wordsofclover's Reviews (2.16k)

I received this book from the publishers via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Kyuri, Miho, Wonna, Ara - four women living in Seoul, South Korea, and all in their own way affected by the current culture's obsession with what face looks like a good, acceptable face, and how young women should act and look like. Kyuri has a face that she's spent thousands on to look perfect but she is horrid debt and under control of her madam and the room salon, Miho is a carefree artist that is naturally beautiful but she's too poor for her rich boyfriend to ever be allowed to marry her, Ara is plain and happy that way, mute due to a childhood accident and obsessed with a K-Pop star. And Wonna is older, and more damaged than the rest, and starting out a pregnancy she is terrified to reveal, revel in or lose.

I ended up really enjoying this book for a myriad of reasons. The writing itself was very pleasant to read, was clear in its intentions and the timeline/pace of the story was fast and immersive. I really felt at times that I was in the rooms with the girls and hanging out with them and listening to their conversations. There was something attractive about them all and I genuinely liked them, faults and all. I wanted to protect them yet at the same time, enjoy life with them.

I feel this book gives a really interesting glimpse at the toxic beauty standards that is so rife in South Korea and Asian culture. I had been aware of some of it before - the skin bleaching, extreme diets and exercise from K-Pop stars (or factories) - but seeing how it affects ordinary girls and how the desire to look a certain way can lead them to an almost 'acceptable' version of prostitution was almost hard to believe. The book also did a good job at really showing the class divide in South Korea too - the difference between growing up rich or being one of the chaebol, and growing up with little to no money - the lack of opportunity people got and how young women had to look at a future where they would never be able to afford their own homes.

I wish we got a bit more - I wonder if we need Wonna at all considering the rest of the book was focused on younger characters in a different stage of life. I liked the female friendship and how they came together near the end but I'm not sure if Wonna's POV gave anything particularly new or striking to the story in comparison to the others. The ending was slightly abrupt but left off with a nice image of women supporting women. 

 On Christmas Eve, Maeve Moone disappears and it's not long before her worried friends and family find her - and discover something awful. The story flips back to the start of Maeve's relationship with her husband Murtagh, their marriage and children, as well as how her death affect her husband and children after she's gone.

This is a book I couldn't really make my mind up about. From the start, the story deals very heavily with mental illness and you know the character of Maeve does take her own life - leaving a devastated family behind. Which means as you're reading the past storyline, you're doing it with a heavy heart, knowing what's coming for everyone, and the torture and pain Maeve is going to go through as her depression takes hold.

While I appreciate books shining a light on mental illness, and the terrible things it can do to a family, there was something about this story that made me feel uncomfortable. It may be because it seemed that Maeve (despite being treated as a teenager in the US) never seemed to seek help or her family never encouraged her to see someone and receive therapy or medication for her dark down days. And when you get Maeve's POV, her thoughts are very painful to read ("It's better to love a dead mother than a mad one" - no, on so many levels).

The LGBT storyline was one I did not see coming at all, and it did shock me a nit when I realised things were going that way but it was also lovely. I really liked seeing this type of storyline for a character who is older and coming into their own identity in a way that may have been impossible or even harder when they were younger. There was a sad scene of homophobia in the book near the end but it was made better by a rather wonderful lecture from the parish priest (who would have thought?) and a showing out of the village in support that brought a lump to my throat.

There were certainly elements of this book I liked but there were too many bits that made me feel weird and sad that I don't think I can articulate properly so it can't be higher than a 3-star for me.

I listened to this on audiobook narrated by Gerry O'Brien and wouldn't rate it highly either. The female voices, and American accents were a bit silly and painful. 

When Mikael Lindnord is struggling through Ecuador with his adventure team, he ends up with an unexpected friend - a scruffy stray he names Arthur. It's not too long before Mikael realises Arthur has adopted him, and as they get closed to the finish line, he needs to figure out how to save Arthur from a life of pain and neglect and bring him home to Sweden.

This was just a lovely book that is perfect for dog lovers, owners and anyone who juts likes a nice story! I loved learning about the world of adventure racing, as well as Mikael's relationship with Arthur and I truly appreciated the love and kindness Mikael and his friends and family all showed towards Arthur, and how much everyone worked to bring him home and get him his best life.

