Take a photo of a barcode or cover
Well this is a very enjoyable tale well told. YA is not my favourite genre however there are always exceptions and this is one of them. This is compared a lot to the Hunger games (which is another YA I enjoyed) and the story really does have a lot in common with these books. What I really enjoyed though was the author taking the sanitised stories of the little people and fairies and bringing them back to the truly scary legends that there were of the Sidhe (or the old pagan gods of Ireland). They make a very interesting foe for a teenager to survive.
“Listen,’ he says, ‘we don’t need the Sidhe to teach us evil. We were the ones who put them in the Grey Land, remember? And not just for a day or however long it is the Call lasts. We Irish… we trapped an entire race of people in hell for all eternity, just so we could take their homes for ourselves.”
At any time between 10 and 17 a teenager on the Island of Ireland will be called back to the Grey Land to try and survive the hunt of the Sidhe. It takes about 24 hours in the Grey Land and 3 minutes 4 seconds in Ireland. As a teenager you never know when you will be called and watch your friends being called around you. As with all things in life this seems to be always when you least expect it and is definitely the most tense element of the story. Teenagers naturally joke around having fun but these ones have to deal with this constant threat. I think Peader deals with this rather well and uses his fourteen year old protagonist, Nessa (who isn’t wasn't whiny about being in love - Yes!) well to tell his story.
The true impacts of war are not ignored as in:
"'How long must I wait?' she asks the mirror in Sidhe.’ As a survivor, she doesn't need to speak the language anymore. But many like her are more comfortable in it than English, and since they have no choice but to marry each other, the primary schools of the country are filling with tiny tots whose innocent mouths spout the long-dead language of their distant ancestors, which also happens to be the living, never-changing tongue of the enemy. Some day, she thinks, we will be them, a greater victory for the Sidhe than if they kill us all."
I also note that one of my GR friends could not work out the genders of the characters without pronouns. Maybe the sequel (which is a well know secret) should include a list of characters as Irish names are sort of difficult to get a handle on for the non-Irish.
Overall a fun read.
“Listen,’ he says, ‘we don’t need the Sidhe to teach us evil. We were the ones who put them in the Grey Land, remember? And not just for a day or however long it is the Call lasts. We Irish… we trapped an entire race of people in hell for all eternity, just so we could take their homes for ourselves.”
At any time between 10 and 17 a teenager on the Island of Ireland will be called back to the Grey Land to try and survive the hunt of the Sidhe. It takes about 24 hours in the Grey Land and 3 minutes 4 seconds in Ireland. As a teenager you never know when you will be called and watch your friends being called around you. As with all things in life this seems to be always when you least expect it and is definitely the most tense element of the story. Teenagers naturally joke around having fun but these ones have to deal with this constant threat. I think Peader deals with this rather well and uses his fourteen year old protagonist, Nessa (who isn’t wasn't whiny about being in love - Yes!) well to tell his story.
The true impacts of war are not ignored as in:
"'How long must I wait?' she asks the mirror in Sidhe.’ As a survivor, she doesn't need to speak the language anymore. But many like her are more comfortable in it than English, and since they have no choice but to marry each other, the primary schools of the country are filling with tiny tots whose innocent mouths spout the long-dead language of their distant ancestors, which also happens to be the living, never-changing tongue of the enemy. Some day, she thinks, we will be them, a greater victory for the Sidhe than if they kill us all."
I also note that one of my GR friends could not work out the genders of the characters without pronouns. Maybe the sequel (which is a well know secret) should include a list of characters as Irish names are sort of difficult to get a handle on for the non-Irish.
Overall a fun read.
Really a 3.5 star review, I rounded this review up as it’s an important subject matter at the moment, particularly to Americans (after their choice for President) but also in Ireland and Europe.
