elementarymydear's Reviews (967)

 
Kicking off Pride month with a sapphic Snow Queen retelling? Yes please and thank you!

Kay is a park ranger at the Glacier National Park, and after years of working there she has uncovered all but one of its secrets: the Eira Ghost, a mysterious spirit who haunts the park. She has no idea that the romantic feelings she has for Gwyn, a guarded stranger who wonders the park alone, might have anything to do with the ghost.

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This was a really fun modern fairytale, with the perfect balance of the original tale and the new story. I really liked the way Adrian J. Smith wove the two together – I won’t spoil how but it was a nice twist on the usual, with the fairytale included as part of the plot. There were also some nice nods to both the original fairytale and various iterations of it dotted throughout, little Snow Queen Easter eggs!

While the romance was perhaps a little bit insta-love, it was still one you could root for and get behind. The romantic moments were incredibly satisfying. Kay and Gwyn’s relationship is the core of the story and has enormous heart to it. It’s also nice to see a sapphic retelling where the queerness is not a hindrance to the story. While I have read some great retellings that incorporate a homophobic society into the story, it was nice to read one with no homophobia at all, and only a brief coming out scene to acknowledge that they live in a heteronormative society.

It would have been nice to have the supporting characters fleshed out a little more, especially Kay’s friendship with her room-mate Gladys. Given that this is at its heart a fairytale, though, it didn’t detract from the overall story which was very much about our two main characters. I did also like the nods to Wales, although I will admit with my beginner Welsh I didn’t realise the title was Welsh until it was mentioned in the book!

If you’re looking for a queer fairytale, I would highly recommend checking this one out. It has plenty of heart with a sprinkling of ice magic on the top.

Thank you to the author for providing me with a free copy for review. All views expressed are my own honest opinions. 

My two overwhelming impressions of this book are:
1. Every politician currently in power could do with reading this, and maybe I should send them a copy with highlighted passages
and
2. The musical was better

We are all familiar with the basic plot and the characters in Oliver Twist, of whom Oliver is the least interesting. A good-hearted, incorruptible orphan, through his story we meet some of London’s criminal underworld and some of its most benevolent rich folk. Even if you aren’t familiar with the story going in, the characters have become so prominent in our collective consciousness that their archetypes are familiar (for better or – in Fagin’s case – for worse).

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I’ve had mixed experience with Dickens in the past, and I was pleasantly surprised at how much of a page-turner this was. Being published serially does mean that Dickens has a vested interest in getting you back for the next chapter in a week’s time, so it’s understandable, but does make for a much more pleasant reading experience than some of his later works. That being said, he’s not exactly concise in his story-telling. What we think of as the story (that is, the plot of the musical) is actually the exposition. What follows is an increasingly drawn-out account of literally everyone scrambling to find out about Oliver’s past, revealing hidden motives, and adding a whole load of other crimes to get Oliver involved in. This culminates in a whodunnit style chapter where everyone (well, everyone still alive) is gathered together for the reveal of Oliver’s true parentage.

The crowning achievement of the novel, though, is its scathing attack on what passed for social care in the early 19th Century. For many of us today the story is how we first learned about workhouses, and is inseparable from them in our minds, and I’m sure that has been the case for a long time before now. Dickens does not hold back on criticising ‘philosophers’ who claim to know what poor people really need. After the past year of the poorest families in our country being given handfuls of tuna in coin bags to eat, it’s particularly sobering. Oliver Twist, in that regard at least, remains as relevant as ever. 

 “everything could change in the amount of time it takes for a single heart to stop beating”

Me: This audiobook looks interesting, I’ll listen to it in the car.
Me two weeks later: *sobbing behind the wheel*

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There isn’t really an easy way to summarise this book, with so many layers to a deceptively simple story that don’t all get revealed and resolved until the very end. Set in a small town in modern-day Louisiana, 12-year-old Kingston goes down to the bayou every day to see the dragonflies. His older brother has died suddenly, and King is convinced that his brother is now a dragonfly and that he needs to work out which one he is. Meanwhile, King’s friend Sandy runs away from his abusive home after coming out as gay, and a conflicted King decides to help him. As the two boys spend more time together, King begins to come to terms with the fact that he himself might be gay, and what that means for him as a gay Black boy in Louisiana.

As soon as the book began I was transported to small-town Louisiana, lost in both the excellent writing and narration. (Seriously, listen to the audiobook. So. Good.) Callender is extraordinarily talented at creating such a simple narrative that is not only beautifully written but captures the complexities of King’s life. How his grief impacts his behaviour and his own understanding of himself; how his parents love and care for him but are unable to help him; how his sexuality and his race are equally a part of him but seemingly at odds.

Really, though, the core of the book is the evolution of King’s relationship with his parents. How they learn to listen to him, and he learns to open up and ask for what he needs from them. The understanding between him and his parents grows stronger and stronger as the two generations learn from each other and help each other. (And what coming out storyline is complete without a crying-in-the-car-with-a-parent scene?)