The writing in this is simple but does the job perfectly. There's a nice conversationalist quality to it -Mikael is telling a story, and you can tell it's a story he likes telling as it's full of adventure, racing, life and death scenarios and then the addition of a gorgeous dog! I liked that Mikael put an emphasis on the state of animal welfare in Ecuador and encouraged others to donate or look into ways of helping other dogs like Arthur. 

When Addie and her sister Deb travel to their friend's wedding in Scotland, they're excited for a girly road trip. But things all go askew, when they another car rear ends them, and their road trip is crashed by Marcus and Dylan - who happens to be Addie's ex. As feelings and tempers fly, Addie and Dylan start to figure out they may not be really over each other.

This book was well paced and had some enjoyable writing - including some witty, easy flowing dialogue and some comedic moments that genuinely had me laughing out loud. There are loads of elements in this book and in Beth O'Leary's writing in general that I do really like, and feel like I should love but I never seem to love her stories as much as others do and this one overall, was disappointing for me.

As nice as the writing was, the storyline of the road trip started to bore me quite quickly and I think a lot of this centred on Addie and Dylan as a couple, and the fact I just didn't really care about them and I actually I kind of wanted them to stay apart from each other rather than get back together. I appreciated the effort that Beth O'Leary put into this book to shine a light on toxic relationships - that occur in your family as well as with friends, and how easy it is to be trapped and almost blind to these kind of relationships and treatment until it's too late. There was also a fantastic chapter in this around consent involving an attempted sexual assault and I really like how the author phrased it that consent isn't something that just stops mattering at some point during sexual interaction, it moves along and can be taken away at any point and that has to be respected and listened to.

But back to Addie and Dylan, I just didn't like them. I liked Deb the best, and weirdly Rodney but I feel like Deb could have had so much to her, and I would have liked to know more about her mind worked other than her deciding to have a baby via sperm donor and hook up with random truck drivers. I also thought the breastfeeding lark with Deb was overdone - 100% understand a woman needs to breastfeed but when you're away from a baby for a whole weekend, surely you'd pump and dump instead of attempting to store breast milk in a hot car?

Dylan was so off-putting for me, and I thought he was honestly a waste of time when it came to Addie's time and energy. I appreciate there was some conversation near the end how he was suffering from depression and was taking meds and going to therapy but this felt very rushed and thrown in at the very end (literally a couple of sentences). It didn't change the fact that for the majority of the book Dylan had been this wet blanket who moped around on his father's money - a father whom he hated but was still happy taking handouts from. And Marcus was just the wooorsssst. I find it hard to believe anyone would put up with Marcus's behaviour - especially towards a significant other and he had the worst excuse, not that there would have been a good excuse.

So yeah, this story didn't so it for me but I still enjoy Beth's writing as a whole and I really like her sense of humour that often comes out in her books too.

Audio: Narrator was excellent, lovely voice and the story itself was just really engrossing, and the audio narrator made it nice to listen to despite some of the creepy goings on!

When Alice and Leo move into a new home in London, Alice feels overjoyed. But as she gets to know her neighbours, soon she discovers something terrible - the previous owner of the home was murdered - right in her very bedroom. Something about the murder - and the verdict it was the husband that killed her - doesn't sit right with Alice and she finds herself eyeing up those closest to her with suspicion.

Like all BA Paris books, this served up exactly what I was looking for - a domestic suspense with fast, plotty writing and the type of story that had you jumping from one guess to the next while waiting with bated breath to find out the truth. I really liked this book from start to finish and while I wouldn't say the big 'whodunnit' was a complete gasp shock, I really liked how we got there.

BA Paris is brilliant at just bringing a story together from all angles, and giving you characters you like and distrust all at the same time. Her books are generally always very domestic in setting too and are not full of bodies and blood and gore but a normal setting of a suburban London street with kids playing out the front. And this ramps up the tension more sometimes because it feels like the crimes happening could happen anywhere.

This wasn't one of my favourites of BA Paris but definitely not one of the worst I've read. A good middle of the stack! And I definitely recommend the audiobook.

I received this book from the publishers via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book is just so beautiful and painful all at the same time.

The Prophets tells the story of Samuel and Isaiah, two young men who have grown up as slaves on a plantation, and through a life of hardship, pain and being treated in the worst ways possible, they found each other and fell in love. Two pieces of one whole. The rest of the plantation don't take much notice of Samuel and Isaiah, leaving them to find peace in a world of pain together, until another slave called Amos begins to preach the Bible and turn the others against them. At the same time, the plantation owner's son, Timothy, comes home and takes an interest in Isaiah that could prove deadly.

