SUMMARY: Someone wants Nick Buckley dead, but as events unfold at End House, Poirot and Hastings are drawn into a sinister plot to kill this young woman and Poirot is determined to protect her.
The Peril at End House is one of my favourites. It is incredibly clever and shows Poirot off at his finest, because it shows his noble side. He realises the threat to Nick Buckley, a young woman Poirot and Hastings meet while on holiday in Cornwall, and Poirot is utterly determined to protect her when it is revealed she has had several near death experiences in recent days, one of which happens right in front of Poirot when a bullet hole is discovered in her sunhat.
Except the problem Poirot faces is that it isn’t entirely obvious why anyone would want to kill her. The will she made leaves the few possession she has, including her beloved family home, End House to her cousin and her friend, but none of that is worth killing her to obtain. Then in a case of mistake identity, someone else ends up dead, which made Poirot all the more determined as a protector.
It is a fantastic book, with an ingenious conclusion and fantastically seeded hints about what is going on, and I highly recommend it. In addition I will also recommend the David Suchet adaption of this book; it is a very faithful adaptation, and well worth a watch as well.
Summary: Queen Elizabeth investigates a murder at Windsor Castle. I really enjoyed it.
I picked this up a couple of years back because I quite like “cosy” mysteries, ones that don’t burn me out. I was curious, because I do like unusual concepts and well, having the main detective be Queen Elizabeth II was definitely an intriguing idea. I did put it off for a while as I do have many books in my TBR pile, but this one I put off even longer after Her Majesty passed away.
It became the right time to try it, as The Crown has come to an end, I’ve read several books now, such as Red, White and Royal Blue, and Falling Hard for the Royal Guard which are set either in royal palaces or have alternative royal families at the heart of their stories. It was time, and I couldn’t put it down. I loved it, maybe not as much as I was hoping I might love it, but I certainly enjoyed it.
I appreciated that this isn’t the Queen going off investigating rather than doing her royal duties: most of the legwork is done by an Assistant Private Secretary and then the Queen is updated, and she sits and thinks about it all. It is more like Miss Marple using her life experience to work out how human nature works than it is Poirot and Hastings going about and out in the world looking for clues. There are differences of course, the Queen has resources to hand that rival the favours Sherlock Holmes can call in, but ultimately this is about her sending out her secretary to gather facts and she has a think.
I liked the story that has started off this series of books: a dead body is discovered in very dubious circumstances in Windsor Castle after a private party and more and more people involved keep turning up dead. MI6 is determined to oust a sleeper agent from amongst the Royal Household, and the Queen is determined to find out the truth, which from the beginning she doesn’t think is as simple as the authorities believe. It’s very enjoyable and I will be on the look out for the next book in the series in the future.
SUMMARY: Poirot and a murder on a train. No not that one; a strangled American heiress and stolen jewels are at the heart of this story.
I enjoyed this book; I would have enjoyed it more if the blurb on the back of my copy hadn’t told me that Poirot re-enacts the journey, because that doesn’t happen until the last third of the book. I was reading the entire book wondering why it hadn’t happened and wondering if I had of missed it. I hadn’t, the blurb was a bit deceiving.
However, that slight annoyance aside, the book is a great read. What’s not to love about a murder having happened on an overnight sleeper train. I mean it isn’t as iconic as the Orient Express, but in its day the Blue Train took people to the French Riviera. This murder is the death of an heiress, who is in an unhappy marriage and traveling with her jewels to her lover. She’s killed and her jewels stolen.
There is quite a cast of characters in this book to keep track of, especially as Poirot travels back and forth between France and England, but eventually Poirot overlooks the obvious and his little grey cells makes his deduction.
It is a very enjoyable read if you’re looking for a mystery with a bit of glamour.
Summary: Expanding on my experience with Steinbeck with his novella warning against the perils of greed
My only experience of John Steinbeck before I read ‘The Pearl’ was when I studied ‘Of Mice and Men’ at school. Nearly twenty years later I’m still not sure I actually like ‘Of Mice and Men’, but I’m still thinking about it. It still pops up in my brain every now and then, so I thought why not try other books by Steinbeck, because I don’t know if it was because I don’t like ‘Of Mice and Men’ as a story or whether it was tainted because it was something I had to do at school. I generally didn’t like studying literature at school; it could be either.
