Starts strangely, but the story emerges rapidly…this is the same Doctor Moreau (his replica, at any rate) of HG Wells sci-fi fame, and in this story he is transplanted to the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico in the middle of Mayan unrest among European settlers, and is given a gorgeous and innocent daughter. We see the story from two balanced perspectives: Montgomery, the English Mayordomo and Carlotta, the meek and mild-tempered daughter of the unethical scientist. Secrets spill out in every chapter as we grow to understand the history of Montgomery’s personal dilemma, and the increasing danger surrounding Carlotta in her unpredictable environment.

Bolstered by secondary and tertiary characters of both vile and wonderful dispositions, mysterious motivations, and fractured loyalties, the story swings along as if carried in the hands of untamed animals as they navigate the treetops of a wild jungle, and the darkest truths finally come to light as the security of Carlotta’s safe little world comes undone.

This is a mature story with deeply troubled characters, glorified and harsh and beautifully untouched conditions, set in a period in history that reeled in a tornado of racism and territorial battles in the ‘new world’ of Mexico. A very creative modern take on late 19th century sci-fi that yields to appropriate lingo and the politics prevalent of the era, drawing the reader into the emotion of strained relationships and to sweat amid the humidity of a secluded jungle, building anticipation and dropping hints, exposing the twisted work of a mad scientist, and raising our hackles with red flags as we tumble along on the dreamy naivety of Carlotta and the coattails of Montgomery’s silent suffrage.

One of Moreno-García’s better ones. I’ll have to make a list of best to less for this author as I’m reading so much of her stuff this year, but this is probs #2 on that list, with The Beautiful Ones taking the chocolate.

By the time I read this I’d forgotten a lot of what happened in the first two books, no fault of the story, but when I began reading it the pieces started to return. 

Full of adventure, conflict, magic, and sacrificial love. A little confusing with the two parallel story lines being told from first person POV every chapter back to back with no context of time-change.

The characters are a gathering of fantasy-types, conflicted and grey, with dark pasts and complex relationships.

It’s good YA storytelling, though nothing literary or poetic. I don’t know why I’m ever expecting literary or poetic in a YA fantasy novel…

The ending is unexpected (was it? Really?), but even though I didn’t initially love where it was going, I finished the last bitter-sweet page, then backed up and read it again—and it was better the second time. And then it lingered and settled and yah, it was okay, it was really all okay in the end…

A wry historical fiction novel with an over-imaginative heroine who underplays the vitality of her espionage role in the war on the home front. But we follow her, rooting for her, even when we think she is acting strange (can we trust her?) and possibly should be more suspicious of the people and instructions that come her way.

The whole Cold War is on a corrupted course, peppered with conundrums, and no one knows whose side anyone is on or who can be trusted, because everyone is lying, or a double agent, or an agent of neither country nor nation but solely serving self as best able. What a twisted mess of cloak-and-dagger and double crossing, messy secreted murders, and hidden identities. 

A fast read I gobbled in one sitting, and then had to sit some more and think over those details…

A collection of short stories by the Queen of Murder Mystery, but these stories are not all murder mysteries. Christie dabbles in speculative fiction, psychological thriller, supernatural romance, horror, some shorts with the feel of Mousetrap and And Then There Were None, one gossipy piece, and this potpourri set of stories even includes a delightful short Hercule Poirot mystery.

Ends on a good note with the last two stories being the best of the bunch; these will add a harlequin smattering of flavour to lazy Sunday afternoons. Each story takes between 20 minutes to an hour to read, and each are separate and contained stories, great for the coffee table in a welcoming living room.

Well, this is difficult.

For several reasons, this isn’t quite 4 stars. I want to add like another .4  of a star—for creativity, complexity, and not so much for the actual text of the novel, but for the artwork on the cover and the inclusion of beautiful and unique indexes, and a story-focused map that transforms New York into a battlefield for the Greek gods, the descendent warrior families, and their followers.