To begin with, I must explain that I am a child of legal immigrants in Australia, who ultimately decided that the lifestyle in their homeland Ireland was better than the Australian lifestyle on offer and so sold up and returned after 8 years. So I grew up with the ongoing debate of which is better money and large houses or family and education (the free education system was better then in Ireland than in Oz). So I understood that in Behold the Dreamers, no matter what their initial excitement at being in the US, one or other of the characters were always going to question which is best, the American dream of the pursuit of money, status and the big houses or home, family and culture. Every immigrant asks these questions on a regular basis for the rest of their lives no matter what their decisions are on the way. So this question must always be central to any story on immigration, which it is in this book.
I also know an Irish woman who married an illegal Nigerian immigrant to Ireland. So I am aware of the fear they lived with not knowing until last minute that he would be allowed to stay in Ireland or deported. He eventually not only got his working permit and right of residency but eventually got Irish citizenship, in this true story. I will not spoil what happened in Behold the Dreamers but I think it’s really an important subject matter particularly for those in the USA at the moment. This is where the power of stories is important as for those unfamiliar with what it is like to live with uncertain immigration statuses can get a glimpse into that world. People in the US should really take this into account in the near future.
So leaving the theme of immigration aside what is enjoyable in the book.
The story is set during the Economic Crisis of 2007/8 and I read for the first time the effects it has not just on the wealthy bankers (the Edwards family) but on all those that depend on them Jende Jonga and his family, Cameroonian immigrants who work for the Edwards. The Economic Crisis blows a crack in the American Dream and its impact on the legal and not quite legal immigrants is well drawn. We also see the pressures on the married life of the wealthier Edwards. The disillusionment with the pursuit of money for its own sake and the importance of family thus become central themes in the book.
Personal highlights are the descriptions of Cameroonian Food. This book made me hungry on several occasions and I absolutely must try Puff Puff for breakfast or anytime really. I liked the descriptions of Limbe and would have liked more. I loved the different descriptions of the people in the various neighbourhoods of New York, I really felt the city came to life for me in this book.
The narrative is very plain and bit slow at the beginning of the story but picks up pace when the Financial collapse happens. As with many stories it's how the characters deal with a crisis that is most interesting. Neni in particular shows that she is one determined lady and will go to whatever legnths are needed to protect her family.
While I liked the characters, I think I needed more in-depth characterisation to really connect to them. This is probably due to writers such as Colm Tobín, JK Rowling, Charles Dickens etc. Who make me very exacting in this area. However, overall it is an enjoyable read.
To begin with, I must explain that I am a child of legal immigrants in Australia, who ultimately decided that the lifestyle in their homeland Ireland was better than the Australian lifestyle on offer and so sold up and returned after 8 years. So I grew up with the ongoing debate of which is better money and large houses or family and education (the free education system was better then in Ireland than in Oz). So I understood that in Behold the Dreamers, no matter what their initial excitement at being in the US, one or other of the characters were always going to question which is best, the American dream of the pursuit of money, status and the big houses or home, family and culture. Every immigrant asks these questions on a regular basis for the rest of their lives no matter what their decisions are on the way. So this question must always be central to any story on immigration, which it is in this book.
I also know an Irish woman who married an illegal Nigerian immigrant to Ireland. So I am aware of the fear they lived with not knowing until last minute that he would be allowed to stay in Ireland or deported. He eventually not only got his working permit and right of residency but eventually got Irish citizenship, in this true story. I will not spoil what happened in Behold the Dreamers but I think it’s really an important subject matter particularly for those in the USA at the moment. This is where the power of stories is important as for those unfamiliar with what it is like to live with uncertain immigration statuses can get a glimpse into that world. People in the US should really take this into account in the near future.
So leaving the theme of immigration aside what is enjoyable in the book.
The story is set during the Economic Crisis of 2007/8 and I read for the first time the effects it has not just on the wealthy bankers (the Edwards family) but on all those that depend on them Jende Jonga and his family, Cameroonian immigrants who work for the Edwards. The Economic Crisis blows a crack in the American Dream and its impact on the legal and not quite legal immigrants is well drawn. We also see the pressures on the married life of the wealthier Edwards. The disillusionment with the pursuit of money for its own sake and the importance of family thus become central themes in the book.
