wordsofclover's Reviews (2.16k)

El is a student in the Scholomance - one of the deadliest schools in the world for those born with magical powers. In the Scholomance, every day could be your last as students are faced with the prospect of being set upon by all kinds of monsters that live within the walls, and the only way of leaving is on Graduation Day. El has managed four years on her own but as her Junior year is almost up, she begins to grudgingly accept some new friendships and alliances that come her way and might help save her life.

This was a really fun audiobook listen - the pacing of the book is quite fast and action-packed with some kind of monster fight happening every couple of pages (even if it's just Orion blasting a few away from El's head) and while I did find there was a lot of information coming my way about how the school worked as well as manna vs malia, I think I understood almost all of it.

The magic school setting is a fun one as this particular setting is different to other kinds of schools in just how dangerous it is. There are no adults or teachers present, the school provides all the education the students need in different topics with the library presenting the students the books they need or want for certain things (or sometimes the spells the school wants them to know). I did have to suspend some disbelief in how any parents would be okay sending their children to be locked away for 5 years in a place that has an extremely high mortality rate but that's just the way this world works.

El as a character is very good - she's really smart and powerful but there's a prophecy about her being able to bring about world destruction - and the way the school reacts to this power of El's is quite funny in many ways. She's snappy and well able to take care of herself but during this book we see moments of vulnerability within her, and ways in which she is a normal teenage girl.

There's not a lot of general teen angst or romance in this book because the students have a lot more to be worrying about but there was a moment near the end of the book that some of it came in and I actually really loved it as it was a lovely, light moment at the end of a book that had been fairly dark - both between El and Orion, and her two girlfriends.

I really liked this, and I'm moving straight onto the next book as it's a fun world to be in for a while. 

Amber is going to Mars - or at least she's been selected to be a part of the final group of contestants in a show that the winners are set to jet off to Mars and begin a new human colony in outer space. Amber's boyfriend Kevin is left behind in their apartment, with all their stuff and the pot plants they meticulously cared for, watching his girlfriend fight for her chance to leave him and everyone else on Earth behind.

This was a fun, light-hearted novel with some serious themes around climate change and remembering that while Mars exploration is a dream many have, in reality we only have one planet and we need to care for it better.

I enjoyed Amber's time on the show and all the over the top challenges she had to compete in to seemingly make living on Mars easier for them - when it turned out that those who would go to Mars would always be criminally underprepared as they weren't actually trained NASA astronauts. I loved the caricature of Geoff Task - the billionaire businessman who was behind the MarsNow project and it wasn't too hard to think about who he could be based on.

Kevin's POV was a real shift and 'other side of the coin' to Amber - where Amber was driven and focused on her goal to get to Mars, Kevin was pretty listless and while a nice guy, his lack of drive or goals was a real turn off and you couldn't always blame Amber for so happily leaving Kev behind. His chapters got a bit frustrating after a while as he just wasn't doing anything to help his situation - I of course wanted him to do a Nick Carraway and write the great Canadian novel as he mused about in his chapters but it never happened.

Near the end of the book, I thought the story dragged on a bit (and got mildly depressing truth be told). I loved the concept of this book (and love the cover), I think it just meandered a bit too much at times and the pacing could have been better. I did enjoy it though!

 

In a world where any woman can be suspected of being a witch, and must be married by the age of thirty, Josephine is starting to worry even more about her future as a 28-year-old black, bisexual woman. Her mother disappeared when she was a teenager, suspected of witchcraft and this has hung over Josephine as she grew into her own womanhood.

This book definitely has a bit of The Handmaid's Tale feel as we are in a world very similar to our own but an extremely patriarchal society where it seems women don't have a huge amount of free will and are expected to choose a life where a man controls most of what they do.

I liked some of what this book explored in terms of a heteronormative society, patriarchy, motherhood and womanhood and then Josephine's experience as a bisexual and biracial woman.

I think this book just didn't give me a huge amount of strong feelings and I thought that the way magic was explored in this book was at times a bit vague. The book was a bit depressing in terms of the continuation of a very patriarchal society and I don't feel there was much of an uprising or showdown in a way I would have liked but I also understand why the author/character made certain decisions.

I think I just wanted more from this book and didn't get it but it might be more of a me problem. 