I’m really glad I read this novella. I picked it up because I was in-between books, not sure what I was going to read next and my copy is less than a hundred pages, so I thought why not? It’s not a pleasant story, like ‘Of Mice and Men’ isn’t, but it is going to stay with me. That’s Steinbeck’s magic I think; writing stories that get stuck in your brain when you don’t expect them too.
‘The Pearl’ is about how the world’s perspective of you changes when you go from poverty to having the potential of riches, and also about your own perspective of the world and your place in it, and what you now feel you are entitled to have because of the new potential that having fortunes may open up for you. The world will try to keep you roughly where you already are, and you will stop putting up with being kept down. The consequences can be ugly.
It’s a short read, but it is easy to read, and easy to get swept up into the world of the protagonists Kino and Juana as they navigate looking after their baby and trying to sell the pearl Kino has found, while falling susceptible to the evil greed can bring to you.
Summary: Viv the Orc and former mercenary, arrives in Thune determined to set up a coffee shop. This a a gentle story of her doing this and building a community around her as she does.
Legends and Lattes had been on my radar for a while, but because it had been in hardback most of that time I hadn’t really paid much attention. However, when I was visiting my parents-in-law over Christmas and I was patronising an independent bookstore recommended to my book obsessed self (Foster’s Little Book Shop in Barnsley, Yorkshire – lovely place, I recommend a pop in if you’re in the area) I spotted it had come out in paperback and I purchased it.
I thought little more of it, as I assumed like most books it would end up in my TBR for a long while, but because its now in paperback the social media channels do change as more and more people start reading it, and the buzz about this book meant it leapt off my TBR pile quite a lot sooner than I had planned. I am so glad it did because it is a delightful book.
I love fantasy, but I don’t read much of it anymore generally because it does come in series and I have been struggling with series in recent years. I know there is a prequel to Legends and Lattes, but I’ve been going easier on myself recently so I didn’t worry about that, and everyone was saying the book is a cosy read: High Fantasy, Low Stakes is the tagline, and it’s a perfect tagline. Viv is setting up a coffeeshop after a lifetime of being a mercenary, and that pretty much sums up the plot.
The driving force for Viv is that she wants to change her life and have her live revolve around a gnomish drink she’s discovered on her travels called coffee. Reading this book was like going back to one of the best things I ever studied at university, which was the history of luxury commodities, including coffee. I forgot that Viv is a orc, that her builder is a hob, her barista is a succubus and that the cast of characters grows in and blossoms in variety and role; the book is about a community being built around a coffeeshop. It was wonderful reading about people experiencing coffee for the first time, like it did happen in Europe when the first coffeeshops opened and coffee was introduced from the Middle-East; there were sceptics to a beverage that is now widely accepted in Western culture, and this book was like what I imagined happened in our history too.
It is the set up of an alternative location to met up with people that isn’t a tavern, and it is something many of us are intimately familiar with as well. It is honest in how much hard work does go into setting up a familiar business like a coffee shop. The operations and thought behind hospitality venues should be honoured as it is hard work. There is also a lot of passion behind wanting to run a business like a coffeeshop, and the passion is evident on every single page. I miss this book and this world, because reading makes you feel like you’re there too, enjoying the coffee and the pastries and the entertainment, and being part of something pleasant.
It’s not the only plot, there are antagonists as well. The city of Thune where Viv is based has an underbelly determined to get a cut out of her. Also, Viv was a mercenary for a very long time. Her past does not leave her alone, but Viv is determined to make sure her new life is a success without having to resort to the ways of her new life to achieve it.
I highly recommend this book; it is gentle, full of love, full of hard work, full of a community, and is somewhere I plan on re-visiting again and again.
Summary: A slow burn romance set in the Tower of London, with the fantastically written, down on her luck protagonist, Maggie whose eyes have spotted a Royal Guard who is well cute, but not easily distracted.