This is the intersectional book that needs to be in every school library. Callender takes us straight into the heart of the story and the characters, creating one of the most moving books on grief, friendship and coming-of-age I’ve read. Everyone will learn something about themselves reading this book, and everyone will have more understanding and empathy for those around them after reading it, too. 

 
I’ll admit I was nervous going into this book. It was one of the most talked-about books last year, and I have loved every V. E. Schwab book I have read so far. There was a lot of hype to live up to, but it surpassed every expectation I had. Not only was it beautifully written with an incredibly powerful story, but the emotions and the turmoil of the characters are so real that you can’t help but feel them too. There were a couple of points where I had to just put the book down and take a few deep breaths, remind myself it wasn’t real and I needed to concentrate on the story, then dove right back in.

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There are three main characters: Addie, Henry (the bookseller who remembers her) and Luc (the demon she sold her soul to for immortality). My heart ached for Henry, a young man who feels so strongly that it overwhelms and consumes him. His and Addie’s romance was sweet but also realistic as they navigated the ups and downs of their relationship. It was also really nice to read a heterosexual romance between two bisexual characters – I can’t think of any other book where that happens.

As the story unfolds, we are given more glimpses into the relationship between Addie and Luc. From their first meeting, where Addie sells her soul, we see the power struggle between them evolve in very unexpected ways. The looming darkness of his character added a huge amount of suspense to the book which I absolutely loved.

It’s safe to say this is already one of the top books I’ve read this year. I’m just completely bowled over by how good this is. Now to gaze at it longingly as I wish I could read it for the first time over and over again.. 

 In the modern-day town of Lore, the Greek gods live their day-to-day lives among us. Some are powerful or successful, such as Athena who has become a businesswoman; some are weak and powerless as belief in them wanes. The Medusa Project follows a young detective, Kyrie Alcide, who is tasked with working out who is framing Medusa for murder.

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I loved the concept of the town and the world, and I thought it was really well-executed. I hope this is the first in a series – if I could have series of standalones set in this world, all following different figures of Greek mythology, I would be a very happy woman. It’s a really imaginative idea that also works really well for this story.

The two main characters, Kyrie and Medusa, were both really fun and had a great dynamic. Kyrie is a really fun perspective, and I loved Lou Wilham’s version of Medusa. I was a little bit disappointed that the romance between them didn’t quite come into fruition, especially when it was such a great slow-burn subplot. If it hadn’t been labelled as LGBT Romance I wouldn’t have known that they got together at the end. That being said, the main storyline is definitely the mystery, and both characters are openly queer throughout so it didn’t detract from the overall book very much.

The biggest let-down for me in this book was the length. At 91 pages it’s a good size for a novella, but wasn’t quite long enough to really dig into the depths of the story. It felt like as soon as I’d become invested in the characters the book was over, and I would have loved to have a book double the length with the same plot but plenty more world-building and details.

Thank you to the author for providing me with a free review copy in exchange for an honest review. 

 “Some people,” Edith said, “fit a great many misogynist tropes into their personal lives.”

I don’t remember the last time I did such a big u-turn on a book. At the start I considered DNFing, frustrated with the emotionally stunted characters and poor decision-making. About a third of the way through, I thought ‘this just got interesting’ and from that point on I was invested. I began to understand the characters and their relationships (even if I didn’t agree with them), and I was gripped until the very end.

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Ava is a young Irish expat, working as a TEFL teacher in Hong Kong. The main plot is Ava navigating an excessively complicated love-life, first with Julian, a sociopathic Eton-educated banker, where the lines between friends-with-benefits and ‘kept woman’ begin to blur. When he leaves for a few months on a business trip she strikes up a friendship and then a romantic relationship with Edith, a Hong Kong lawyer who, while confident and self-assured, isn’t out to her parents.

It takes a while to get to know Ava as a character, and she deliberately keeps us at arms length. She is quite detached from her own emotions, for reasons that come to light towards the end of the book, sometimes sabotaging her own happiness or refusing to explore why she feels certain ways. I couldn’t help but warm to her, as frustrating as some as her decisions were, and I found some moments – particularly when she talks about her relationship with her queerness – that spoke so strongly to my own experiences that I couldn’t help but feel Dolan had plucked them from my brain. By the end you can’t help but root for her, even if you do want to sit her down and give her a stern talking-to!

The most unexpected part of this book for me was the way it dealt with classism and colonialism. Primarily these themes were explored through linguistics, and Ava’s job teaching her mother tongue in a completely different dialect from the one she speaks. While Ava is, on the whole, obnoxiously unaware of how her life bears next to no resemblance to that of the average Hong Kong citizen, she is painfully aware of how not only language but dialect is a symbol of wealth and power. Dolan manages to clearly express Ava’s complex and evolving feelings on the matter, and the intricacies at work. This made Ava’s ignorance of the other factors at play frustrating – for example, her relative wealth – but that in turn gave us more understanding of her character, and encouraged the reader to look beyond Ava’s own observations.

Exciting Times was one of the biggest surprises of the year so far for me, and I will definitely be reading Naoise Dolan’s work in the future!