elementarymydear's Reviews (967)

 Wuthering Heights may just be the most misunderstood classic (at least by those who haven’t read it yet). If you’d asked me two weeks ago what it was about, I would have mumbled something about Heathcliff, Cathy, Yorkshire moors and Kate Bush. As far as I was aware, it was a passionate tale of two troubled lovers who had lots of sad dinners. Having conducted an informal poll on my housemates, I was not alone in my ignorance. We all had in our minds that this would be like Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice but much, much sadder.

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The difference is that Wuthering Heights – contrary to popular opinion, including the blurb on my copy – is not a love story. It is a story about a lot of very terrible people, two of whom have a passionate, brief and toxic romance that shapes the lives of the next generation. I cannot emphasise enough how many terrible people are in this book. Some have redeemable qualities, some do not. Some are born terrible, some achieve terrible-ness, and some have terrible-ness thrust upon them. From start to finish, everyone is making bad decisions. (Also, there are ghosts? Kind of. It’s ambiguous.)

And yet, somehow, I enjoyed this book. I loved this book. It’s incredibly atmospheric, with Emily Brontë capturing you and transporting you to the Yorkshire moors. You can hear Cathy calling at the window, feel the wind buffeting you from place to place. The setting grounds the story and the characters, and without it the plot would have no roots. It’s a tale filled with haunting moments and images, ones that have stayed in our collective literary consciousness for well over a century now. The themes of love (of all kinds), betrayal, otherness, and passion were wildly ahead of their time and are still relevant today. Also, it’s kind of a weird but great flex to punish your enemies by forcing them to take out a mortgage with you.

Wuthering Heights was unexpected in every way. Beautifully crafted, with a weird story about terrible people, I was consumed by it right until the very end. Will I re-read it? Definitely not for a while, but probably down the line. Will I still be reeling from it next week? Month? Year? Absolutely. 

 Temple of Ice is an epic polar fantasy adventure, following Tama, an almost-qualified winter mage, as she realises her destiny and saves her realm from the corrupting power of Malsumi, a vindictive goddess. Not everything is as it seems, however, and along the way Tama is confronted with scheming and betrayal from those she trusted.

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The two stand-out things in this novel for me are the character of Tama and the world Christian Cura has created. Tama is a great protagonist. She’s brave, strong-willed, and mischievous, but also vulnerable at times. I love having queer characters in fantasy where their sexuality is not an issue in their world and Tama was a perfect example of that. She is bisexual, and has two love interests in this book, both women. The way she handled and dealt with her romantic feelings towards other characters was painfully relatable! We’ve all been there, Tama…

The blossoming of a romance in the second half of the book gave the story some extra drive, and although the relationship developed quite quickly it was very believable as we watched the two characters from when they first meet to when they become companions. You couldn’t help but root for them! I did find myself cringing slightly at the writing of some of the more (ahem) intimate scenes though.

It was really clear that Christian Cura has a very clear, detailed vision of Khione, the world Tama lives in, and when that came across it added so much depth to the story. That being said, the first few chapters felt quite rushed, as if he couldn’t wait to get to the meat of the story, and I would have loved to explore the world and the set-up a bit longer before we got to the main event. It’s a shame when there’s clearly so much there that it felt like we were only getting the tip of the iceberg sometimes. Once the story got underway, though, the pacing was much better and I could easily lose myself in the story. It’s almost a shame it’s a stand-alone (as far as I’m aware) because it feels like there’s so much more of the world to explore!

Temple of Ice is quite a short book, coming in at just over 200 pages, and it’s perfect for when you need a little bit of adventure to lose yourself in for a couple of hours. If you’re looking for polar fantasy, queer characters, or diverse casts, you can’t go far wrong with this one!

Thank you to the author for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. 

 “A problem isn’t finished just because you’ve found the right answer.”

I picked up this book last night with the intention of reading a couple of chapters before I went to bed, and ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting. From the first page I fell in love with the characters and the tender friendship between them that grows so wonderfully across the book.

