg" width="209" /></a></div><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>The Barnum Museum</i>, by Steven Milhauser: With its high-quality prose and the author's extraordinary imagination showing through the words, I was repeatedly blown away (and, should I be honest, slightly envious of his wonderful writing skills!).</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Jack Peachey</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgiWqJPat1GrBhdR4N8CrSikYwB2SH-lJVVUe60xAPoPYRPa7-DrVrus-xHEYPQ_rgM-aZvTkCz_1K54z00yA0XBEPUbgblX8uDNpRPay14mmR3ZOW6reCSf5-muC9qNsjV4ZjQT47Fc9wq6D3uJljkHAjstR5-emxq5q5xIwmv7CL-w8Gga5oOwVjFx4/s1000/Brave.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="651" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgiWqJPat1GrBhdR4N8CrSikYwB2SH-lJVVUe60xAPoPYRPa7-DrVrus-xHEYPQ_rgM-aZvTkCz_1K54z00yA0XBEPUbgblX8uDNpRPay14mmR3ZOW6reCSf5-muC9qNsjV4ZjQT47Fc9wq6D3uJljkHAjstR5-emxq5q5xIwmv7CL-w8Gga5oOwVjFx4/s320/Brave.jpg" width="208" /></a></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Brave New World</i>, by Aldous Huxley, presents a dystopia that is outwardly and inwardly repulsive in character, yet one that is shown with a verisimilitude I've scarcely seen in the genre; a naturalistic state with comprehensive worldbuilding. A challenging novel delivered with evocative prose, it far surpasses its contemporaries in creating a society that is at once alien and disconcertingly real. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Karen Rust</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i><br /></i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnDCnCnsLdyOlZmfPSut3JTH24kwUmhigyJMU3Vb92WWm3wXvWp6gVd8B4wGos-KE-ohN35hEHCOXvHl_qFEEBy4KuMEduXFI_Ryms8MEuiBCp6tpLeQ0eo6M3-VRJeZwlQwGPil08mKjXVy6J3FfnSSDOQ4Tq9jIcWsqVhlG5tnOnJX8QFLdmcNvw1jg/s1000/Stonemouth.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="636" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnDCnCnsLdyOlZmfPSut3JTH24kwUmhigyJMU3Vb92WWm3wXvWp6gVd8B4wGos-KE-ohN35hEHCOXvHl_qFEEBy4KuMEduXFI_Ryms8MEuiBCp6tpLeQ0eo6M3-VRJeZwlQwGPil08mKjXVy6J3FfnSSDOQ4Tq9jIcWsqVhlG5tnOnJX8QFLdmcNvw1jg/s320/Stonemouth.jpg" width="204" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Stonemouth</i>, by Iain Banks: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Set in the fictional Scottish coastal town of Stonemouth, we meet twenty-five-year-old Stu standing on the edge of what sounds like the Firth of Forth Bridge. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">He's back home for the first time in five years for the funeral of the patriarch of one of the towns' two gangster families - a family he was about to join, until a drunken indiscretion led to them trying to kill him, and a hasty exit on a goods train. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Set over a few days, this is a masterclass in how to keep the reader hooked and drip feed the back story in until everything makes sense. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Funny, cool and sometimes violent, we follow Stu as he navigates old school friends, the family who wanted him dead, and the woman he lost in his escape to London. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">An edgy and fun read, I could picture it in my head as a <i>Trainspotting</i>-style film, and have since found out it's been dramatised by the BBC, so will be checking it out on iPlayer! </span></p><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Teika Marija Smits</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiGvFmGDDAn4wP_gXw1jU1ttAQyIBpr9T5Z7po-_fC5j-N16_IvHuzhLnVQ2lyT0FS6HI9q1KatPseMKWqiPw9BA62J541FG2S4ZY2BnUsFhCaYE_aCwp-uiFz5nkt1LicoyXu00x5BWafK-VKJ-Jhb_xs2ZJ4zXaUtQL_fMtcjAE2L8n-U6A2p3ps6oQ/s1000/Seven%20Basic%20Plots.