Take a photo of a barcode or cover
1.26k reviews by:
inkandplasma
The reeds stood tall and dead: I had the oddest feeling they wanted me gone. The light was failing. I caught a swampy smell of decay. Behind me something rustled and I saw the reeds part for some unseen creature. I thought: No wonder Maud’s mad. All her life in a place like this?
Rating: 5 stars.
Full review available on my blog here from 13/12/19 here.
I've been trying to read more of Waterstones' book of the month picks, because they've yet to steer me wrong, so I picked up Michelle Paver's Wakenhyrst and it completely suckered me in. I love gothic thrillers, and this had all the eerie earmarks of a true gothic story, mixed with a curious format that had me fascinated from the first page.
This book is eerie as hell. From page one, we know a gruesome murder took place at Wake's End all those years ago, but what nobody knows is why. Maud's father was arrested for it and has been held in an asylum since that day, where he's been painting pictures of demons that have drawn public acclaim. When suspicion is shifted to Maud, she finally allows access to the journals that she has kept hidden and reveals the truth about her father and the horrors of her childhood. The narrative shifts between traditional prose and her father's journal entries and it creates an incredibly interesting and spooky atmosphere. Between Maud and Edmund, the reader gets most of the information we need to start putting the story together but not all of it, and it's in that tiny middle ground that Michelle Paver has created an intoxicating and claustrophobic sense of supernatural presence. As a reader my imagination was running wild and I was creating all kinds of crazy theories to explain what was happening, some of them perfectly logical and some of them entirely ridiculous. All of them dark.
Maud's character was the most compelling part of this book. She's brave and interesting, and utterly trapped in a society that devalues her because she's 'plain' and odd and, of course, because she's a woman. No matter how much proof she has that her father is dangerous, she's dismissed and accused of attacking her father's flawless reputation, and her mission to protect the beautiful wilds of the Fen get her cast as a witch. She knows she can't control her father as he devolves into a madness she can't comprehend, but she also knows she has no choice but to try.
As a piece of historical fiction, the storytelling in this novel is beautiful, if frustrating as hell to read. No wonder Maud was so perpetually frustrated by her limitations. She faces the misogyny every day in her own interactions, and in the loss of her mother after repeated miscarriages and still births left her weak - but Edmund ignored the doctor's advice and chased his own sexual pleasure until it killed her. If it wasn't the misogyny of Maud's situation, it was the class inequalities faced by the characters living in Wakenhyrst, and the othering that occurred every time anyone strayed from the strict socially and religiously acceptable paths. Overall, it created a detailed and rich world as a backdrop to Maud's horror story, and I was utterly enraptured from the first page to the last.
Rating: 5 stars.
Full review available on my blog here from 13/12/19 here.
I've been trying to read more of Waterstones' book of the month picks, because they've yet to steer me wrong, so I picked up Michelle Paver's Wakenhyrst and it completely suckered me in. I love gothic thrillers, and this had all the eerie earmarks of a true gothic story, mixed with a curious format that had me fascinated from the first page.
This book is eerie as hell. From page one, we know a gruesome murder took place at Wake's End all those years ago, but what nobody knows is why. Maud's father was arrested for it and has been held in an asylum since that day, where he's been painting pictures of demons that have drawn public acclaim. When suspicion is shifted to Maud, she finally allows access to the journals that she has kept hidden and reveals the truth about her father and the horrors of her childhood. The narrative shifts between traditional prose and her father's journal entries and it creates an incredibly interesting and spooky atmosphere. Between Maud and Edmund, the reader gets most of the information we need to start putting the story together but not all of it, and it's in that tiny middle ground that Michelle Paver has created an intoxicating and claustrophobic sense of supernatural presence. As a reader my imagination was running wild and I was creating all kinds of crazy theories to explain what was happening, some of them perfectly logical and some of them entirely ridiculous. All of them dark.
Maud's character was the most compelling part of this book. She's brave and interesting, and utterly trapped in a society that devalues her because she's 'plain' and odd and, of course, because she's a woman. No matter how much proof she has that her father is dangerous, she's dismissed and accused of attacking her father's flawless reputation, and her mission to protect the beautiful wilds of the Fen get her cast as a witch. She knows she can't control her father as he devolves into a madness she can't comprehend, but she also knows she has no choice but to try.
