I love Christmas and in many ways, I am still a kid at heart (more looking at life with excitable eyes way, not so much the tantrums). So, it makes sense that among all the other things I love about the festive season that I really enjoy reading kids’ books Continue Reading
Books
Birthday book review: Trashlands by Alison Stine
Until the COVID pandemic came along and furiously and comprehensively disrupted life as we once knew it, most, if not all, people would have had trouble thinking in terms of a world ruinously different from our own. As a hypothetical concept, many of us accepted that without actual, substantive action Continue Reading
Book review: The Mistletoe Pact by Jo Lovett
For many people, Christmas is an impossibly romantic time of the year. While this applies to the heat of a Southern Hemisphere festive season too, it is far more easily conjured in the Northern side of the globe where falling snow, twinkling lights in early dark nights and decorations placed Continue Reading
Book review: A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1) by Alix E. Harrow
One of the inestimable joys of reading anything by Alix. E Harrow, who has given the superlatively evocative joys of The Ten Thousand Doors of January and The Once and Future Witches, is her sublimely invigorating gift for gloriously reinventing well-worn tropes and cliches for the better. Equipped with rich Continue Reading
Book review: Anything But Fine by Tobias Madden
When you dive into a book, there are three key things you hope will be presented and accounted for: Characters who are so fully-realised that you swear they are but a sentence or two from leaping off the page. Writing that sweeps you up in its grasp such that you Continue Reading
Book review: How to Survive Family Holidays by Jack Whitehall (with Hillary and Michael Whitehall)
Families are, by and large, rather wonderful things. They give us a sense of belonging, a place to call home, people who notionally, and often, literally have our back and a vital brick in our identity. We need our families – but do we, for all those laudable positives, want Continue Reading
Book review: Miss Treadway & the Fields of Stars by Miranda Emmerson
Those jarring sounds you hear as you dive deeper and deeper into the emotionally complex but thoughtful accessible novel Miss Treadway & The Field of Stars by Miranda Emmerson are illusions being comprehensively and almost irretrievably shattered. In the world of 1965 London, smack bang in the middle of the Continue Reading
Book review: Freckles by Cecilia Ahern
At the heart of every one of us is this insistent need to belong, to fit in, to be unconditionally cared for, loved and part of something that extends far beyond ourselves. It’s understandable; we are social creatures who have evolved to always be in concert with others, to find Continue Reading
What the world needs now … Station Eleven drops evocative trailer
SNAPSHOTBased on the book of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven is set before and after a fictional flu pandemic. The inhabitants try to rebuild their world while holding onto the best of what they lost. (synopsis via nine.com.au) If watching the teaser trailer for HBO Continue Reading
Book review: Happy Hour by Jacquie Byron
One of the great pleasures of life is sitting down with a book and finding that the blurb on the back cover, though wonderfully poetic, beautifully written and fulsomely enticing, does not do full justice to the novel before you. Clearly it’s done a brilliant job of luring you in Continue Reading