An emotional, engaging historical novel, so full of twists and surprises, even as it stuck true to the stories of the women it was modelled upon… Absolutely absorbing. I loved this story. 

It’s a bit dry innit. I’ve had more chemistry with the man from the Polo ads than what these two enemy-lovers build their flimsy relationship on.

However, let it be said that the plot is certainly intricate and interesting as plots go; it’s not all starry-eyed witless teenage love.

Reveals are unexpected. Cool…

I think that’s about all the celestial good I can think of…a unique story, the execution of it wanted more passion in the telling. 

emotional, sentimental, melancholic, nostalgic, devastating, yet always hopeful

The supernatural elements undergird our belief in a happy ending… and this story emphasises our desperate need for the supernatural in our bleak hopeless existence.

There’s a sweetness to the blind hopeless hope demonstrated here. Again, beautiful writing from Arden.

A feel-good nostalgic novel, full of the Christmas spirit and themes of reconciliation and (a hesitant) romance, but also includes moral and ethical dilemmas through the complex lives of its very human, very relatable characters. 

At times the writing was a touch distant and stiff (an ironic criticism considering…), but overall, the unfolding of a reluctant flower to its vulnerable, personal, sentimental heart.

Lovely moral: It’s always worth taking a chance on love; no matter the result, the choice to choose love is rarely the wrong one. 

A modern take on the cosy English murder mystery. This vicar is not quite the sleuthing saint of dear Father Brown—and not all the naughty of auld Father Ted—but something in between, and thus quite more relatable in the long run.

And in the mix of murders and trysts, our vicar is desperately trying to be a decent father to a pubescent daughter and an upright Father to his unruly parishioners. Somehow, he stumbled across the solutions to several interwoven mysteries, but not without getting a bit of blood on his own hands along the way. 

A good addition to this series in an age old genre of entertainment.

Alia becomes a much more appealing character in this second part of the story. It’s well-crafted and original storytelling; solid character development; unique world build; a deeper dive into the triangle of relationships initiated in the first rollercoaster of the series; worthwhile entertainment. 

 

I liked the invented religion and religious prophecy and related aspects, it added another layer of interest to this addictive read. 

This is … often good writing in chunks. And then it repeats and repeats and repeats and... The author is obsessed with white and white and white and repetition over and again. This novel could have been …oof… probably 8h shorter (what is that like? 300 pages too long?) it was a BIT OF A long haul to get to the end. The majority of the middle narrative was action and action and repeated action (and a lot of bedroom action) that all didn’t accomplish much until round about the 80% mark.

The ending was superb. Grand wee twist. Just took too long to get there imo.

Won’t be reading the third for a while.
Exhausted after this one.

But I’ll come back to it…

starts a bit dark and ugly 
turns morbid & hilarious
becomes increasingly absurd
but the plot moves along as the mismatched participants engage in their most serious quest
ends in relief & romance

short enough to enjoy in a reasonable time frame

This was a heart-warming, heart-wrenching, heart-mending surprise of a novel, stuffed with wit and charm, some naive passion and a mature romance, a mouthful of banter, and all the delectable literary truffles you’d expect from a book with shelves of books on the cover and the word ‘book’ in the title. 

 

Each character is embroiled in colossal real-life mistakes that cause irreversible trauma and life-long damage, and each is presented with a simple impossible question: what will you forgive? 

 

The unpredictable responses from this motley cast of serendipitous friends and lovers confronts our piety, humbles us, and mends us. We are inadvertently asked to evaluate our own quick-to-judge assessments of the people in our lives, and even those on the fringes, and the asking is gentle and kind, the extension of the forgiving hand of the person we’ve hurt the most… 

 

This is not simply a novel, it’s a whole purpose, the divine ambition and momentous objective and subtle intent that should be and can be applied to every novel we read; it’s precisely a novel about how to read a book—as if our lives depended on it… 

 

This will probably be one of my top reads of 2025, and it’s only January… 

A dark fantasy that dabbles in all the evil wiles of religion and royalty while teetering our anti-heroine between several reckless and rash romances. Lore is special—and she knows it, but she doesn’t quite know the whole of it, and certainly not the why. All the mystery around her origins and the dark power she possesses keeps us reading, and the reveal near the end is kinda weird, but fits the stretched limits of this macabre tale. 

 

The setting is a fantasy take on pre-revolutionary Paris, including dirty Kings and twisted Cardinals and all the terror of the city’s skull-stocked catacombs—with characters who learned to speak English in 21st Century New York. 

 

It’s definitely unique, and apart from a personal dislike with several cartoonish voices in the audiobook narration (the pronunciation of August sounded like: ‘A-goosed’ —and if that didn’t cause a few misplaced giggles…), it was a fascinating read.