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tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-07-09 06:19 pm
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2025/105: Breaking the Dark — Lisa Jewell

2025/105: Breaking the Dark — Lisa Jewell
Her whole life has been a slow-motion multiple pileup. She lives on the edges of everything, at the sharp pointy corner of existence between normality and extraordinariness where she is neither one thing nor, truly, the other. She can do extraordinary things, but she doesn’t like doing them. But she can’t be normal either, she’s too broken, too other. [loc. 1217]

I'm not familiar with Jewell's thrillers, but I am a fan of Marvel's Jessica Jones, and had listened to an audiobook of another story featuring her, Playing with Fire. So, for the challenge involving two books in the same shared universe...

In Breaking the Dark, Jessica is recruited by a wealthy socialite who believes that something weird has happened to her children, Lark and Fox, while they stayed with their father in Barton Wallop, a small village in Essex (the UK version).Read more... )

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tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-07-08 03:29 pm
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2025/104: Oracle — Thomas Olde Heuvelt

2025/104: Oracle — Thomas Olde Heuvelt
In both timelines there was a chain of events triggered by a smaller event on the North Sea. At Doggerland, it was the annual sacrifice they pushed off in a canoe. In the eighteenth century, it was the five sick hands they threw overboard to drown. ‘It’s been awakened,’ Grim uttered. ‘That thing from below. Its hunger was aroused, and now it’s demanding more . . .’ [p. 280]

I've enjoyed Heuvelt's previous novels (HEX and Echo: supernatural horror in the modern world, with layered narrative and unreliable narrators. Oracle -- in which an eighteenth-century plague ship suddenly appears in a tulip field -- ties together Doggerland, oil rigs, smallpox epidemics and oppressive regimes.Read more... )

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tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-07-07 08:34 am
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2025/103: Hemlock and Silver — T Kingfisher

2025/103: Hemlock and Silver — T Kingfisher
I had just taken poison when the king arrived to inform me that he had murdered his wife. [opening line]

A new T Kingfisher novel is always a delight, and Hemlock and Silver -- a dark and occasionally horrific riff on 'Snow White' -- has brought me great joy, right from that opening line.

Read more... )
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dancefloorlandmine ([personal profile] dancefloorlandmine) wrote2025-07-06 05:30 pm
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Nidhoggr mead

The Ludoquist¹ has announced that it's started stocking mead, which may have the effect of testing my usual rule of not drinking while dicing. Has anyone out there tried Nidhoggr mead, and what opinions do you have on it? They do a range of flavours which remind me somewhat worryingly of 'ciders' like Old Mout.

¹ Croydon's rather fine boardgames café, which also hosts a regular RPG one-shot evening on Tuesdays.
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tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-07-05 09:21 am
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2025/102: When Women Were Dragons — Kelly Barnhill

2025/102: When Women Were Dragons — Kelly Barnhill
[Author's Note] I thought I was writing a story about rage. I wasn’t. There is certainly rage in this novel, but it is about more than that. In its heart, this is a story about memory, and trauma. It’s about the damage we do to ourselves and our community when we refuse to talk about the past. It’s about the memories that we don’t understand, and can’t put into context, until we learn more about the world. [p. 366]

Reread for Lockdown bookclub: original review here. I liked it even more the second time around, though I found myself focussing more on the silences, absences and unspoken truths of Alex's childhood than on the natural history of dragons. Interestingly, it felt a lot more hopeful when I read it in 2022 than now, nearly three years later.

Discussed with book club. Reactions were mixed. We wanted more about knots, and whether they were actually magic.

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tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-07-02 07:38 am
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2025/101: The Silence of the Girls — Pat Barker

2025/101: The Silence of the Girls — Pat Barker
I was no longer the outward and visible sign of Agamemnon’s power and Achilles’ humiliation. No, I’d become something altogether more sinister: I was the girl who’d caused the quarrel. Oh, yes, I’d caused it – in much the same way, I suppose, as a bone is responsible for a dogfight. [loc. 1596]

This is the story of Briseis, a princess of Lyrnessus who was captured when the Achaeans sacked the city. Her husband and brothers were slaughtered, and she was given to Achilles as a prize. Later, Agamemnon's prize Chryseis was returned to her father, a priest of Apollo: plague had broken out and Apollo, the god of plague, needed to be appeased. Agamemnon complained about the loss of his property: Briseis was taken from Achilles and given to Agamemnon to replace Chryseis, and Achilles then sulked in his tent and refused to fight.

Of course the story is quite different from Briseis' point of view.Read more... )

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tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-07-01 09:36 am
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2025/100: Monsters — Emerald Fennell

2025/100: Monsters — Emerald Fennell
The best thing about there being a murder in Fowey is that it means there is a murderer in Fowey. It could be anyone. [loc. 464]

The nameless narrator of Monsters is a twelve-year-old girl, orphaned in a boating accident ('Don’t worry – I’m not that sad about it') and living with her grandmother. Every summer she's packed off to an aunt and uncle who run a guest house in the quaint Cornish town of Fowey. There, she meets Miles, also twelve, and they bond over a murder Read more... )

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tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-06-30 07:48 am
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2025/099: The Story of a Heart — Rachel Clarke

2025/099: The Story of a Heart — Rachel Clarke
Depending on your point of view, the transplantation of a human heart is a miracle, a violation, a leap of faith, an act of sacrilege. It’s a dream come true, a death postponed, a biomedical triumph, a day job. [loc. 199]

Keira, aged nine, is fatally injured in a traffic accident: her heart keeps beating but she is brain-dead. Max, also aged nine, has been in hospital for almost a year because his heart is failing. This is the story of how Keira (and, more actively, her family) saved MaxRead more... )