My critical bone over the writing kicks in, because after all, we’re rating writing here.  The actual execution of the story only deserves a middle-road 3, maybe less. It’s clunky, wordy, and drags out explanations in places, but seems to miss important details in others; it uses misplaced expletives that come off sounding juvenile and awkward rather than natural; bases relationships on unsteady foundations as these appear or are destroyed by a word, relationships balanced on a precarious trust—and trust simply turns to mist on a passing wind or miraculously out of nothing finds solid ground on which to flourish.

The pace is fast, so fast at times you have to stop and go back and wonder what in the world you missed along the way, and yet there isn’t anything to add.

The characters are developed quickly based on flashbacks that reveal their historical connections. Don’t miss the introductory glossary of family lines at the beginning of the book, and the index of characters and families at the end of the book; these are vital for catching nuances included in the story that no one will take time to explain, though there is enough explanatory dialogue between battle scenes to fill quite a few pages.

The fight scenes are numerous, plenty, lots of blood and if a cat has nine lives, Lore has 20, because she’s bloodied and broken from page one, and her trauma is more than physical.

Overall, the myths of Greek gods come alive in the pages, in the streets of New York in this 7-day competitive battle, cycled every 7 years as ordered and upheld by the gods. The concept is wild and exciting, and would make for an adventurous video game. The story races towards the finish, with battle scenes arising in iconic New York parks and museums, allegiances twisting and flip-flopping between participants until no one knows who to trust, but many of the combat-trained participants share the same end goal, which is to end the cycle of epic battling, and they work to destroy the cycle by engaging in violent blood baths and fire storms until the last day.

If you like that sort of thing…

Wow… 

It’s Christmas morning and I’ve been up since before 6am like an anxious child, and so, I started reading this novel, which has been on my list since it was published and I’ve wanted to read it in one go, as I knew that’s what it would compel me to do—and lo, that’s (almost) what I’ve done this morning. Hark, it’s Christmas morning. Lo and behold, I’ve read it all.

What a story…! And not implausible. I did think that the story would be about the twins, though, and when it shifted to the daughter, I was waiting for it to return to the mother’s story—and perhaps include the twin sister’s—but we stayed with the daughter. Not what I expected, but it circled round to the twins after all in a perfectly natural manner. I admit, I wanted more of the story of the twins from the start, and that seemed to pass too quickly over too many years, and then was unraveled and revealed from hindsight’s perspective.

The tertiary characters were a collection of interesting eccentrics who served to highlight the more ‘normal’ characteristics of the otherwise deemed socially odd twins.

A story of racism and systems of racism still digging nails in deep, even where least expected. A beautiful story that gives real hope for reconciliation. 

Much more cheek in this one than the last—and it’s fun for all that and the intertwining relationships, friends and foes, and a slew of people I want to love but no one is sure who can be trusted—not even me. Kept me engaged with the secrets and insinuations and all the coiling death threats. I just didn’t know what way this was going to go—and all the myriad plots braid together to make for a very readable adventure. 

 

Again, another YA that’s not super literary or poetic in any way, but it’s all plot and adventure, and plenty of it, with more talking animals. Characters have unique voices and the four main voices, coming through with differing narrative styles, work with one another to move thighs along, even when they are working against each other. 

 

Major philosophical questions raised: Who is real and what is real and what makes a person real? Major political questions raised: Who should lead—the people or a sovereign? And how should that be decided? But who decides? All the complex questions are explored from various perspectives, creating empathy and understanding on all sides, but not quite resolving the political and social dilemma—and meanwhile, the islands are sinking, enemies are rising, and time is running short. 

 

I appreciated the allegorical confrontation of selfish motives in leaders, those who have arrived to positions of power and yet ‘serve’ only as a salve to the stinging bitterness that propels their grasp at revenge; it was refreshing to see their bitterness outed—and second chances offered. Whether these were taken, I’ll leave you to read… the contrast was drawn clearly to well-intentioned leaders and the difficult decisions made by them, sometimes wrongly interpreted, on behalf of their people. The isolation of leadership stings on a seat of power, but the love for the people, when chief motivator, wins the long battle. 