As a piece of historical fiction, the storytelling in this novel is beautiful, if frustrating as hell to read. No wonder Maud was so perpetually frustrated by her limitations. She faces the misogyny every day in her own interactions, and in the loss of her mother after repeated miscarriages and still births left her weak - but Edmund ignored the doctor's advice and chased his own sexual pleasure until it killed her. If it wasn't the misogyny of Maud's situation, it was the class inequalities faced by the characters living in Wakenhyrst, and the othering that occurred every time anyone strayed from the strict socially and religiously acceptable paths. Overall, it created a detailed and rich world as a backdrop to Maud's horror story, and I was utterly enraptured from the first page to the last.
Spells are just prayers with more steps and a name that scares people.
Rating: 4 stars
Full review available on my blog on the 16/12/19 here.
Can I sign up somewhere for a hundred more books about fat witchy women? I picked Undead Girl Gang by Lily Anderson up because I loved the idea of teenage witches and an undead murder mystery, but I also got sisterhood and unashamed fat girl energy and believable teenage characters. I pretty much binged this one, and the twist still got me!
This is such an easy binge read. I love a YA murder mystery a lot, and this was a really interesting twist on that. Bringing dead girls back so they can solve their own murder? Count me in. Especially when I started hearing great things from other reviewers. It helped that Mila is a highly relatable character. She goes to great efforts to give off a 'I don't give a fuck what you think' vibe, even if she hasn't completely convinced herself yet, which reminds me of teenage me. If only I'd had a mini-coven and a spooky grimoire to go with it. I also adored the way that she talks about her weight. It's a little thing, and I don't know if everyone would notice it, but she makes a point of correcting people when they use soft terms and euphemisms like 'curvy' and 'heavy'. I'm a 'big girl' too, and I felt seen when Mila called out her friends, even her closest friends, of using 'fat' as a dirty word. Fat doesn't have to be an insult, and Mila gets it!
Riley and Mila give me the sweetest found family vibes and I love it. They're sisters by heart, if not by blood, and opening on her best friend's funeral could be a miserable start to a novel. Instead it's handled lightly, and Lily Anderson sets the tone for the novel early. Sure, the things that Mila is going through are tragic and traumatic, but she's going to handle them like a bitchy witch and make Riley proud. It helps that she doesn't have to focus on her grief, because she's too busy trying to convince anyone to believe her that her best friend would never kill herself. It doesn't take long to get onto the campy necromancy part of the novel, where Mila's first real spell goes a little too well and she accidentally brings back June and Dayton with Riley. This isn't a novel that focuses intently on the aftermath of grief, though it has some great messages about closure and letting go, the loss aspect is a smaller part of the story. I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that, this is primarily a supernatural murder mystery and not a contemporary novel about love and loss.
The mystery part of the novel is fairly simple, but the supernatural twists in the novel make it interesting and set it apart from other YA mysteries, and on top of that, I was still surprised by the final reveals and the explanation of the actual circumstances of the three girls' deaths. It was unpredictable, but not overly complicated, which I personally prefer in YA mystery - sometimes they can get bogged down in getting too complex and lose the prose. Lily Anderson dodges that and Undead Girl Gang ends up a real page-turner. This earned 4 stars from me because it was just so fun to read. It was funny and wild and kept me guessing, and that's all I wanted from a book with a kicking name like Undead Girl Gang.
Rating: 4 stars
Full review available on my blog on the 16/12/19 here.
Can I sign up somewhere for a hundred more books about fat witchy women? I picked Undead Girl Gang by Lily Anderson up because I loved the idea of teenage witches and an undead murder mystery, but I also got sisterhood and unashamed fat girl energy and believable teenage characters. I pretty much binged this one, and the twist still got me!