I like a good romance story, and this book popped up on my social medias about the same time I was that I was having one of my phases (I’ve had several) of being a bit obsessed with Red, White and Royal Blue. I’m British and the idea of someone trying to get attention of the infamously stoic Royal Guards really appealed to me. I didn’t know it when I picked it up, but is it also set in the Tower of London, and do love a good setting.
When the book eventually called to me off my shelves and I picked it up the first thing I learned was it was set in the Tower of London, and that the protagonist Maggie lives there. Now I knew already from when I was a bit of a tourist that people do live in the Tower of London, and I was sceptical about the protagonist living there for all of five seconds. I was immediately reassured that the opening pages of the book is a foreword from the author about the setting in the Tower of London and that being a resident in the Tower of London is based on her own experience of living there. I was immediately reassured that the author was writing about something quite unique and relatively unknown from her own experiences.
And I loved every single page. I adore Maggie as she navigates an awful break up from her toxic ex, the modern world of Tinder dating and Freddie, the Royal Guard who has caught her attention. The setting in the Tower of London is what really makes this book quite special, as it puts a twist on a contemporary romance, but equally, Maggie herself is wonderful. She is honest about being a wreck, about being insecure, about not having her life as together as she would like and that she has had quite a few disappointments along the way. She is also passionate about what she loves, which is history, and doesn’t shy away from her passions simply because it might not be what others want to know about her. I loved her anyway, but I especially loved her when in a restaurant on an unsuccessful date she doesn’t just leave, she totally stays and has the carbonara she had already been looking forward to having: I’d do that too. There is no point in going hungry just because your date isn’t going well.
The romance with Freddie is definitely a slow burn, and there is a lot of mystery about Freddie, and that is what keeps it intriguing. I highly recommend it if you are looking for a slow burn romance and in an interesting setting, because the Tower of London is a character of its own. And if you ever are in London and you have a chance to go, I recommend that too as it does have a fascinating history.
I’ve written about re-reading books before, and the joy I get from it because it is less stressful. I adore re-reading a book because I already know the end of the story. I know what will happen to the characters; I don’t obsess over how it will end and the need I get to know the story. It makes reading an overwhelming hobby sometimes because it completely takes over. It means I really do have to be in the right mood to read a book, and it means my hobby of collecting books is kind of getting out of hand compared to the number of books I then actually read. My to-be-read (TBR) pile is essentially the majority of what are on my shelves.
So I have been trying something new this month, because I have lots of books I own which I do want to read, and re-reading them isn’t an option until I have actually read them. It is still an experiment and occasionally this month I have found myself reading a book cover to cover, but I have been more gentle with myself.
After doing a bit of reading, I’ve been deliberately forcing myself to actually put a book down at the end of a chapter and stop reading for that day. I’ve always been afraid in the past that if I put a book down I might never pick it up again and carry on reading it. It has happened before with books I have been enjoying when my mental health made it a struggle to even try. It also happens when I’m not enjoying a book and the debate I then face is the fact I don’t want to read it, but I have some sort of internalised guilt about it, so I don’t try something else in the mean time. I just avoid reading until I can come to the conclusion that it is going to become a Did-Not-Finish (DNF).
I realised something needed to change when over Christmas, a time I do legitimately have off to relax and do my hobbies, and instead of doing some reading, I was completely obsessed with my other hobbies; sewing, crochet and knitting. I avoided reading, and I realised I was doing it on purpose because the book I was trying to read just wasn’t for me. I needed to come up with a new plan so I have a strategy to make reading easier:
When I feel myself getting obsessed with a book, I put it down and stop reading that day. This is a work in progress, because on weekends it is very easy to let this happen, but I need to do something to break the obsession cycle that consumes me when reading, especially during the working week when I do have actual responsibilities (I do on the weekend too, but my husband is more flexible than my paid job – except for getting meals at actual meal times. He does prefer being fed). I have time during my commute, lunch break and before bed set aside for reading if I want, and if I need longer away I take it, but make sure I’m not away for more than a couple of days. Even if I just read a chapter/section, I read something of the book slowly over time not all at once.
If I do find myself feeling like it might be a DNF I’ll read non-fiction for a bit. I can’t really have more than one fiction book going at a time, but I can have a fiction and non-fiction as concurrent reads. When the debate over DNF is happening I can read non-fiction until I’ve reached my conclusion. This will help with my TBR pile as well, as I have many non-fiction books lined up to read but I generally pick fiction over non-fiction.