Personal highlights are the descriptions of Cameroonian Food. This book made me hungry on several occasions and I absolutely must try Puff Puff for breakfast or anytime really. I liked the descriptions of Limbe and would have liked more. I loved the different descriptions of the people in the various neighbourhoods of New York, I really felt the city came to life for me in this book.
The narrative is very plain and bit slow at the beginning of the story but picks up pace when the Financial collapse happens. As with many stories it's how the characters deal with a crisis that is most interesting. Neni in particular shows that she is one determined lady and will go to whatever legnths are needed to protect her family.
While I liked the characters, I think I needed more in-depth characterisation to really connect to them. This is probably due to writers such as Colm Tobín, JK Rowling, Charles Dickens etc. Who make me very exacting in this area. However, overall it is an enjoyable read.
Really 4.5 stars for the sheer pleasure of the read.
I wasn’t going to read this one. I am not a fan of a lot of YA fiction, the Twilight series, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children etc. There are always exceptions, though, and this book falls into that category. My lunch stains, when I couldn’t stop reading in order to eat, are a testament to that (just as well it wasn’t a library book).
At the beginning, I thought that River was a well drawn introverted troubled teenager, who wants to take control of her life by making friends with the popular kids, who happen to be a family of suspected witches called the Graces.
Midway I realised that River was simply not seeing how more damaged and isolated the Graces were than her, how they were actively hurting themselves by clinging to their beliefs in magic and family.
As I suspected she would, River turns the tables on the lot of them by the end of the book. I actually saw the end and the revelation of the secret coming, simply because that is what I would have written it. That didn’t reduce the enjoyment, though.
Magic may or may not be real in this book, this is not The Craft. It has far more depth and a character with balls and is no Twilight. It is more a coming of age tale with the possible existence of magic as a backstory.
I wasn’t going to read this one. I am not a fan of a lot of YA fiction, the Twilight series, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children etc. There are always exceptions, though, and this book falls into that category. My lunch stains, when I couldn’t stop reading in order to eat, are a testament to that (just as well it wasn’t a library book).
At the beginning, I thought that River was a well drawn introverted troubled teenager, who wants to take control of her life by making friends with the popular kids, who happen to be a family of suspected witches called the Graces.
Midway I realised that River was simply not seeing how more damaged and isolated the Graces were than her, how they were actively hurting themselves by clinging to their beliefs in magic and family.
As I suspected she would, River turns the tables on the lot of them by the end of the book. I actually saw the end and the revelation of the secret coming, simply because that is what I would have written it. That didn’t reduce the enjoyment, though.
Magic may or may not be real in this book, this is not The Craft. It has far more depth and a character with balls and is no Twilight. It is more a coming of age tale with the possible existence of magic as a backstory.
When I was a child (about 10/11 I think) I bought a copy of Jane Eyre for 2p in a sale of work. All the other books were about 50p. So it was cheap even then. The reason? It was in really bad condition, some child had scribbled on most of the pages and others were torn out. Still, I had seen an adaption of Jane Eyre on TV and I was fascinated with the story of the unwanted Jane. I made a good choice as I loved that book, I read it again and again and had to make up what happened on the missing pages, and where the child’s scribbles were too dense to make out the text.
Somehow I think that if I had a similar bad copy of The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield I would have gone to the same efforts to read it. Maybe it’s because Jane Eyre itself is referenced in the book, mostly though I believe it is because it is a well-crafted tale, that lets the reader fall into a story that is larger than life as all good stories should be.
The premise of the book is about a Jayne Eyreish character called Margaret, she has been asked by letter to write a biography of a famous and popular author Vida Winter (great name) who lives in a gothic manor in the moors no less. Vida Winter is most famous for her first book thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation, but it only had twelve tales. What happened to the thirteenth tale? The world and its dog would like to know. Vida Winter has told journalists dozens of stories about her life and childhood, each one more outlandish than the next and not one of them true. Is the thirteenth tale that everyone thirsts for her life story?
