Nic Dempsey

Black Heart – Holly Black

The last of the Curse Workers books. I really enjoyed them, I liked that there is no absolute good or bad and while I don’t think it’s a happy ending really, I like that it worked out. I also liked the way that what is normal for the world in the book would be off for real life. Always wearing gloves so that bare hands were shocking, it also meant that I spent a bit of time thinking how much that would suck and how smart phones would never have been invented!

Across a Star Swept Sea – Diana Peterfreund

Having loving For the Darkness Shows the Stars. Loved. I knew that a book set in the same world  but loosely based on The Scarlet Pimpernel instead of my beloved Persuasion, was going to be good but not as good as FTDSTS because it’s not FTDSTS! I really enjoyed it, there was a bit too much show not tell for me, but I liked it, I liked Justen and I liked Persis and I liked that as with FTDSTS there were left over things. The world wasn’t perfectly resolved because the main characters admitted they were attracted to each other.

The Bucolic Plague – Josh Kilmer-Purcell

This made me laugh out loud on the train in the morning. Easy and fun to read, I loved it, I loved that ultimately Kilmer-Purcell doesn’t take himself too seriously. In the book, he points out that the ‘story’ in a set of truths and I like that they made it work but also that he was honest about how manufactured ‘the perfect life’ is. It really made me want an allotment again!

This Boy – Alan Johnson

I’ve been meaning to read this for a while. Alan Johnson is a couple of years younger than my parents and grew up in West London. It’s not that far away from where my parents (and I) grew up, and know the areas that he’s talking about, that with some other stuff (he was born in the same hospital as my parents, his mother was cremated Kensal Green two years after my grandmother was, he’s a QPR fan) make it very ‘there but for the grace of God’ for me. He was 13 when his mother died, my mum was 14, so when he talks about his school not really being interested in the fact that his mother had died, I can believe it because of what I know of how my mother’s school responded when her mum died. Johnson is very straightforward about how awful his childhood was but he is rarely self pitying and he’s much nicer about his father than I would manage to be in similar circumstances. It’s not just about that though, Johnson is describing a world that’s gone a child growing up in those circumstances now, wouldn’t be able to end up as a cabinet minister. Worth reading.

The Bane Chronicles (6 to 9) – Cassandra Clare et al

I finally caught up on these. I like them, I like the backstory they give to Magnus and to the Shadowhunters world. This weekend when I was slightly brain dead, I liked that they were easy to read! They are probably only worth reading if you like the other books set in that world!

Hidden – Kelly Armstrong

Another short story and easy read. I gave up on the Otherworld series round about book 9 but it was nice to jump in for a short story!