I’ll still a mood reader but if I’m struggling to work out what I want to read next and I’ve scouted my entire TBR to try and find one to read, what I’m going to do is revert to my ‘Agatha Christie’ mood and read one of her many books that are in my TBR. Over time as my classic book collection grows as well (as I now have a subscription for classic books as well as Agatha books as a monthly delivery), I might pick up a classic to read if I can’t pick a newer release to choose from.
Don’t get annoyed with myself when the book a really want to read is a re-read, and not a new read. I do sometimes feel guilty for wanting to go back, but sometimes what I need is a book I know and love more than a new world and its stories.
Try not to fret about reading a book that is part of a series. I have lots of books that when I bought them were standalones and then they later turned out to be part of trilogies, or series, and that puts pressure on me. I feel like if I like it, I’m going to then have to immediately put everything else aside and finish reading off that series next. As a mood reader this doesn’t sit well. I’ve decided that this is a worry I don’t need, and that if I do happen to love a book that is part of a series I don’t need to go out and get obsessed. I don’t need to read an entire series of books one after another straightaway. I can get to them in time.
Also on the note of series, if I do have a series and I already own them all, like Benedict Jacka’s Alex Verus books and Freya Marske’s books, where I have read part of them but not all of them, to not be worried about re-engaging. With Jacka especially, I don’t need to go back to the beginning and re-read them all and then see if I can carry on and finish the series. I’ve tried this twice now and I keep getting stuck on the same book in the middle. I need to leap in at some point mid-series and try it that way.
Most of all though, I’m just going to be gentle with myself. Reading should be fun and enjoyable, and it isn’t always easy but I’m trying and I’ve had a great month of reading because I’ve gone easier on myself.
I’ve been writing a book now for the better part of a year and a half. It had been an idea that had been knocking around my head before I was suddenly inspired to write it, but I have completely lost control over it.
I got to the first year anniversary of having started to write it and I had a massive wobble. Now I know that it takes longer than a year to write a book, what very rarely happens for me though is that I work on the same piece of writing for that long before I put it aside and work on something else for a while. The wobble was because I hadn’t done that but I still didn’t have something that would remotely class as a draft, even a shoddy one.
So I put this book aside for several months, toyed with other works-in-progress, and finally came back to it over the Christmas holidays. I am still stuck, and my entire problem stems from the fact I am not a very disciplined writer. This blog post is not an article telling you how to write, the dos and do nots, the “rules” which work for one author who’s decided this is the way it has to be done and tells you as much. I have tied myself in knots over and over again trying to follow “writing advice” and it has got me no where so far. However, I have gained a bit of what I’d class as useful insight, which I’m going to share and it was an epiphany moment for me.
I write, like I literally just sit down and I start writing, and I don’t necessarily have even a vague plan or even character names, I just go. And this is my undoing. Last summer I went to a question and answer session/book signing with Will Dean, for The Last Passenger: he was being interviewed by another author, Emma Flint. Both of them mentioned something which surprised the hell out of me: before they write a book both of them have usually been planning and researching it for about six months before they actually sit down and write it.
This was a fine example of what real life authors do: the discipline behind being a writer isn’t just about the actual writing. It is all the work that goes into it behind the scenes, before the process even starts. Now I knew this is what authors do, it was the length of time they do this that shocked me. And this is not something I do at all; I skip planning and I go straight to writing. I think the word is “pantser” when it comes to plotting, and what happens when I don’t have a plan (dear reader, I have never had a plan) is I have new ideas while I write, and if I really like an idea, I go backwards into what I have already written and I write it in. This keeps happening; I expand the plot and the word count not by writing from the beginning to the end, but by going back to the beginning, writing and editing back to the middle where I’d got to previously to incorporate the new idea I had. Then I carry on forward until I have another plot altering idea which requires me to go back to the beginning. The normal pattern is I do this until I hit a brick wall, I’m still no where near the end and I have now got such a convoluted set of plots and threads to wrap up it is literally beyond my skill to do it and I can’t finished. Usually I start then a revision that is essentially a re-write and the pattern begins again, only I’ve taken out some of the ideas for their own book and I now have more the write.
