Every ninety years, twelve gods incarnate as humans. They appear as rock stars and are loved and hated in equal measure. In two years, they are all dead. The lesson they need to learn is: just because you’re immortal, doesn’t mean you’re going to live forever. In the first volume of The Wicked + The Divine we are introduced to Laura, a seventeen-year-old from London who is utterly devoted to the various recently incarnated gods, who appear as rock stars of various genres all over the city. After […]
Rook
Sharon Cameron’s “Rook” is a futuristic dystopian fantasy novel that almost retells “The Scarlet Pimpernel”. It also asks the question, could what has already happened happen again? There were a lot of layers to this novel which made it interesting and hard to put down. However, with so many layers, there was a danger that they wouldn’t all pay off. Retelling “The Scarlet Pimpernel”, now called the Rook, with a female protagonist was interesting and I thought was refreshing take on the classic. Sophia Bellamy, […]
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories
I find a lot of our fairy tales/bedtime stories have been watered down overtime from their very blunt, graphic depictions of what happens when you don’t follow society’s rules or confront evil. Coming across the ” Politically Correct Bedtime Stories” intrigued me for this reason. There’s also been a lot discussion around political correctness and whether we’ve gone to far with it. In this book, it’s definitely gone way too far. The book starts with Little Red Ridding Hood and ends with the Pied Piper. […]
All y’all talking about Rothfuss were right
It feels like I have been reading people talk about how awesome Patrick Rothfuss is for years, although the talk seems to centre more on him than his book. I finally picked up the first one in the series this summer and then had to tear through the second immediately afterwards, all within a week. It was like I was shovelling the food in my face like I did when my kids were tiny. I read these months ago, HAD MANY THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS, and […]
Black girl poetic magic
Electric Arches is collection of poetry by Eve L. Ewing. Her poems muse on the black experience. She reveals painful moments of racism she encounters and add in handwritten font her imagined replies to the N-word. She writes odes to her musical heroes in “Appletree [on black womanhood, from and to Erykah Badu] and “On Prince”. Each poem describes how their music touched her soul. She uplifts the ordinary with her words adding a fantastical gloss of wonder. “so in this world, grease is a compliment, no […]
Murder from the perspective of a fetus
I am a huge fan of Ian McEwan, and I’ve read a number of books by him. So when I saw that he had another one out, I went and picked it up. I’m not sure what to say about Nutshell (2016). It held my attention, but I couldn’t buy into the entire conceit, so I was left with the feeling that it was odd. The protagonist of this story is a fetus in its mother’s womb (I assumed it was a boy because it sounded like […]