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We read from the perspective of a young woman, a single mother in her late twenties, who is newly employed as a housekeeper to an aging professor of mathematics. She is his tenth housekeeper; following a car accident his memory only lasts for eighty minutes. Every morning he has forgotten her, and refers to the scribbled notes he has clipped to his suit.

After a while, on the professor’s insistence, her son joins them after he has finished school. The professor nicknames him ‘Root’, due to his flat head (just like a square root), and so that is the name that sticks.

It would be useless for me to try and describe the relationship between the housekeeper, the professor, and Root, when you could (and should) read the book yourself and get a much better idea than I can clumsily summarise in a paragraph. Their friendship is unique and true, but not without betrayals, arguments and disagreements. There is a fourth character as well – the widow – whose absence through most of the book begins as one kind of tragedy and ends in another.

For the professor, whose life is a daily cycle of unknowing and uncertainty, mathematics holds the beauty and constancy of the universe. His obsession and admiration of numbers is infectious, and soon spreads to both the housekeeper and Root. I will admit that the maths geek in me got very excited when Euler’s identity appeared! The professor has a way of describing numbers, as if they as much living and breathing characters as they are constants, that you couldn’t help but be drawn in by.

This is an absolute gem of a novel, and if you’re looking for something gentle, gripping, and moving in the best way, I would highly recommend it!

 Imagine, if you will, that it’s one o’clock in the morning, and you’ve opened the Wikipedia page for the Vrouw Maria: an 18th Century Dutch shipwreck containing paintings bought by Catherine the Great. You read a bit about the boat, and the day the storm sank, and then you open in a new tab the article about the painter of the lost art. Then about Catherine the Great. Then about the art historian who decided the artist was no good and wrote him out of history, then a later art historian who decided he should be rewritten back into history, and while you’re there you may as well read about the man who founded Washington DC’s National Gallery. Then you read about the diver who discovered the wreck, and then before you know it you’re knee-deep in the legal battle between the diver and the Finnish National Bureau of Antiquities, including maritime law, antiquities law, the European Court of Human Rights, UNESCO Heritage Sites, and somehow, Swedish multi-millionaires.

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That’s what reading this book is like – and it’s not a bad thing at all. It’s everything (and I mean everything – the authors were very thorough) you might want to know about one lost painting, and the events that came before and after it. The book is split into two parts. Part one is about the history of the painting, the painter, and how Catherine the Great came to buy it. Part two is about the modern day attempts to recover the shipwreck and the painting, and the complexities raised by these plans. Prepare yourself, though; no stone is left unturned, and it’s a slow read to get through the sheer amount of detail and background given to us.

That being said, this was – surprisingly – a very gripping read. Although I read it incredibly slowly I felt like I was reading a gripping, page-turner of a thriller, and although that meant I got a little disappointed when I realised how little I’d read after an hour or more of reading, it wasn’t hard to sit down and get absorbed back into the story.

The biggest drawback for me was a lack of citations. For a popular non-fiction book you wouldn’t expect footnotes, but the bibliography was impossible to find on Kindle; I didn’t even know it was there until I found it hidden in the epilogue. When the authors are painting such a vivid story, though, it was hard to know what was fact and what was fiction (or rather, fictionalised fact for embellishment). Especially in the historical chapters people would say things, or feel things, or do things, and it wasn’t always clear how we know this. Did they say it to someone who wrote it down? Was it a diary entry? For the later chapters about people still living, it wasn’t always clear if the people involved had been interviewed by the authors, or if they had used quotes from other interviews, or people’s recollections. Without a way of checking chapter notes or a bibliography, a brief note in the text would have tied the whole thing together very nicely.

This is definitely a niche interest book. If you are interested in the subject matter, definitely pick it up (when you have many hours to spare!). If you’re not, this probably isn’t the book to get you into it. For those of you who do pick it up, though, it’s a treat of a read.

Thank you to the author for providing me with a review copy.