I also edit as I go; I cannot bring myself to write onwards if what I have previously written isn’t good enough. I’m not very good at accepting the idea of a shoddy first draft, but re-reading my work recently I have some very good sections of a book. They are of an excellent quality, but they’re not part of a finished whole. Based on all the ideas I’ve had and all the plots I’ve come up with which constitutes the lives of my two main characters, explaining in detail all the nuances and facets of who they are and why they do what they do, those good sections I do have will never be part of a finished book. I always, always, always write books that start out as a simple idea, and spiral out of control, and in many cases spiral into longer and longer series. (Fine for fantasy, less fine for this particular example which is a contemporary romance which I want to be a standalone)
Listening to those two authors was a little bit of a wake up call; I need a shoddy first draft. I need to get to the end, and let’s put it this way most of the time I know the end, I just don’t get there. That is my undoing; the discipline I have is very good at refining raw prose, it is not very good at getting that raw prose into a completed draft. I know why; I really hate planning. Planning the plot of my book completely kills the creativity for me. The endorphin hit I seek from writing is spending time with my characters and their voices and playing with them. Planning what I want to have happen is soul destroying for me; I find it so boring and I don’t do boring. I’ve got plenty of hobbies; if I get bored I go do something else.
This is great for my overall contentment, not so great for my life long ambition/dream of being a writer, and also not possible for the hours of the week I’m contracted to work (as not a writer), and I don’t have a choice about whether I’m bored or not.
I need to buck up my ideas really. For all the years I was struggling/fighting with depression I took what I could get out of the joy writing brings me, when writing was a possibility but I have some incredibly bad habits. For years the ability to be disciplined just wasn’t there and couldn’t be there, for many months at a time, simply because I couldn’t write. The effort involved in the creative act was beyond what I had the energy to do. I need to plan more, I need to stop myself from going back and re-writing an incomplete draft simply because I’ve had an idea I want to add in. I need to try to stop myself from editing too much as I go (with the exception of spelling; fixing that as I go is a must).
I need to find discipline as a writer in a way that works for me, because I can’t do this and be bored as I plan it all, but something has to change, otherwise I’m never going to get there. Working out how to do this is the next difficult step I need to take.
When I started this blog way back in May 2013 I had intended on it being a blog for writing. I did this because back in 2013 I was a great deal more ambitious. I was in my twenties, writing was going to be my career, so I did what everyone on the internet was telling me I needed to do. I signed myself up for all the social media platforms, and I started a blog. I was going to build myself up an author platform. I would enter competitions, go to local writing events to learn and to network (I’m lucky in the North East of England that New Writing North who do this sort of thing is local to me). I did everything I could to try and learn how to become a traditionally published author and this would be my job.
And I got absolutely no-where doing this. I wasn’t winning competitions, and you don’t get feedback from competitions to tell you how to improve and without feedback I wasn’t going to even try to get an agent because if it wasn’t good enough I didn’t want to waste the chance to make an excellent life-changing first impression and the only thing that matters of course is a first impression (I was in my twenties cut me some slack). I wasn’t amassing the followers I was expecting, and when I started I just didn’t really understand the magnitude of what it is you need to do to get those followers. You have to sacrifice time spent writing your stories to do the marketing side. Quite frankly it got to the point where I was writing this blog and not writing my stories because I have a full time job to pay the bills and being human I need to sleep.
There wasn’t time for everything, and I thought the author platform was more important than being you know, being an author, because what was the point in trying to be an author if you had no audience? I mean I was quite productive on this blog. I have the Key to a Great Story series on here and my Book (Re)Writing series which came afterwards, and because I was starting to get desperate to create content I started to write reviews because reviews I could do in such a large number I could publish something every single day to see if that helped.
It didn’t.
The numbers stayed low, I wasn’t getting views, likes, interaction. Anything. This all fed into my self-esteem telling me that no one liked my writing or my opinion, and that stopped me from doing competitions, and events. I didn’t know words like algorithm, or engagement. I quite genuinely believed I wasn’t getting any of what I was expecting to get because I was delusional about thinking I was good enough to have it in the first place and time was running out. I needed to be successful young because this was going to be my life, and if I didn’t get success soon I was doomed to be someone who didn’t achieve their dreams.
