DNF at around 48%

I kept going and kept going and realised that I felt like I'd been reading for hours and it was only 15 mins.

I'm kind of interested in the story but it's just too slow and meandering and I'm not really enjoying it so that's that.

*listened on Audible*

This was really engaging and interesting. I know absolutely nothing about Marie de Guise, though I must have read about her before because I have read the biography of Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser.

Anyway, the title is a bit misleading, she barely had any involvement with Henry tbh. Aside from that, this was great. I always find the French history a bit tricky, I can't keep all the nobles in my head, so the mind did wander a bit at times but it kept my attention in general and I definitely learned lots of new things.

Sometimes I feel like I shouldn't rate books if I haven't finished them but I feel pretty confident that this is going to continue to be rubbish.

The writing is so poor. I can't imagine ever talking to my sibling the way these sisters talk to one another.

I barely managed 50 pages so I can't see how the plot is going to go but spending 50 pages waiting for them to all turn up and tell the same bloody story to every single one of them individually in the same stilted weirdly formal language was enough for me to call time on the thing.

I got tempted to read this through the weird fervour around it on SM. Another lesson to myself to stick to my guns and ignore most people's views on books.

This was glorious. And heartbreaking. It felt so constricting I felt at times I couldn't make it to the end. It managed to convey the beauty of a Russian winter with the absolute horror of its impact during the siege.

This is the second book I have read recently set in a siege - the siege of Sarajevo being the last one I read. Both exploring the idea of what this kind of experience does to an individual's humanity. This one was more hopeful I think despite the sheer scale of the loss of human life that winter.

I am on a run of cracking books. I struggled with the pace of this in places but I thought it was brilliant. I felt so trapped in Cushla's world, and the intersections of sex, religion and class were really well explored. The spiral of events felt so inevitable. Though this history feels far away, it's not. And it's a kind of oppression being lived still all over the world.

I am struggling to order my thoughts about this. It has baffled me in many ways.

This felt like a very detached novel; the unnamed narrator felt entirely self-contained, their world view an odd one. It works - though we are inside her head throughout, the viewpoint felt ostracising.

Despite references to modern technology, the setting felt timeless, as well as geographically unspecific. The root of the ostracisation appears to be antisemitism - and there are references throughout that seemed to make this clear - but the tone and claustrophobia could have spoken to other forms of discrimination and suppression.

It's a novel to be studied and unpicked and I am not sure I enjoyed it so much as I could appreciate and respect what it was doing.

I enjoyed this one much more than The Kite Runner but I think it still suffered the same issues. I didn't feel the characters were fully drawn, they did feel like stereotypes in places. I was left with the same overwhelming sadness - reading this in 2024 - that the book ends with hope - but the Taliban are back in charge in Afghanistan today.

Having said all that, it was, like the Kite Runner, highly readable. I cared about these characters and what would happen to them. I felt immersed in the Afghan history - something I am only just starting to get the shape of outside of the usual Western narrative. I preferred the female perspective here, and that it stayed in Afghanistan mostly throughout.

I've rounded down as this is probably a 3.5*

I am very fortunate not to have experienced any real loss in my life yet. Perhaps it's this that left me feeling cold early on. I can't relate to this level of emotional breakdown.

The egg idea was cute, but Addy just annoyed me for a good portion of this. The very interiority of his grief meant that I couldn't really get into it. I enjoyed it more as it went on, and the concept was good - the egg served very much as a metaphor for the walls Addy was erecting around himself - and the breaking down of his barriers had me turning pages but I felt like it had potential to be more than it was.

Having really loved Panenka, I was pleased to get more of the similar here. Leonard and Hungry Paul isn't really the same - it has that gentle quietness about it that I so enjoyed about Panenka. This felt partly a little more twee which accounts for the 4 stars but it was a very enjoyable story about ordinary people and their lives.

Not my usual kind of read but I thoroughly enjoyed this.

As usual I did get a fair few plot points - that Jamie was the second gunman was obvious. That there was a bomb in the theatre was obvious. I didn't get the twist with PC Beard but I did clock, at the point he was helping get the kids into the theatre that there was something off with him.

But, it was an absolute page turner, I found it really tense and suspenseful. My heart was in my mouth for Rafi and Basi and I was glad for the good outcome.