If you ask most people, especially inveterate readers for whom books hold an almost mystically romantic quality, working in a bookstore would have to be the best of all possible worlds. The people who work there talk highly about the merits and rewards of helping books and people make happily Continue Reading
Books
Book review: Ledge by Stacey McEwen
There is something breathtakingly wondrous about being plunged into a whole new fantastical world, especially one as expansively and vividly realised as that in Stacey McEwan’s debut novel, Ledge, the first entry in The Glacian Trilogy. While the title might be taut and sparing in its use of letters, the Continue Reading
Book review: The Bellbird River Country Choir by Sophie Green
Despite all its lustrous, wondrously glittering possibility, life has a way sometimes, or much of the time if it has dealt you more than a few harsh blows, of feeling like it’s done as much as it’s going to do. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have given up on life; Continue Reading
Book review: The Brink by Holden Sheppard
It will hardly come as a newsflash to anyone that we live in a world with very fixed, and by “fixed” I mean concreted and superglued in place with all the concrete and super glue every produced, idea about everything. EVERYTHING. Of course, no one ever stands up and hands Continue Reading
Book review: Isaac and the Egg by Bobby Palmer
A peculiarly awful thing happens when someone you love deeply dies. Suddenly a world that made sense, that had order and purpose, that had joy, and yes, sometimes sadness and angst because what life doesn’t, isn’t any of those things anymore. It just suddenly ISN’T. What do you do with Continue Reading
UPCOMING READS: A Crown and Ivy and Glass by Claire Legrand (The Middlemist Trilogy – book 1)
SNAPSHOTBridgerton meets A Court of Thorns and Roses in this new fantasy-romance series. The story centers around Gemma, Farrin, and Mara Ashbourne, three sisters in a noble magic family who must fight hidden dark forces trying to destroy the Middlemist—an ancient barrier that protects their world from the dangerous realm Continue Reading
Book review: Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky #1) by Rebecca Roanhorse
A world-weary lament often thrown up, laced with more than a little weary resignation, is that there is nothing truly original under the sun, the product of the fact that though humanity is rich with imagination, that there are so many types of stories that can be told. True though Continue Reading
Book review: The Last Library by Freya Sampson
In a lot of ways, grief essentially stops the clocks on our lives. One minute, our life is humming along with all the usual happy bells and whistles, most importantly with the presence of that very special loved on, and the next? Well, it goes off a neverending cliff into Continue Reading
Book review: The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston
It is a gloriously rare thing indeed when a book comes along such as The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston which takes a well-worn premise and absolutely and completely upends it in ways both sweetly heartfelt and profoundly moving. When this happens it affirms once again that while there may Continue Reading
Book review: The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley by Sean Lusk
It’s a rare book indeed that doesn’t transport you far away from the everyday, taking you on a richly imaginative journey, whether it’s into someone’s life, their innermost thoughts or to magical places that defy the intervention of the ordinary. It’s one of the great, abiding joys of reading. The Continue Reading