 

The surprise at the end was very unexpected… 

 

If in the first I wasn’t racing to pick up the 2nd, at the end of this one, my curiosity is adequately piqued… 

The interesting thing about this book is the historical context that paints the common suffering of middle and lower class women in England in the time of Jack the Ripper. The book does not sell itself as the tale of The Ripper, nor as a new hypothesis about his presumed identity, but as a very intense look at the five women assumed murdered by Jack. On this promise, it delivers. One can see how a serial killer of the Ripper’s calibre would thrive in a society that treated its women this way, and the question arises about the responsibility of community and society, not only the Ripper, for the conditions and hardships these women were expected to suffer. In the end, their deaths almost seem a release from the daily struggle against pending death. It’s an incredible feat that any of these women survived, let alone gave birth multiple times to living infants, the conditions were so horrid; if a modern teen or young adult had to survive in a similar situation, they’d be dead quite young, with no help from a Ripper.

The unfolding of these stories makes one wonder if perhaps there even was a Ripper, that maybe these were five separate violent murders, provoked or accidental, premeditated or impulsive; one might understand how the anger and emotion and charged injustice spilled over into the night streets, crawling with desperate, hungry, dishevelled, and hopeless men and women who had resorted to animalistic behaviour, unbridled in their pursuit of vile passion, or the mere desire to forget the life they were cursed to continue living.

I didn’t come to this book looking for new insights about the Ripper, and that should be the furthest from the reader’s expectations, rather, I wanted to gain an understanding of the lives these women might have lived prior to their violent ends. It is full of this socio-cultural historical content in research-laden pages of insight, and a fair bit of educated assumptions, opening the reader’s eyes to the lecherous treachery of the 19th Century domestic and social realities that our predecessor sisters were forced to endure.

In a couple of these cases, it seems that spouse or snubbed lover may have been guilty of the murder, though in the age predating DNA evidence, this proof could not be pinned on these abusive, neglectful husbands, and in a day when a woman had no rights and little to sustain her if rejected by her man, it seems they got off with murder, with the convenient image of The Ripper at their disposal to cover their own crimes.

One can hardly blame these distraught women for seeking to disappear in the drink, if they had access to the mind-numbing substance. We’ll never know the truth of what happened those dark desperate nights in Whitechapel, but the assumptions drawn here can’t be far off reality.

It is a straightforward account written with easy-flowing style, and in conclusion, it circles back to its thesis statement; the author berates the culture that reveres the Ripper, calls the reader to poignantly recognise and put an end to the glorification of misogyny, and to stop giving voice to the fantastical victimiser.

Ohhh alright then, flip sakes, not enough of a 3 to be a 4, so like 3.45 ⭐️ because those hefty passages of explaining all the explanatory details the author felt needed over-explaining really subtracted from the flow of the adventure this one was advertised as in all the synopses. 

Sure, still, the adventure is wild and intense, but perpetrates a touch of confusion in the shrugging acceptance by which the heroes engage their task.

But…this second addition only leaves us hanging on a cliff, wondering what Will’s fate will be and how Lyra wields such silent power (and yet does so little in this novel) for the number of characters who pop up without much purpose or reason other than to praise Lyra. This strange quest to kill the creator, annihilate destiny, and discover dust (Dark Matter) flings us between daemons (spirit beings) and angels and witches and sceptres and a group of mental children ripped straight out of <i>Lord of the Flies</i>…

Not gonna lie: it’s a weird one, but it’s a twisting, character-complicated adventure, and though the uncertain (accidental?) quest is often overshadowed by long passages of ideological dissertation wrapped up in ‘you-didn’t-know-that?’ dialogues, it has its moments of shining emotion and captivating suspense.

Perhaps Book 3 will be able to tie up the myriad loose ends Book 2 has managed to unravel since Book 1. 

An intrigue-building third edition to the series. We move forward another few generations, to the descendants of Bayta—specifically the great granddaughter who aims to have the same spirit. This one feels like a short piece of a much longer story, and at this point the story is starting to seem eternal…

Hari Seldon’s predictions seem to have gone wrong the way things are turning out, but the true believers see the truth and make the connections. The Mule looked to have thwarted Seldon, but the Second Foundation proves him wrong—and Arkady, our witty 14 year old, might outsmart them all.

The only thing I don’t like about this series is that you get to know a character and then they’re gone…