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="578" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiGvFmGDDAn4wP_gXw1jU1ttAQyIBpr9T5Z7po-_fC5j-N16_IvHuzhLnVQ2lyT0FS6HI9q1KatPseMKWqiPw9BA62J541FG2S4ZY2BnUsFhCaYE_aCwp-uiFz5nkt1LicoyXu00x5BWafK-VKJ-Jhb_xs2ZJ4zXaUtQL_fMtcjAE2L8n-U6A2p3ps6oQ/s320/Seven%20Basic%20Plots.jpg" width="185" /></a></div><br /><i><br /></i></span></div><div><i style="font-family: arial;">The Seven Basic Plots</i><span style="font-family: arial;">, by Christopher Booker: At over 700 pages long, it took me a long time to make my way through this book, but I know I’ve been profoundly changed by reading and reflecting on Booker’s theories. Not only has </span><i style="font-family: arial;">The Seven Basic Plots</i><span style="font-family: arial;"> greatly enhanced my knowledge of literature, it has also deepened my understanding of how humans make sense of the world, and their lives, through stories. And as a fan of the theories of Carl Jung I appreciate the way Booker approached storytelling through a Jungian lens. To my mind, this is an essential read for everyone. After all, we are all the authors of at least one story - the story of our life.</span></div><div><br /></div><p><b style="font-family: arial;">Jonathan Taylor</b></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh6Y2OA5I0qj2HsjhGLAUFant8Pegy7Or9C9L-abHZEv0CGyIMI80yTvbm9LZ2vZ8Tr0w_A8pmBu0hP3JUWaTwceNBcf_pVuBicFOCYct6n6Vqab7hUb-VPx_3Pkf69rHMN7swf6GVRUqChGMUolX8rkBg5_rvbjz8zATSylkdA6xv4TgVFECV0yffZak/s1000/Dymoke.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="642" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh6Y2OA5I0qj2HsjhGLAUFant8Pegy7Or9C9L-abHZEv0CGyIMI80yTvbm9LZ2vZ8Tr0w_A8pmBu0hP3JUWaTwceNBcf_pVuBicFOCYct6n6Vqab7hUb-VPx_3Pkf69rHMN7swf6GVRUqChGMUolX8rkBg5_rvbjz8zATSylkdA6xv4TgVFECV0yffZak/s320/Dymoke.jpg" width="205" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>What to Do Next</i>, by Sue Dymoke: Brilliant author and educator <a href="https://creativewritingatleicester.blogspot.com/2023/06/im-sue-dymoke-1962-2023.html">Sue Dymoke</a> died in 2023. This is her last collection of poems, and includes a beautiful preface by her partner, David Belbin. The book is a poignant memorial, then, but it is also a joyful celebration of life, of travel, of childhood, of science, of allotments, of what to do next. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Maria Taylor</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgquF9d_dwU3O0L68BeCdluZHVXm_5fkgqUfDhEbeAWZ-rx-8MVCQi_ol7UrxP_LoPQmYf7h149k00Y_VwRFK1smJ6_-d_3jeJtyPTaLPsV5P8xIYHgttGot7jggyOcRHFvldPtJj6Qu7RpBBuN5F_hAWqdkVTZ_ntf6df1Mc6FZo31jsYoaBYL0FJ4eio/s500/Adichie.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="327" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgquF9d_dwU3O0L68BeCdluZHVXm_5fkgqUfDhEbeAWZ-rx-8MVCQi_ol7UrxP_LoPQmYf7h149k00Y_VwRFK1smJ6_-d_3jeJtyPTaLPsV5P8xIYHgttGot7jggyOcRHFvldPtJj6Qu7RpBBuN5F_hAWqdkVTZ_ntf6df1Mc6FZo31jsYoaBYL0FJ4eio/s320/Adichie.jpg" width="209" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Half of a Yellow Sun</i>,<i> </i>by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, is one of the best novels I’ve ever read. It’s an evocative and stirring narrative of two sisters both before and during the brutal Nigerian-Biafran war of 1967-70. The novel vividly depicts the emotional truth of their lives.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Miranda Taylor</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinqIKytyDyoNGhaxYGXmz3ytY2XxuUuqytniw3aEi4y8wYcEUbQdaHpyRO2XTPHNu_jI5q7RXrHTPN9LJOAdvFkZ7Prssa3SAT5_Cn7VCTZDaXV2ieKL8pIIqg7dBzln3ni11xvMpQsmIDWq0YR78c8YuI2vUFUqd0LEEYf93e4vOfds9BJFLLue9t9bM/s1000/Fruits.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="692" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinqIKytyDyoNGhaxYGXmz3ytY2XxuUuqytniw3aEi4y8wYcEUbQdaHpyRO2XTPHNu_jI5q7RXrHTPN9LJOAdvFkZ7Prssa3SAT5_Cn7VCTZDaXV2ieKL8pIIqg7dBzln3ni11xvMpQsmIDWq0YR78c8YuI2vUFUqd0LEEYf93e4vOfds9BJFLLue9t9bM/s320/Fruits.jpg" width="221" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Fruits Basket</i>, by Natsuki Takaya,<i> </i>follows Honda Tohru, a young girl who has lived her life in solitude after losing her parents and her house. She encounters a family who takes care of her - however, the family is not as it seems, as they can change into animals of the zodiac. The story is a sad one yet also hopeful.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Rosalind Taylor</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ4vZDfHh3WPt3gzZ-EPuTLVXsg-VfZYdFQdbVINx0RGTLVCWAuhWFsPD556uxzzhLnEWng5dbq8mplR84SIqIXuTvFkY1yfX0dJ4OW5sJi1y3tBvWSEiDyNFDCCXhIt50-wRAi6VdzP8beu4rz1K9lz7iXFC75kDYXkUQJVdg5q_IpVxsJZrk2wliWe0/s500/Scum.