The second writing series, Book (Re)Writing, was a great deal more personal and a great deal more reflective of my state of mind than my original writing series. Let’s just put it out there, my state of mind was not in great shape. One word: depression. When I started this blog and when I started looking into how to become a writer I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I knew there was something wrong and I was not kind to myself about it. I was lazy, I was unmotivated, I was a failure for not achieving my goals. I didn’t know I was ill, I just thought I wasn’t good enough, and even after I had the epiphany that the problem was that I suffer from depression, I still wasn’t kind to myself.
I want my career to be as a writer, but what my depression chipped away at for years was my ambition. Anyone paying attention to this blog won’t fail to notice that between May 2018 and July 2022 there is nothing here. I think I might have written a couple of New Year’s Day blogs about the books I own/read which I have since unpublished because they were drivel (I’ve unpublished quite a lot of substandard posts to be honest, because I was churning them out and it wasn’t all quality). Eventually I just stopped blogging because something had to go to help me patch back together my mental health and because the blog wasn’t achieving for me what it was supposing to be achieving and was in fact counter-productive I stopped. Admittedly I also stopped between August 2022 and August 2023 because I tried to start it up again in 2022 but I hit another patch of poor mental health and the re-boot just wasn’t going to happen.
But this blog doesn’t exist now to be the author platform it was originally intended for, it is simply me. My voice, my opinion and what is left of my ambition. I call depression ‘My Thief’ because that is what it is to me. I’ve even written a pamphlet of poetry about it, which one day I may even work on some more and share. I’ve never really explained why I came back to doing this blog after years away, and it is quite simple really; I stole it back.
Now these days I am a lot kinder to myself then I used to be and I’m a lot more understanding that it is not just the young that are able to be successful. I mean I am still young (which is why I’m reluctant to change the name from Young Writer’s Notebook) just not as young and naive as I used to be. It isn’t just about how good you are, it is luck as well and I understand that better now. My ambitions are lower, but when it comes to the blog I have different aims. I will not be doing daily content ever again, but I am trying to do regular weekly content, scheduled to be published on a Saturday morning when I have the time to share the links on the few social media profiles I keep (yes I am aware you can connect them up and it does it automatically, I used to do that, but that was part of the churning and it seems so impersonal). I try not to look at the stats.
Also I’m going easy on myself. It might not be every week. I had planned to read lots of Christmas related books to do themed posts and honestly, I have no idea what I was thinking, given I’m a mood reader and sometimes the books I should be reading are the very last things my brain will co-operate about. You will notice I didn’t have much content in December; yeah the content I planned to do was dependant on me reading specific books and honestly I just couldn’t. I’d slipped into the old habit of thinking about the numbers and the stats, and that was what drove me crazy about this blog and well social media in general in the first place. Everything is about the numbers.
It isn’t. I blog now because I want to share my thoughts on books, films and TV, which back in the day I was beginning to think were drivel as well, because I would never say anything bad or negative. I still won’t but that’s because I generally keep my negative opinions to myself if I’m not able to be constructive, or if it is by a creator who can’t take the hit of a poor opinion (I see Disney as fair game, an indie author isn’t).
It will be for writing as well, once I work out what the hell I want to say about writing again. Given I’ve been thinking about this since mid-2023 and so far I’m managed to only do reviews or pieces about reading and reviewing, and not writing, it might be a while yet before I work this out myself. Mainly though this blog is for me, because even if no one else is really paying me any attention, sometimes I have things I want to say and I don’t say to myself anymore “Shut up no-one cares what you think” because I am kinder to myself. That is one of life’s lessons I have learnt getting older: be kind and not just to others.
Summary: The best selling crime novel of all time. I’m not arguing with that, but I do have a few tips for approaching it if you are new to the story. Spoiler free review
Somehow, and I’m not entirely sure how, but I managed to make it to my mid-thirties as a massive Agatha Christie fan for the vast majority of my life, and I had never read, seen an adaption of, or come across spoilers for one of her most famous pieces of work: And Then There Were None. I knew very little about it.