This is such an easy binge read. I love a YA murder mystery a lot, and this was a really interesting twist on that. Bringing dead girls back so they can solve their own murder? Count me in. Especially when I started hearing great things from other reviewers. It helped that Mila is a highly relatable character. She goes to great efforts to give off a 'I don't give a fuck what you think' vibe, even if she hasn't completely convinced herself yet, which reminds me of teenage me. If only I'd had a mini-coven and a spooky grimoire to go with it. I also adored the way that she talks about her weight. It's a little thing, and I don't know if everyone would notice it, but she makes a point of correcting people when they use soft terms and euphemisms like 'curvy' and 'heavy'. I'm a 'big girl' too, and I felt seen when Mila called out her friends, even her closest friends, of using 'fat' as a dirty word. Fat doesn't have to be an insult, and Mila gets it!
Riley and Mila give me the sweetest found family vibes and I love it. They're sisters by heart, if not by blood, and opening on her best friend's funeral could be a miserable start to a novel. Instead it's handled lightly, and Lily Anderson sets the tone for the novel early. Sure, the things that Mila is going through are tragic and traumatic, but she's going to handle them like a bitchy witch and make Riley proud. It helps that she doesn't have to focus on her grief, because she's too busy trying to convince anyone to believe her that her best friend would never kill herself. It doesn't take long to get onto the campy necromancy part of the novel, where Mila's first real spell goes a little too well and she accidentally brings back June and Dayton with Riley. This isn't a novel that focuses intently on the aftermath of grief, though it has some great messages about closure and letting go, the loss aspect is a smaller part of the story. I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that, this is primarily a supernatural murder mystery and not a contemporary novel about love and loss.
The mystery part of the novel is fairly simple, but the supernatural twists in the novel make it interesting and set it apart from other YA mysteries, and on top of that, I was still surprised by the final reveals and the explanation of the actual circumstances of the three girls' deaths. It was unpredictable, but not overly complicated, which I personally prefer in YA mystery - sometimes they can get bogged down in getting too complex and lose the prose. Lily Anderson dodges that and Undead Girl Gang ends up a real page-turner. This earned 4 stars from me because it was just so fun to read. It was funny and wild and kept me guessing, and that's all I wanted from a book with a kicking name like Undead Girl Gang.
I knew the premise of A Christmas Carol (who doesn't) and I'll be honest that I had to work hard to stop picturing Scrooge McDuck every time I read 'Scrooge'. But I did enjoy this. It was a short read, and I don't usually enjoy Dickens but I tried to put my preconceptions aside. I still don't like Dickens' writing style. I'll be the first to admit that he writes really well, but I find it slow to read. For a novella it wasn't so bad though, and the premise of this story is brilliant as we see Scrooge rediscover the joys of Christmas. I was left feeling very Christmassy, which is an impressive feat when I read it on my lunchbreak at my retail job on a pre-Christmas Saturday!
"We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glistening in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.”
Rating: 4 stars
The Amber Spyglass is the final part of the His Dark Materials trilogy, and there's no way I can summarise the plot without a mass of spoilers. If you've gotten this far, you're in it til the end anyway.
I read the first 50 pages of this, then for some reason I really struggled to continue with it, and guilt-read 4 books instead of continuing with it. Once I'd pushed through the first part of the book, I was suckered in by the ridiculously engaging plot, and Pullman's amazing worldbuilding (even if I still think Lyra's world is the best world) and I paced through the rest of the book in a couple of days.
I can't really go into much detail without delving into spoiler territory, but it's safe to say that Pullman doesn't lose momentum on this series and Amber Spyglass is definitely a worthy final book. It's a ya book, sure, but it's beautifully complex and extremely powerful and the moral lessons being taught are so important, even if the ending did leave me utterly heartbroken.
Rating: 4 stars
The Amber Spyglass is the final part of the His Dark Materials trilogy, and there's no way I can summarise the plot without a mass of spoilers. If you've gotten this far, you're in it til the end anyway.
I read the first 50 pages of this, then for some reason I really struggled to continue with it, and guilt-read 4 books instead of continuing with it. Once I'd pushed through the first part of the book, I was suckered in by the ridiculously engaging plot, and Pullman's amazing worldbuilding (even if I still think Lyra's world is the best world) and I paced through the rest of the book in a couple of days.
I can't really go into much detail without delving into spoiler territory, but it's safe to say that Pullman doesn't lose momentum on this series and Amber Spyglass is definitely a worthy final book. It's a ya book, sure, but it's beautifully complex and extremely powerful and the moral lessons being taught are so important, even if the ending did leave me utterly heartbroken.