DI Adam Fawley and the team find their Christmas holidays cut short when a house fire turns from a suspected arson attack to a murder when the bodies of two young children are recovered with no sign of the parents. As the team look into the family and what could have caused such a terrible incident to happen, Adam struggles to keep his home life afloat and keep up with the job.

Having gone into this series slightly backward (I read the fourth book first, and then started from the first), this one is my favourite book following the fourth (Close to Home). I really like this series for the different characters we are following on the team and how with each book and each case, we slowly slowly get to know them all a little better and a few months further on each time - and I also really like the stories for the cases that the team are investigating. I love how in each book the case has separated into a few different tails for different characters to look into, and there's normally a few twists and turns and red herrings before the conclusions.

The conclusions always let me down slightly - they were never bad but I found the first and second book conclusions slightly over the top but thankfully this resolved with No Way Out. I really enjoyed the journey of the investigation as always and I really liked following more of DC Somer who is one of my favourite characters. There were a few red herrings dropped in this book that I thought added a lot to the story and did have me jumping around a bit before the big reveals happened.

One thing I did find odd was the halt of a storyline that I presumed would have carried over from the second book and that is Adam and Alex's fostering of a little boy called Billy. There was no mention of him at all in this book and when they stopped fostering him and how Alex felt about it as we saw her bond with the boy in the second book. I just thought it strange that it didn't go anywhere else. 

16-year-old Bluebell or 'BB' as she's know to friends and family is fat, and she's pretty okay with this. BB loves her food, really loves it and she also loves herself and her body -however issues arrive after BB has an asthma attack during school exams and is instructed to keep a food diary by her doctor, which turns into a bit more an everyday diary as BB talks about her experience living in a bigger body in a world that has been programmed to think thinner is better.

This is a book I honestly wasn't sure about when I started it as I think I felt a little overwhelmed by Bluebelle's personality at the beginning of the book - there was definitely a personality clash but the more story went on, and the more the reader saw the softer, quieter and more insecure sides of BB than than public persona she parades around in, I liked her a lot more.

This is a book I wouldn't recommend reading if you're hungry or if you're dieting as there are so many food descriptions from yummy shepherd's pie with cheesy mash on top, to mushy, vinegary chips, YUM. There are also some gross food descriptions I could have done without to be honest as well, and there were times BB ate or thought about eating some things that really made me wonder.

I love BB's body confidence and how beautiful she knows she is. She does tend to focus on other people's size, especially if they are smaller like her sister Dove and her manager Alicia - she uses descriptions like bony and sharp to describe these people to over emphasise how thin they are in comparison to her. I was a bit iffy about her lackadaisical attitude towards exercise and her overall health, especially given her asthma, but I'm glad this was sorted by the end of the book and we see BB find joy in moving her body in different ways alongside joy of her curves. As someone who generally hates exercise, I understood her reluctance about it but have to admit that some kind of movement most days is better for us in the long run - and you can be fat and fit!

One of the things I loved most in this book was BB's relationship with her little sister Dove who is very opposite of BB in many ways. The way they looked after each other and had little moments together in sisterly companionship was just very nice, and every time I think of Bum Tills now I will probably laugh out loud. 

In this moving memoir, Hannah Pick-Goslar narrates her extraordinary life from the time she and her parents moved from Germany in the wake of Hitler's rise to power and their new life in Amsterdam to the start of WW2 and the increased tensions and fear Jewish people felt all over the world, and the Gosslar's family incarceration in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Through the horror, Hannah holds on to her happy memories with her family and her friends, including Anne Frank whose diary would become famous following her death.

This was a brilliant book, and really well written and paced. Hannah's story is so hard to read at times and it's so hard to believe that these atrocities happened and not just to her family but to millions of Jewish people, and others Hitler opposed. But Hannah's strength, intelligence and positive attitude prevails throughout the story even as she is faced with increased restrictions as a Jewish person in the Netherlands, the death of her beloved mother and their her teenage years snatched away due to her imprisonment in the camps. I loved Hannah's family from her mother and father, to her gentle grandparents and her ever loving aunts and uncles living abroad and always searching for trapped family. I also really felt emotional at Hannah's relationship with Otto Frank following the war and how he helped the girl who was his daughter's best friend and he became a grandfather figure for her children.

I just thought this was a brilliant book, and Dina Kraft who wrote this book for Hannah Pick-Gosslar did an amazing job and helped a wonderful woman put her unbelievable life journey into words to share with the world.