“Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other.”

Rating: 3 stars

I didn't like Subtle Knife as much as I loved Northern Lights, but on the flipside I also didn't hate it half as much as I did the first time that I read it. I've settled in a sort of middle ground where I like it a lot more than I did once, partly I think because I'm older and I can grasp the more complex themes of the book a little more clearly, but I still much, much prefer the first novel. At the beginning of Subtle Knife, Pullman says that it's set in our world, and to some extent I think that's why I always find it disappointing. I know lots about our world, I find our world to often be boring (that's why I read fantasy, after all) so to go from Lyra's world with a rich tapestry of daemons and magic and talking bears to our plain-ass regular world is kind of a bummer.

But it is a good book, the characters are still beautifully developed and Pullman does create an interesting and authentic feeling multiverse idea, which is not always easy to pull off, and I will definitely finish out the trilogy as I don't really remember much at all of Amber Spyglass.

Satirical and empowering, I loved it!

“One day, long ago, she’d gone seeking an adventure and found terror instead. That day had changed the course of her life, and left her hands awash in blood. It was not her fault, but this was how it must be. She understood that now.”

Rating: 4.5 stars

I loved this book. I was recommended this by my housemate, and then by a work friend, and decided to give in and read it. I can't believe I waited so long. Alice is a retelling of Alice in Wonderland, with all of the Wonderland taken right out of it. This is a dark, difficult story of a grown up Alice who lives in a real, dark world. No Wonderland about it. There are familiar characters threaded throughout: The Caterpillar, The Cheshire, The Jabberwocky and of course, The Rabbit. They're not the characters that I remember from Wonderland, though.

“In the Old City there were very few ways for women to stay alive, and all of them involved a man.”

Alice is set in a horror-fantasy world called the 'Old City', where Alice was hospitalised after she comes back from her trip down the rabbit hole. They think she's crazy, and she does too. While this world is a fantasy world, it felt heavily influenced by Victorian-era England to me, and this book pulls no punches about handling rough topics. Within the first few pages, we are brutally (though not graphically) aware that Alice has survived being kidnapped, raped and drugged, and hospitalised for her sufferings. Her only friend is the man in the cell beside hers, Hatch, only able to communicate through a mouse hole for years. When the Jabberwocky escapes, a monster of horror searching for blood and magic, Alice and Hatch escape too, and find themselves on a journey to find the blade to slay the Jabberwocky - not because they're heroes but because they have no other choice.

Despite being a fantasy novel, the monsters in Alice are unrelentingly human in their behaviours. Even when there is magic in every scene, it is hard to shake the brutal reality of their behaviour. We see sex slavery, human trafficking, murder, mutilation, cannibalism, rape and endless acts of mindless brutality. It never felt to me like Henry was including these factors to be gruesome, or shocking, but instead included them as realistic details in the underworld of a city rocked by gang crime and poverty, and in a time where a woman was more possession than person.

The characters were all well-fleshed out, especially Alice and Hatch, and I loved following two characters who had been told they were crazy, and kind of believed it, but weren't willing to let that get in their way. The whole book was incredibly fast-paced, especially when it entered the second act, and while that fit the narrative well it did sometimes feel a little fast. I did read the whole novel in the space of a few hours, though, so perhaps that didn't help with feeling it was moving quickly.

The end of this book was satisfying and whole, so while I haven't read the sequel yet it feels very complete. Once I've read the sequel, I will know for sure, but at the moment I honestly don't feel it needs another book to complete Alice's story. I'm sure I'll love [b:Red Queen|30196348|Red Queen (The Chronicles of Alice, #2)|Christina Henry|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1463389307s/30196348.jpg|47294674] just as much as I've loved her other stories.

I could talk about this book for hours, and the more I talk about it the more I consider raising the rating again and again. Overall, I thoroughly recommend this book, and on the back of this one I read [b:The Mermaid|38613557|The Mermaid|Christina Henry|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1518979003s/38613557.jpg|58041711] and loved that too. I will absolutely be reading the rest of Henry's dark retellings, and can't wait for [b:The Girl in Red|43550676|The Girl in Red|Christina Henry|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1549547388s/43550676.jpg|66672643], a retelling of one of my favourite stories of all time.

“I want you to remember what was good in me, not what was most awful. The people you love should be allowed to keep their worst to themselves.”

Rating: 4 stars

This book was way better than I expected. I saw the movie, and honestly found it massively confusing. After reading the book I have to get my hands on a copy of the movie to rewatch, because I think I'll enjoy it so much more understanding all of the context of the book.