I just loved this book so much. The writing and the characters are absolutely exquisite and the way Robert Jones Jr flipped between the story on the plantation to the voice of 'The Prophets' and then also a story from a tribe in Africa where a female King reins with her male wives, and is suspicious of the new skinless wanderers that have appeared . There is so much in this book that is very hard to read - how everyone on the plantation is treated, and the pain and suffering and trauma every character holds inside of themselves is A LOT but it's also full of beautiful moments from friendship, to love and it comes down to the very special bond between Samuel and Isaiah and that how is more than just two people in love but two souls that are one and that should never be parted.


"This was how he would engage in his own bit of rebellion: he leaned against the wooden bit of the fence that surrounded the barn and stared at the heavens. Crowded, he thought, and wondered if, perhaps , the abundance was too much ; if the weight of holding on was too heavy, and the night , being as tired as it was, might one day let go, and all the stars would come tumbling down, leaving only the darkness to stretch across everything."

I also recommend reading Robert Jones Jr acknowledgements at the end of the book as it is definitely one of my favourites I've ever read. 

 When Ames gets his girlfriend/boss pregnant, he immediately falls into a gender identity crisis due to his past as a transwoman and his complicated relationship with his own masculinity, and what it means to be a 'father'. In an act of desperation, Ames ends up enlisting Reese - his ex girlfriend and also a transwoman - to join his family with Katherine, and become another mother to their child. The three have to figure out what their queer family will look like, and what it means for all of them while they also battle their own issues with family, and parenthood.

This book was well-written and I found the topic just really fascinating as it was explored throughout the book. It's one of the first books I've read that truly explored what it means to be a transwoman today, and not only that but just someone constantly battling with their own gender identity and queerness. And how that comes in a lot of different forms, and is a different experience for every single person.

I like how the idea of family was explored in this book, and how family is so much more than than poster family of a man, woman, baby and a dog with a white picket fence. It can mean a variety of different things from biological family to surrogate family among friends, mother-daughter relationships among transwomen and drag queen etc.

I don't think anyone was really likeable in this book but I don't think they were suppose to be anyway. Everyone was very human in a way, and Ames, Reese and Katherine were all f***ed up in their own ways from growing up in a body that you didn't want to be in, to dealing with racism and cultural identity as well as messed up relationships, divorces, abuse and miscarriage. I don't understand why Ames had brought in Reese before mentioning anything to Katherine, that was really weird but also showed how Ames thought of Reese in his own head too and I think the dynamic of their relationship was just intense and interesting and could probably have been another 400 pages on its own. I also really didn't like how Katherine kept throwing in the possibility of abortion into the mix like a grenade and a threat. It was done in a way that felt very emotionally manipulative.

I was disappointed that the book only spanned the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and I know the book ends on a bit of a quizzical note and I think each reader has to individually decide themselves what happens next but I was expecting to see the full 6-9 months of the pregnancy, and the relationship between the three parents, so when we didn't get that and we didn't get any scenes where they actually had to parent a real human baby and forget about their own selfishness for a time, I felt hard done by as this would have just been a great thing to see.

Overall, a good book and one that made me think a lot about and the first book in what i hope will be many I will read that really examines queer families and non-traditional families.
 

When Georgie goes to bed one night, she doesn't expect to wake up on a spaceship having been abducted by evil green men in suits - yep, aliens. When a bid at freedom goes wrong, Georgie and he fellow captives find themselves on a strange planet full of snow and ice. Adventuring out, Georgie then meets a mysterious blue hulk of an alien who seems convinced she's his mate. She uses the attention to her advantage to help the others but can't help noticing the surge of attraction she holds for her strange saviour as well.

This was honestly just an entertaining read that I actually ended up enjoying more than I expected to. There's a lot in this book that is a bit silly and nonsensical but I didn't pick this up expecting an extremely indepth science fiction book - I wanted a bit of fun and that's what I got. While the start of the book doesn't start out great with an upsetting scene involving sexual assault that I'm not 100% sure needed to really be in there, it slowly gets nicer to the point when the communication between Georgie and Vektal is super sweet.

While I enjoyed the romance and the sexy times (very convenient how built for human female pleasure Vektal was, I must say), I actually just really liked the brief description and exploration of the planet we did get, and how Vektal and his people lived inside the caves as well. Learning more about all of this, not necessarily the future romantic set-ups would make me keen to read more of the books.