"Every night, 12-year-old Gwenni Morgan flies in her sleep. She leaves the bed she shares with her sister and soars into the night sky, listening to the nighttime sounds of her small Welsh village below. Irrepressible Gwenni -- a dreamer full of unanswerable questions and unbounded curiosity -- is childlike yet touchingly adult. Reluctantly facing a modern world, she prefers her nightly flights to school and her chores. Blessed with the uncommon insight of a young girl, Gwenni's view of the world is unparalleled.
Quaint, odd, touched, funny in the head: Gwenni is all too familiar with the taunts of her peers and fields them with equanimity beyond her years. She knows she can no more change her nature than stop the sun from rising. And when a neighbour goes missing, Gwenni turns amateur sleuth, determined to solve the mystery of his disappearance. Little does she realize that the trail she's pursuing will bring her uncomfortably close to home, and a dark secret."
Didn't enjoy this at all, I feel tricked somehow by the synopsis. I found it really boring and a very weak storyline. Most of the book was spent describing old fashioned ways of living and depressing abuse stemming from mental illness.
The blurb on the copy I picked up suggested a mystery/ spiritual novel, so it was a great surprise to me that the mystery is dealt with very quickly and there is no spirituality at all. It hinges on the young protagonist, Gwenni, having no knowledge of the metaphor 'the black dog', i.e. depression (although I took it to mean anger in this case). To an older reader, therefore, the disappearance of Ifan Evans is explained pretty much immediately: Gwenni finds Mrs Evans with a bloody mouth (she assumes this is due to a visit to the dentist) and the youngest Evans daughter, Catrin, talks of having beaten her father's black dog with a poker to stop him being angry.
The rest of the book is ostensibly about the discovery of Ifan Evans' body and the subsequent search for the murderer, but the real interest lies in the slow unfolding of Gwenni's relationship with her mother, and the small Welsh community's quiet unravelling in the post-war years. Although never specified, the novel is set a decade or so after the Second World War, and so the weight of the losses from that conflict prove too much for some characters in the novel. People in the small town lose husbands, lovers, children, and hope - it drives one character to suicide.
The biggest discussion point for me in this novel is therefore the presentation of mental illness. One review, quoted on the cover of my copy, describes the book as 'blessedly unsentimental', which is one of its main plus points. The characters with explicitly-referenced mental illness (of which there are many) are described in a matter-of-fact way by children, who are often shown to be the victims of mentally unwell parents lashing out but continue to seek the approval of their parents. This is particularly true of Gwenni, who desperately tries not to anger her mother, although this ultimately proves impossible.
Age rating 15+. Just really depressing.
"Jude has been lying low since the storm, which caused so many things to be lost that it played havoc with his magic, and he is hiding from his own power, his divine former employer, and a debt owed to the Fortune god of New Orleans. But his six-year retirement ends abruptly when the Fortune god is murdered and Jude is drawn back into the world he tried so desperately to leave behind. A world full of magic, monsters, and miracles. A world where he must find out who is responsible for the Fortune god’s death, uncover the plot that threatens the city’s soul, and discover what his talent for lost things has always been trying to show him: what it means to be his father’s son."
The City of Lost Fortunes is an ode, a dedication, to New Orleans and its people. A fantastic, imaginative fairytale-like puzzle of gods and monsters, supernatural folklore and myths. It is an incredible venture into a world otherwise unseen to mere mortals, topped up with a generous dose of attitude, unexpected nuggets of wisdom and twists, underlined by an unwillingness to fold in a game with an open ending.
It's gorgeously written book, though naturally so and just enough that as I read I kept realizing how much I was enjoying the descriptions, the language, the refrains that cast so many echoes throughout the story. The events and the New Orleans it takes place in are vivid. So are the characters, their flaws and their desires. It's also a ton of dark and fascinating fun.
I liked all of the characters in the book- some of them we have all heard about through various tales, but it seemed to me that Bryan Camp is a special kind of puppeteer to bring them all together: angels, vampires, zombies, psychopomps, voodoo loas riding the human bodies, ghouls… I’m telling you, this book is a treasure and when you’re reading it, you’re the pirate taking a dive into a loot of pure gold. A completely wonderful book for anyone loves mythology, folklore, magic realism or urban fantasy.
Jude was a fun yet sympathetic character to follow through this winding story, at once cheering him on and laughing at his antics. His trickster nature a true delight to see come forward.
Age Rating 14+. Deals with a few mature themes and some strong language.
"Oliver Marks has just served ten years for the murder of one of his closest friends - a murder he may or may not have committed. On the day he's released, he's greeted by the detective who put him in prison. Detective Colborne is retiring, but before he does, he wants to know what really happened ten years ago. As a young actor studying Shakespeare at an elite arts conservatory, Oliver noticed that his talented classmates seem to play the same roles onstage and off - villain, hero, tyrant, temptress - though Oliver felt doomed to always be a secondary character in someone else's story. But when the teachers change up the casting, a good-natured rivalry turns ugly, and the plays spill dangerously over into life. When tragedy strikes, one of the seven friends is found dead. The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless."