But finding out…perfection.
It is considered a masterpiece for a reason, and as much as love Murder on the Orient Express which is one her comparable works, it is in the shadow of And Then there Were None in my mind. It is an astoundingly brilliant book.
That is not to say is didn’t have a false start with it. I mentioned this in my post on the pitfalls of being a mood reader. I booked myself into to see the play adaptation at the theatre, and I wanted to read the book first. So on a train journey (to go see a different play) I tried to start it, and got a little bit overwhelmed. I was too excited about something else, and I just couldn’t cope with the names in the first chapter. This is an ensemble book, and when I tried again to read it, I approached it with the ability to make notes on all the character names.
And that really helped me; I know people have mixed feelings about Dramatis Personae. Personally I’ve always appreciated them, even if all they are doing is listing the names of characters and basic details. But then again I grew up reading epic high fantasy; I have a fairly good memory but even I forgot characters that came back three hundred pages later. So I wrote one up for And Then There Were None, and that reassured me that I did at least know who the main players were in the story.
I recommend it if you struggle with character names, and a second tip I have for you for reading this book, is if you are reading a physical copy, when you come across the Ten Little Soldiers Boys nursery rhyme, stick a bookmark in that page. Trust me you are going to refer back to it.
And then enjoy. There is a lot of detail in this book, but don’t worry too much, everything is gone over and rehashed by the characters frequently, as the sinister circumstances they find themselves in get darker and darker. I adore the tension in this book, and as much as I enjoyed seeing the play, and I’m sure there are other brilliant adaptations out there, the book, the original medium is mind blowing, because if you do not know, there will be a point near the end of the book when a shiver goes down your spine and you go ‘huh, wait what, but…how?’
It was very recently I came across the term ‘mood reader’. Never have I come across something that so perfectly describes how I approach reading.
I’ve talked before about how I like to re-read books, but picking a book to read is a nightmare. For a start I have to be in the mood to read, and there are a multitude of reasons why I might not be: poor mental health; my writing is going well and is a priority; life. Honestly life gets in the way of reading the most, mainly because to be able to afford books I need to work for a living, but that really gets in the way of reading. There is nothing more irritating than the desire to read being very strong during my working hours. I have had books on my desk waiting for my lunch break, calling at me in my peripheral vision and driving me to distraction.
I have the same problem with writing, but stronger, because I would much prefer to write for a living, but that’s a different irritation.
Then there is the biggest pitfall of being a mood reader: not being in the mood to read any of the books I already own. I don’t feel envy often, but I am green-eyed when it comes to people who have a to-be-read (TBR) pile and what they do is pick a book off the pile and read it. Like what? How the hell do you just do that? I both cannot comprehend how someone manages to do that, and am extremely jealous all at the same time. I can’t just start reading a book. I have to want to, and it almost needs to be an obsession. And it is never the same twice, there are different moods.
‘Buy it, Read it’ Mood
Any excuse for a Tom GIF, and I can have a problem with cookies sometimes.
Occasionally I end up buying a book in person and I’ll start straightaway because the desire to read it is so strong I’m pretty much already reading it in the queue for the tills. I did this recently with Tom Felton’s autobiography ‘Beyond the Wand’, and I have been a fan of his since his days in the Borrowers. I’d seen it in paperback one day and the next I had to go back and buy it because the idea of it had haunted me. I finished it within two days. Doing this is far too much like instant gratification which doesn’t sit well with me because I’m not impulsive by nature.
And this habit of buying books I want to read can become a problem if it ends up in my TBR pile.
When I bought the book I wanted to read it. By the time it has been on the shelves for a while (and given I generally buy books in piles I can’t start them all at once) the desire the read the book may dissipate and never return.
I’ve had to be quite harsh with myself over the years when I’ve been sorting out my books, and I have ended up giving away a lot of books I just never read, because I knew I was never going to bother and it was just taking up space. I am well aware of how privileged I’ve been over the years to be able to afford books I just ended up giving away: I am a lot more cautious now, a lot more mindful (though not about cookies, I’m talking books here). I try my very best to not be taken in by a book just because I’ve been exposed to it so much that I’ve been ‘pressured’ into buying it via marketing, bookstore tables, and well…the fear of missing out.
