jstilts's reviews
116 reviews

Deja-vu to my last book review - this is another book that starts off 5 star rating as we see the fascinating world of the book through the eyes of a child, but when they hit adulthood the remaining two thirds of the book becomes tedious and dull.

This post-apocalyptic fantasy of hardship and magic is brilliant as we follow Onyesonwu growing up as an outcast trying to fit in to her adopted town, even volunteering to undergo a coming-of-age genital mutilation ceremony in a bid to bring less shame on her family (a tough read that chapter, but interestingly her family does NOT appreciate the gesture) and makes lifelong bonds through the shared horror of this experience. In time she also begins to exhibit amazing powers that scare and impress her, but finds a friend and - eventually, after much hardship - a mentor.

Unfortunately the book, brilliant until now, soon gives Onyesonwu a quest that sees her traverse the desert for chapter after chapter after chapter, doubting herself over and over. The end of the quest - and the book - was not worth the journey for me, but those early chapters are powerful.

Tough to give this book a rating as the first 150 pages are absolutely exceptional five star stuff (everything up to Moshe arriving in England) - but then it just becomes incredibly dull and ultimately extremely disappointing.

The book charts life for a reclusive foundling orphan boy Moshe in Jamaica with a strikingly unusual appearance. He befriends a girl - Arrrienne - on his first day at school, and they develop a very strange and special rapport and relationship. Following them through these early years in Jamaica is fascinating and beautiful, with mysterious portents for the future reinforced by the narrator (Arrri, looking back on their life).

Unfortunately these portents and claims of amazing times do not deliver - the adult years are strikingly banal in comparison to their magical and raw childhood. I honestly wish I'd stopped reading at the end of Part Two.

Three very closely linked short stories that appear to be about relatively mundane dinner dates between two characters and slightly different set of friends and spouses - but there is a creeping sense of unease expressed in strange imagery, missed conversations, observations and dreams that are usually subtle but sometimes startlingly present.

It's hard to say exactly what this short book is entirely about, but it lingers in the mind - despite it's surface-level ordinariness there are a lot of nagging little questions left to the reader in the end 

It also rattles along at a good pace - the text is conversational and observational, inviting you to read it all in one go.

Hilariously bad but mercifully short collection of stories.

Holmes' powers of observation and deduction are almost completely absent, instead leaping to the most surface-level of conclusions if he manages to identify a crime at all - he's basically a borishly posh Lestrade: incompetent, and in some stories it's almost the death of him.

I don't exaggerate - one tale has Holmes called out to look at a corpse. He can't tell if murder was committed, but goes to the most likely suspect. This person calmly and under no prompting simply confesses. 

This isn't a stand-out issue, it's the norm - another example involves the death of a savage literature critic, who Holmes doesn't bother to even visit the scene of the crime or look into his affairs, just rightly assumes an author did it. He finds someone who gladly confesses. One can only assume that the author of this book has received similar harsh reviews.

Aside from people confessing with suicidal ease (seeing as they will hang for murder), other characters that should be distraught at the deaths of friends and relations are chipper and jovial, or shift gears between happy and sad from sentence to sentence. One early tale in the book of a murdered girl from a group of cyclists had me wondering if her friends were drugged, in a cult or mentally challenged - turns out they were just badly written.

Each story is only about 10-15 pages (and keep in mind this is a large-print edition) so the stories are very brief, but they seem padded nevertheless. Utterly twistless straightforward crimes unworthy of Holmes or your attention.

A combination of lovely and sad, this Graphic Novel charts a high school student's second year where she starts friendless, depressed and struggling with mental health issues that she barely realises she is suffering from - seeing them as a background part of her developing teen life.

Things swiftly improve as she makes some genuinely great new friends and starts to create a Zine with them (with issues fully reproduced in the book!) - but in this somewhat autobiographical tale life is not so straightforward. There's even one point the character admits would be a perfect happy ending, but the story has a ways to go.

The ending left me a touch unsatisfied in that it left me wanting more, but that's life: the story never really ends.

Most books like this boast something like "100 amazing tricks" in which you'll find 10 genuinely good ones, and in that regard this book is no exception - but this book has unusually clear descriptions and illustrations, with an easy-going writing style that's a pleasure rather than a chore to read, and it's honest about the amount and type of practice you'll need to pull these tricks off.

It's a decent book to learn impromptu magic that require almost no props nor set-up. Soon you'll be doing coin tricks, card tricks, making cutlery transform and dinner rolls bounce and levitate!

Claire Keegan has a lovely writing style, but I'm thankful this is such a short story - a very depressing little tale about two cold people who decide to marry, then don't.

It's hard to believe in their relationship at all as the man has no redeeming features, not even anything excitingly awful - he's just casually cheap, blandly unappreciative, lazily misogynistic - but not in ways that fire the blood. Sabine is barely sketched - just a barely-there presence. They are both grey and blah, and you're left wondering why they ever bothered to pursue this non-relationship past the first day.

Regardless, there is something compelling about the writing - I'll be interested to try a longer novel by this author and hope it has a bit more substance to it.

Didn't get far but flicked through to some random pages to make sure it wasn't just the beginning, but no - the whole book is a series of bleakly negative essays on random subjects related to travel. I'd highly recommend "Drive your plough over the bones.of the dead" by the same author instead.

A nice little volume of three slightly linked Sherlock Holmes mysteries - but don't expect the horrors the title and blurb suggest, just a little bit of morbidity at times. These are three straightforward enough murders with some supernatural trappings designed to lead Holmes astray, which he sees right through in his usual style.

The murders are for the most part easy enough for the reader to solve, but not so easy that you can't be forgiven for feeling pleased at doing so - basically, Lovegrove plays fair.

Great if you prefer you Holmes in short-story format, and the links between are in the end just about satisfying enough if you prefer a longer-form narrative.

This is a glorious mess of a book, difficult to read as it changes styles so often: sometimes it reads like a play, sometimes like a mockumentary, sometimes the author argues with his conscience on the page - sometimes it almost manages to have a straightforward narrative for a while. Some parts are short, some are agonisingly long. Characters flit in and out, sometimes seeming to fill the role of lead character only to vanish from the narrative and die off-screen.

But it's funny, with savagely biting satire that takes no prisoners for the whole of humankind and early 20th Century politics, racism and colonialism in particular - and some of it quite prescient, at points Čapek seems to predict the Atom Bomb and Hitler's Lebensraum well before World War II even started. Čapek takes no sides: the USA, Germany, UK, France and his own native Czechoslovakia each suffer under his painfully funny withering glare.

It's a high-concept book: "What if we discovered a new species, exploited them, enslaved them - but began to rely on them and bred them in numbers that swiftly out-grew our own?" and that the author explores every nuance of this idea to the bitter end is what makes this book worth reading.

However, when you realise that this book was published after the likes of "Brave New World" (which gets cheekily name-checked!) and well after "The War of the Worlds" it's hard to understand why this book is such an unusual collection of randomly-firing styles. It might not suit everyone, you need to be quite patient.

I probably wouldn't have picked up this book except the author wrote the play "Rossums Universal Robots" that coined the word "Robot", so I was intrigued about the rest of his work. R.U.R. has some similar themes of human folly and the uprising of enslaved peoples, but "War with the Newts" is different in almost every way imaginable!

It's ideas are interesting and worth exploring, it's wit is savage - but I have a hard time recommending this book as it's an uneven read that can be a slog at times.