There is a tale within the tale about the Angelfield family living in their own gothic house, the beautiful and willful Isabelle, Charlie her ill-fated brother, Isabelle’s odd twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a very practical governess, a very naive doctor, a garden and a fire that will have devastating consequence.
Really this tale is so over the top it should not work, the fact that it does makes it worth every one of its five stars.
Forgot to say. I read this for the October 2016 read with the Gothic Literature Group on Goodreads.
Somehow I think that if I had a similar bad copy of The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield I would have gone to the same efforts to read it. Maybe it’s because Jane Eyre itself is referenced in the book, mostly though I believe it is because it is a well-crafted tale, that lets the reader fall into a story that is larger than life as all good stories should be.
The premise of the book is about a Jayne Eyreish character called Margaret, she has been asked by letter to write a biography of a famous and popular author Vida Winter (great name) who lives in a gothic manor in the moors no less. Vida Winter is most famous for her first book thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation, but it only had twelve tales. What happened to the thirteenth tale? The world and its dog would like to know. Vida Winter has told journalists dozens of stories about her life and childhood, each one more outlandish than the next and not one of them true. Is the thirteenth tale that everyone thirsts for her life story?
There is a tale within the tale about the Angelfield family living in their own gothic house, the beautiful and willful Isabelle, Charlie her ill-fated brother, Isabelle’s odd twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a very practical governess, a very naive doctor, a garden and a fire that will have devastating consequence.
Really this tale is so over the top it should not work, the fact that it does makes it worth every one of its five stars.
Forgot to say. I read this for the October 2016 read with the Gothic Literature Group on Goodreads.
This book demands to be read slowly, perhaps best summarised by a single sentence in chapter 2.
“And even when I answered him in my impeccable Canadian accent, he continued with the slowness of the ages, until I, too, felt my pulse slow, and time became relative, as the physicists have proved it was, so perhaps Ai-Ming and I are still seated there, in a corner of the restaurant, waiting for our meal to come, for a sentence to end, for this intermission to run its course.”
The book is an epic story of China over 60 years from Mao's Cultural Revolution to the Student protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989 (which I barely remember as images of tanks on the news). The story revolves around three classical musicians and their families; Sparrow (Bird of Quiet), a composer, Kai a pianist and Zhuli a violinist. Music and its affects are therefore central to the thinking, behaviours and motives of the characters. I don’t know much about classical music but playing some of the mentioned pieces on Spotify while reading the book certainly helped my understanding here. Thien takes these passionate characters and pitches them against the constraints of communism, the Cultural Revolution and ultimately the rise and fall of the peoples hopes for change at Tiananmen Square. Every character is searching for (and sometimes loosing) their own identity amongst the chaos "I've been searching for myself but I didn't expect to find so many selves of mine.”
There are also intriguing mentions of the Chinese languages, the multiple meanings of its characters and how writing (even hateful writing) can be beautiful and tell you something of the author. The importance of writing can be found in protest signs, musical notation, the hand-copied Book of Records (an epic novel within this epic novel) and in self-criticisms (that citizens are forced to write).
Personally, this book has opened up an understanding to me of the Chinese women I worked with while studying for my PhD in the UK. They too had arrived there on international scholarships and I think finally I understand something of what they were trying to tell me. For this I thank Thien and of course them.
I will
be reading this book again and it is my favourite for the Man Booker prize - though I still have to read Hot Milk.
“And even when I answered him in my impeccable Canadian accent, he continued with the slowness of the ages, until I, too, felt my pulse slow, and time became relative, as the physicists have proved it was, so perhaps Ai-Ming and I are still seated there, in a corner of the restaurant, waiting for our meal to come, for a sentence to end, for this intermission to run its course.”
