It really doesn’t take long for a holiday to feel like a
lifetime ago, does it? Do you find that? That it takes less than a couple of
hours back at work before that lovely break feels like nothing but a distant memory.
It was such a nice
time though, just me, and my parents and The Sibling, and this lush holiday
cottage on the Anglesey coast. It started off
rainy and windy, which wasn’t the best, obvs, but we cooked yummy food in the
Aga and Mum and I curled up under patchwork quilts and read books.
And then,
like a holiday miracle, the sun appeared so there were lots of coastal paths
and skimming stones and lying on a blanket on the beach. There was seafood and
ice cream and peregrine falcons and puffins; there was gin and wine and yahtzee
and dominoes; there were art galleries and castles and bara brith and
Welshcakes and it was just a lovely chilled out kind of a week. It was weird at times, because we booked it
ages ago so obviously The Ex-Boyfriend was supposed to be there, but you know,
that particular wound is almost 4 months old now and for the most part I’ve
become pretty adept at ignoring it. I’m all about The Future now, whatever it
may look like.
I’m back in the office now for three days and then I’m off
again, catching a train in the general direction of Brighton.
Hurrah. Before then though, I want to
talk about my holiday reading, because it was pretty freaking excellent.
I took my Kindle, because why would I not? Holiday
reading is pretty much the reason I got a Kindle in the first place. I read so much more when I’m on holiday, and books as much as I
adore them, they weigh a lot. A LOT. My Kindle
weighs nothing and it means I don’t need to even decide what books to take away
if I don’t want to. I did, this time, I
had a full holiday reading list, but all of those
books were in just the one place and it made life so much easier. Also, I love
it, I am an unashamed lover of my old school Kindle keyboard. It’s on its last
legs I think with weird black lines appearing at random. When it finally gives
up the ghost imma be reals sad.
Anyway, I started my holiday reading off with Matthew Quick’s
The Good Luck of Right Now which is
just, it’s really lovely. Matthew Quick is a really lovely writer I think. I
remember thinking exactly the same after I finished reading Silver Linings, that there’s something about his writing
that’s just really lovely. He has this way of taking these fragile characters,
these people that are just a little bit different and planting them firmly in
your heart. It was a lovely read, lovely
and quirky and all I hoped it would be. This story of this man in his late 30’s
who’s never had a girlfriend – never had a friend even –
never known anything other than his Mum and is left floundering after she
passes away is absolutely gorgeous in its simplicity. Its all t
And then I read Uprooted. Which.
Holy excellent book, batman.
This book this book this BOOK. I could not put it down. When
I had to every part of my being was itching to be reunited with it again to the
point that Mum and I curled up on the sofa one night to watch Death in Paradise and I couldn’t concentrate because all I could
think about was the Dragon.
It's so good.
It's a thousand times better than I was expecting.
It's so good.
There’s so much I want to say, so much I could say about
ideas and themes and parallels but SPOILERS. I went into this pretty much
unspoiled, with back cover knowledge only and I don't want to take that away so
I'll avoid all that but read it and come back to me and then we'll talk.
I can say that
was captivated from the first page by this, a real Grimm-esque fairytale; not
the kind that promises happily ever after but that kind that makes you afraid
to stay up past your bedtime. It gave me goosebumps, it made my heart race
(from in my mouth because that's where my heart was for the most part: IN MY
MOUTH) and it had me holding my breath because there was no guarantee here that
anything was going to turn out well. & I loved that because that's kind of
where I'm at right now you know? I mean, clearly my world is one without
malevolent woods and wizards taking girls from their homes and old forgotten
spell books but it is one without
any guarantees.
This is a story about people, about magic, about how good
doesn't always triumph over evil and even if it does it's rarely a battle
easily won. Which you know, relevant. The story is fast paced and detailed and
fascinating and the characters are freaking awesome: whether you like them (Nieshka)
or not (Solya) you like reading them.
And there's a love story and it's fabulous but it's also
secondary, which again I loved; I loved that this book had a love story but wasn't a love story, that Nieshka is so
much more than that kind of heroine.
TL;DR: EVERYONE NEEDS TO READ THIS BOOK.
After Uprooted I read
Lisa Heathfield’s Seed, which, well I’m still not
entirely sure what to say about it really. It made me feel all the things. But
not good things. Not because the book wasn’t good, in fact the fact that it
made me feel so many things is a mark in its favour, its just, it made me super
uneasy.
It’s about a 15 year old girl who’s grown up in a nature
loving quilt, dominated over by this (awful) guy they call Papa S. Pearl loves
her community, because she was born into it, she’s never known anything else
and it doesn’t enter her head to ask questions. & then a new family
arrives, from the Outside, with a boy Pearl’s
age called Ellis. Ellis, obviously, knows that things aren’t right at Seed, and
even though Pearl tries to stay away from him, she can’t help but be drawn to
him, and when she realises she can’t actually answer any of his questions, it
all becomes super complicated.
It just, it made me angry. The
whole isolated community that Pearl lives in,
that she trusts in so completely and that’s all built on lies, it made me
angry. Papa S gave me the creeps and the whole thing with Pearl
wanting to be chosen as his next ‘companion’ made my skin crawl. It’s not an
easy book this one, and it doesn’t shy away from its heavy themes – cultism is
hard to read about and what is essentially child abse even harder: some of the
scenes, particularly between manipulative Papa S and blindly accepting Pearl
were fairly enough to make my chest tight and my blood boil but at the same
time they kind of worked. This book would not have been anywhere near as
engaging if it didn’t pull the punches like it did. It was well written, the
pacing was good, the characterisation excellent, and the building of tension
tight enough to build this feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach because seriously,
I could not see how this was ever going to end any kind of well.
I read the last word feeling as angry and as frustrated as I
had in the beginning. Make of that what you will (I gave it 4 stars, if you
wondered.)
There are rumours about Heathfield writing a sequel although
it all seems a little ‘will she, won’t she’ at the moment. I hope there is. I
hope there is because I’ve really come to care about Pearl. I want to know where she’s going to go
from that heart-stopping breathtaking ending.
Then, I headed down the road of The Thriller with Clare
Mackintosh’s I Let You Go. I liked it. I liked
it most of all because I got halfway through and was all smug and ‘I know
exactly where this is going’ AND THEN WAS THE WRONGEST PERSON TO EVER BE WRONG.
& I love it when that happens. I love that unpredictability, the way it
feels when I know where something is going to be totally blindsided. A 5 year
old boy is killed in a hit and run, right before his mother’s eyes. This is
part Jenna’s story because how do you come to terms with witnessing something
like that, and part police procedural (and I love me a police procedural) about
the hunt to catch the driver who was callous enough to kill a 5 year old boy
and drive away. And that’s all I’m going to tell you, other than it’s totally
worth a read this one. If only for the pulling away of that rug.
Right now I’m about ¾ of the way through Prisoner of Night and Fog which started off slowly but seems
to be picking up now. S’good.