This book is so darkly beautiful that I didn’t want it to end. What fascinated me more was the fact that it is not only an ode to Shakespeare, but also the value of the Villain. Well-written villains are the crown jewels in Literature and a large majority of readers find them absolutely fascinating.
In M.L.Rio’s novel, we have seven four-year students that are about to graduate and become actors in the real world and leave their isolated almost cultish world. A tragic event following a short period of intense feelings causes their world to tumble down. Passions and hidden animosity come forward and the villains become victims and the victims are turned to villains on their own freewill.
The seven friends are among the most interesting characters you’ll come across. They are not to be trusted, or believed, but you must care, and hate them by turn. The entire book is described exquisitely and defused with an un-real, dreamlike quality that is sublime to immerse yourself in.
There is a sequence of a production of the Scottish Play, set during the night of Halloween, in the darkness, outdoors. It is among the most beautiful and most powerful depictions I've ever read or watched.
Something else that I loved was the strange/strong relationship between James and Oliver. When I was reading, I kept on wondering why the heck I wanted them to end up together. Quite badly, too. I mean, by all appearances they were just friends. Plus, Oliver was head-over-heel for Meredith and yet, I couldn't help but feel that while he lusted after Meredith, he had a very real passion for James. Just like Oliver himself says (towards the end), he himself had no idea what he and James were. Whatever it was, it was bloody brilliant.
Modern language interacts with Shakespeare’s immortal lines in a brilliant flow of speech. I really liked the little turn at the end. It opens up a lot of questions about what will happen next, but it was a nice little surprise in a story I thought had already ended.
Age Rating 14+. Drugs, drinking, murder. You know, normal college stuff.
"In the depths of the Maine woods, the wreckage of an aeroplane is discovered. There are no bodies, and no such plane has ever been reported missing, but men both good and evil have been seeking it for a long, long time. What the wreckage conceals is more important than money: it is power. Hidden in the plane is a list of names, a record of those who have struck a deal with the Devil. Now a battle is about to commence between those who want the list to remain secret and those who believe that it represents a crucial weapon in the struggle against the forces of darkness.
The race to secure the prize draws in private detective Charlie Parker, a man who knows more than most about the nature of the terrible evil that seeks to impose itself on the world, and who fears that his own name may be on the list. It lures others too: a beautiful, scarred woman with a taste for killing; a silent child who remembers his own death; and the serial killer known as the Collector, who sees in the list new lambs for his slaughter.
But as the rival forces descend upon this northern state, the woods prepare to meet them, for the forest depths hide other secrets."
As my first Charlie Parker book its stands well on its own, I only realised it was part of a series after reading.
Its delivered with exceptional poetic skill, but undone somewhat by a cast too large for the length of the story, which dilutes the impact and leaves the book feeling more like a series of vignettes. Parker himself is mostly relegated to bookend chapters and merely picks up crumbs long after the reader has discovered them. Structurally odd and not altogether satisfying by the time we reach the hurried ending, a less than fantastic Connolly novel is still better than most, and this one certainly has its moments, even if they don't ultimately combine to thrill.
The little side stories where, for me, some of the best bits. Particularly ones concerning Parker's grandfather and his friend, touched by death and scarred by loss.
There’s a lot of humour buried in this dark tale, much of it from Charlie, Louis and Angel who all had me cracking up on multiple occasions. There are a lot of great Louis and Angel moments including some great interactions with Charlie's daughter Sam.
I loved the character of the Collector. Connelly truly explores the human condition and the price of playing God. The grey morality of all the characters was wonderful to explore and a breath of fresh air from the usual goodie toe shoes main character.
The truly terrifying thing is that Connolly seems to understand that goodness is but a twisted, transformed version of that same evil, and that very twisted version of goodness is the most we can hope for on this earth. He portrays the drama of a life where evil is the default, and therefore easily obtained, and goodness is always beset with obstacles, requiring tremendous effort, never achieved with any great satisfaction or perfection, and even that only with the most heroic effort.
One of my favourite quotes was:
‘Is this how evil is done, he asked himself, in small increments, one foot after the next, softly, softly until you've convinced yourself that wrong is right, and right is wrong, because you’re not a bad person and you don’t do bad things?’
The natural setting of the woods is instrumental to the thrust of the plot and Connolly's perfectly rendered descriptions of the beauty but inherent malevolence of the natural world are perfectly realised. Skilfully interweaving folkloric tales into the plot, the woods and their surrounds become like another character in the book and influence greatly the actions of the human characters.
Age Rating I would say 14/15+. Demons, dark atmosphere, off screen death and torture, grey morals, Satanism. Wow sounds like an awful book now that I am writing this out.
"Every night, 12-year-old Gwenni Morgan flies in her sleep. She leaves the bed she shares with her sister and soars into the night sky, listening to the nighttime sounds of her small Welsh village below. Irrepressible Gwenni -- a dreamer full of unanswerable questions and unbounded curiosity -- is childlike yet touchingly adult. Reluctantly facing a modern world, she prefers her nightly flights to school and her chores. Blessed with the uncommon insight of a young girl, Gwenni's view of the world is unparalleled.