The book is an epic story of China over 60 years from Mao's Cultural Revolution to the Student protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989 (which I barely remember as images of tanks on the news). The story revolves around three classical musicians and their families; Sparrow (Bird of Quiet), a composer, Kai a pianist and Zhuli a violinist. Music and its affects are therefore central to the thinking, behaviours and motives of the characters. I don’t know much about classical music but playing some of the mentioned pieces on Spotify while reading the book certainly helped my understanding here. Thien takes these passionate characters and pitches them against the constraints of communism, the Cultural Revolution and ultimately the rise and fall of the peoples hopes for change at Tiananmen Square. Every character is searching for (and sometimes loosing) their own identity amongst the chaos "I've been searching for myself but I didn't expect to find so many selves of mine.”
There are also intriguing mentions of the Chinese languages, the multiple meanings of its characters and how writing (even hateful writing) can be beautiful and tell you something of the author. The importance of writing can be found in protest signs, musical notation, the hand-copied Book of Records (an epic novel within this epic novel) and in self-criticisms (that citizens are forced to write).
Personally, this book has opened up an understanding to me of the Chinese women I worked with while studying for my PhD in the UK. They too had arrived there on international scholarships and I think finally I understand something of what they were trying to tell me. For this I thank Thien and of course them.
I will
be reading this book again and it is my favourite for the Man Booker prize - though I still have to read Hot Milk.
This is the most fascinating, skin crawling story I have read in a long time. I think the quality of the writing is probably only 4 stars but the narrative is too good for me not to bump it up. The central character is strong. You should not like her or even understand her motivations very well but instead I found myself feeling sorry for her and desperately hoping for her to get away with it. If you like Stephen King (but with a stronger ending and a better female character) you will probably like this.
In a strange way the story also highlights all the natural beauties of this world while talking about some of the darker and sadder aspects of our lives. It also examines what it means to be human and what our place is in this universe.
I read this novel not knowing that there is now a movie based on the book. A movie that I now must see - as I cannot even contemplate how you would translate.
There is nothing else I can say without spoiling the story.
https://mariahilldublin.wordpress.com/
In a strange way the story also highlights all the natural beauties of this world while talking about some of the darker and sadder aspects of our lives. It also examines what it means to be human and what our place is in this universe.
I read this novel not knowing that there is now a movie based on the book. A movie that I now must see - as I cannot even contemplate how you would translate.
There is nothing else I can say without spoiling the story.
https://mariahilldublin.wordpress.com/
Yes you can judge a book by its cover! This book’s cover actually tells you the whole story and if you were a skin reader like Leora and her Mother you wouldn’t have to look inside to the pages, all would be told by the beautiful markings.
In this Dystopian World, that Alice Broadway has so carefully created, your life story with all it’s achievements and failures is tattooed on your skin. Thus, you let people know who you are (so there is trust), your soul is unburdened onto your skin (so there is hope) and when you die your family can remember who you are from your skin book (so you live on). People who don’t have tattoos known as the Blanks are to be feared.
In the beginning Leora’s father has just died and she begins to suspect that something has been omitted from his skin book. What that secret is will change her life forever…..
This book is well written and it’s one of those stories that you find yourself so engrossed in that it’s a hard shock when you look up from the book and have to engage again in the real world (like having to actually get off at your Bus stop). Some of the plot devises are obvious, some not so. I won’t say which I am not a spoiler. Let’s just say two things. I am going to stop saying I don’t like YA (this and recent reads have proven this to be untrue) and I am already looking forward to the sequel after that ending!
In this Dystopian World, that Alice Broadway has so carefully created, your life story with all it’s achievements and failures is tattooed on your skin. Thus, you let people know who you are (so there is trust), your soul is unburdened onto your skin (so there is hope) and when you die your family can remember who you are from your skin book (so you live on). People who don’t have tattoos known as the Blanks are to be feared.
In the beginning Leora’s father has just died and she begins to suspect that something has been omitted from his skin book. What that secret is will change her life forever…..
This book is well written and it’s one of those stories that you find yourself so engrossed in that it’s a hard shock when you look up from the book and have to engage again in the real world (like having to actually get off at your Bus stop). Some of the plot devises are obvious, some not so. I won’t say which I am not a spoiler. Let’s just say two things. I am going to stop saying I don’t like YA (this and recent reads have proven this to be untrue) and I am already looking forward to the sequel after that ending!