Ig Perrish is in living hell after his girlfriend Merrin is raped and murdered - everyone thinks he's responsible, and the evidence that would exonerate him is destroyed. He wakes up, after a night of heavy heavy drinking, with horns on his head and a sudden power that he can't control. Everyone he speaks to confesses their sins to him, and he can influence them to do the things they confess to him.

Ig decides to use this power to hunt down the man who really killed Merrin, but the book is ultimately much more than that. Another reviewer said that every time something interesting was going to happen, the book jumped back in time, but I loved that aspect of this novel. Horns is a story of Ig's life, leading up to Merrin's death and the year afterwards. It's about the impact of the accusations cast against him, and ultimately how his life has spiralled from that point.

The supernatural elements of this novel weren't scary in a horror sort of way, more of a way carrying the psychological thriller aspects of the novel. And I would definitely call this a psychological thriller, keeping me hooked from page one all the way through to the end with an intense fascination in Ig's story.

Both Joe Hill books I've read have been equally good, and I'm definitely putting the rest of his work on the top of my list, because I find the way he writes incredibly engaging and hard to put down.

Rating: 4 stars

I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Warehouse is about two strangers who apply for a job at Cloud, a conglomerate company that owns just about everything. You work for Cloud, or you starve. Paxton is coming to terms with working for the company that ruined his life, and hoping for a future with Zinnia, the woman he met when he started his new security job. Zinnia is hiding things and she wants Paxton's all-access pass, and maybe something she never expected to want.

Several times, I wanted to stop reading this book. Not remotely because it was bad, but because it was scary. The Warehouse is set in the future. The very, very, very near future. I'd go as far as to say that it's uncomfortably close. Every thing that the workers at Cloud do is tracked by a Cloudband on their wrist, and I found myself looking several times at the smartwatch that I use to track everything from my steps to my schedule to how much water I drink a day. Cloud owns everything, they own the materials and the production and the transportation used to deliver items to customers by drones. Brick-and-mortar stores are dead (this was particularly frightening to read as a retail worker in quiet, rarely visited store). The Warehouse felt like a reflection of something realistic, something that is sitting right on the horizon and waiting to happen. I wanted to put this book down at times because I didn't want to think about the next forty-five years of my working life and what the world might be like by then. And that's probably what makes this such an interesting book to read. I'd even say important, because people need to be thinking about the future and what we want to see. After all, the market dictates.

All in all, though, I'm glad that I read this. I enjoyed it a lot, when I got past the deep horror of how real it was, and the characters were whole and interesting. Paxton and Zinnia felt real and I wanted to know how things worked out for them, and the issues/thriller balance was handled really well, with enough intrigue to keep me turning pages.

Rating: 2.5 stars

Divine Intervention was a very quick read (slowed only by the way my phone formatted it terribly, but I'm not blaming the book for my phone's sins). Divine Intervention puts forward an absolutely interesting concept. I like the premise set out at the end of this story, playing into some of my absolute loves (superhero figures and mistaken identities) but this entry itself felt a little overburdened by exposition. Perhaps that's just me reading from the perspective of someone who has experience with RPG/D&D genres (because this did feel a lot like a D&D session) but I felt like there were huge chunks of information squeezed into the middle of scenes that created a slightly broken pace. Readers with less knowledge about traditional RPG classes and deity systems might appreciate this though. The art style was fun, and didn't distract from the story, and I did love that the characters were diverse. I think I would have enjoyed this potentially more if it was two volumes, and the information dumps were spread out a little more to make it feel a bit more natural, but overall this was an interesting read and I will probably keep an eye out for the remainder of the series. If you like RPG/D&D/questing adventurers, you will probably enjoy this story.


I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a review.

"You're the same person now that you were when you wrote novels. The only thing that's changed is that the books have been burnt. But even if paper itself disappears, words will remain. It will be all right, you'll see. We haven't lost the stories."

Rating: 3.5 stars

Usually on a 3.5 stars I round it down to 3 stars out of 5, but I'm making an exception for this one because I absolutely couldn't put this book down. Once I'd gotten started, I was reading it at work in between orders, and stood in the kitchen waiting for food.

The Memory Police is an allegorical dystopia that, ultimately is about so much more than it appears. On the island of this story lives a novelist, working on her manuscripts quietly and trying to keep under the radar of the Memory Police who anyone who doesn't lose their memories when things disappear. But at heart, this is a book about humanity and personality and asks a lot of interesting questions about how our memories and experiences, and our feelings about those experience shape who we are as a person. It's an overall unnerving read, actually discomforting in parts. I described it to my housemate as giving me a 'general aura of stress'. I think this is going to be the kind of book that I'm thinking about for a while before all the implications sink in.