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="357" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ4vZDfHh3WPt3gzZ-EPuTLVXsg-VfZYdFQdbVINx0RGTLVCWAuhWFsPD556uxzzhLnEWng5dbq8mplR84SIqIXuTvFkY1yfX0dJ4OW5sJi1y3tBvWSEiDyNFDCCXhIt50-wRAi6VdzP8beu4rz1K9lz7iXFC75kDYXkUQJVdg5q_IpVxsJZrk2wliWe0/s320/Scum.jpg" width="228" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System</i>, by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, follows Shen Yuan, who reincarnates in a very badly-written novel as the abusive teacher of the protagonist, Shen Qingqui, whose fate is to die at the end at the hands of the protagonist. </span><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Scum Villain's Self-Saving System</i> is very funny and enjoyable to read. I liked reading about the characters and how they change. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Paul Taylor-McCartney</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ65T_yATAxN-uj6iCvtAeo78r_5c5bLM9VdOw3LTiH4BYhei1MYrGcWgHDyIAXs0BclguITl2K9zYMwRHlZoAMjw-Wr_qK3sZ0xi-T6W1XKiPR6aIaI7vCb9E3Xx1I1DIYkhFg4CyGZ6JLBe7yJpHO3HBrRyH0v1jXjFFB0Azf4ylrwIyiyROAwvw7rI/s1000/Prophet%20Song.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="652" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ65T_yATAxN-uj6iCvtAeo78r_5c5bLM9VdOw3LTiH4BYhei1MYrGcWgHDyIAXs0BclguITl2K9zYMwRHlZoAMjw-Wr_qK3sZ0xi-T6W1XKiPR6aIaI7vCb9E3Xx1I1DIYkhFg4CyGZ6JLBe7yJpHO3HBrRyH0v1jXjFFB0Azf4ylrwIyiyROAwvw7rI/s320/Prophet%20Song.jpg" width="209" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Prophet Song</i>, by Paul Lynch: This is a</span><span style="font-family: arial;"> visceral, heart-wrenching story of one woman's fight to keep her family together as her country descends into a totalitarian nightmare. Urgent and timely dystopian fiction that will live long in the memory.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Harry Whitehead</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihLpyaVr6Bn4UcbadzSlzdPfsLtr59vK5Nz3jldFwZDZIg8JeOyVyMP9njDZJrN9aEwn5PgkpG1GrwHRvzW4H6FOgSXKg1F1OsY2V9mLomivlGdwoCSibMFCZ8SlXlwMUWv3SC_3a5qVuwdms15dR6JTfaTiVQBnzLyQAFfPqw6O1KuM0daIgz9nmtuNo/s1000/Martin.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="647" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihLpyaVr6Bn4UcbadzSlzdPfsLtr59vK5Nz3jldFwZDZIg8JeOyVyMP9njDZJrN9aEwn5PgkpG1GrwHRvzW4H6FOgSXKg1F1OsY2V9mLomivlGdwoCSibMFCZ8SlXlwMUWv3SC_3a5qVuwdms15dR6JTfaTiVQBnzLyQAFfPqw6O1KuM0daIgz9nmtuNo/s320/Martin.jpg" width="207" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>In the Eye of the Wild</i>, by </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Nastassja Martin: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">In this fierce, dark and utterly unique memoir, French anthropologist Martin is attacked by (and attacks!) a huge bear in the Kamchatka wilderness, an event the shaman of the people she’s been studying had long warned her was coming. Unable to rationalise the psychological fallout from her injuries back in France, she returns to Siberia to embody the bear/human she’s become. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Lee Wright</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj938SQoLzcXx9LPP31Y5mqsSDGX5vMQT2VoSO6g2ibUP9y4q_zAlSnDlfoyBlQTZyhux2bimaS4CH4A-5yddX6pYnWswxcJgKaL2nVvHSfBRc4nthcLkHZ_90ZoC4Jo1PdM6IOORECPiOAmMWy5k7gQolee2tO1W5CoQp7j_MEfxBKv3ARqL_zzPXKwMg/s1024/Ducks.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="711" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj938SQoLzcXx9LPP31Y5mqsSDGX5vMQT2VoSO6g2ibUP9y4q_zAlSnDlfoyBlQTZyhux2bimaS4CH4A-5yddX6pYnWswxcJgKaL2nVvHSfBRc4nthcLkHZ_90ZoC4Jo1PdM6IOORECPiOAmMWy5k7gQolee2tO1W5CoQp7j_MEfxBKv3ARqL_zzPXKwMg/s320/Ducks.jpg" width="222" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands</i>, by Kate Beaton, is a graphic memoir of a young woman’s experiences working in the oil sands in Alberta. Kate Beaton grapples with the morality of the oil industry, faces harassment and sexual violence while working in an overwhelmingly male work force, reflects on environmental degradation, homesickness, loneliness, the health risks caused by the oil sands, and the destruction of the lands of the First Nations. </span></p><p></p><p><br /></p>Everybody's Reviewinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08574910976001949135noreply@blogger.com0