‘The Siren Song’ Mood
I mean I’m certainly susceptible to the fear of missing out, because I still don’t know what possessed me to buy ‘Companion Piece‘ by Ali Smith, as I’ve never been intrigued enough by her books before to consider buying one. She just doesn’t write the books I’m interested in reading. I’m still assuming it was the purple cover.
But in the case of ‘Companion Piece’, that book did call to me eventually; it was time to read it, and on reflection while it wasn’t wholly enjoyable and in parts I didn’t understand what was going on, I do really like it. And this is how I do end up reading most books.
The book has to sing to me like a siren and draw me in (maybe I’ve watched The Little Mermaid live action a few too many times). The lyric of a song only I can hear gets stuck in my head, whirling around and around, only silenced by me picking it up, and reading all the other words. Unsticking the playing buffer on a Walkman and getting to the next part of the CD: relieving me of the maddening skipping over and over again of the same extract of a tune repeating over on loop.
The fear of ‘The Siren Song’
The siren song doesn’t always work as positively. I mean I’m not drowned out at sea, but sometimes I start reading a book, and sadly I soon know if it is going to be a Do-not-finish (DNF). I’m not the sort of person who will force myself to carry on reading a book that I’m not enjoying. I wrote about this years, when I described the effect of a bad experience with a book; now admittedly a lot of that was because of poor mental health and I ended up with a pit of anxiety in my stomach whenever I saw the book that broke me a little bit (and also sadly the sequels). That was all just a horrible coincidence. But if I’m just not intrigued or even worse if I am bored I’m not going to waste my time. It’s part of why I can be very harsh with giving away books I never even tried to read, because sometimes years after I first bought it and I’ve still not read it, I know I’m just never going to bother.
And this experience is why I don’t really just pick up a book and start reading it, nor do I just read anything, because I don’t want to be put off from reading. I generally avoid thrillers, most horror and gritty crime, because I’m not into that sort of book, but strangely on the other end of that spectrum I’ve started to be a lot more cautious about ‘feel-good’ novels, because honestly, most of the time they fall into the ‘I’m so bored’ category and have become DNFs through no fault of their own.
I am a mood reader who walks on a tightrope.
‘The Lets Get This Over’ Mood
I do however every now and then have a book that does fall into a category of books I generally avoid. My approach to reading these sorts of books is very much ‘Let’s Get this Over’.
Now I’m going to clarify, because this sounds really harsh; it’s not. This is me reading at my most daring. I’m not forcing myself to read a book I don’t want to read, I want to read these books, because there has been something in the premise that has intrigued me, but there is an aspect that makes me apprehensive because of the aforementioned bad experiences. It is usually thrillers and a hint of gore.
And never once have I read a book a ‘let’s get this over’ with mood and regretted it. Well I regretted it a little bit with ‘The Last Passenger‘ by Will Dean because that thriller burned me out for reading for about three weeks. However this year for two books I’ve read with this approach I followed the same routine.
It’s been a Friday night, I have had the house to myself, and I have just sat and read the book in one sitting, with the knowledge that I’m not likely to get disturbed and I have a weekend of relaxing ahead of me to recover. This was how I read ‘Tender is the Flesh‘ which I got talked into reading by a colleague and was expected to pass onto the next colleague to read. It is also how I read ‘The Third Wheel‘ by Michael J Ritchie, which I had been concerned about for the same reason as I had been ‘Tender is the Flesh’: gore.
‘Tender is the Flesh’ is definitely gory, and very cold, emotionally. ‘Enjoyed’ in the wrong word to use; I certainly admired the skill in the execution of creating a dystopian world. ‘The Third Wheel’ by Michael J Ritchie though spend the vast majority of the first half of 2023 being the best book I had read all year, (until I bought and started ‘Wendy, Darling‘ by A.C. Wise on my way out of the bookshop and that added itself to my list of go-to recommends). ‘The Third Wheel’ is still one of the best books I’ve read this year, and it made me very glad I’d been brave.
I survived the tightrope walk.
‘The Agatha Christie’ Mood
Yes, yes the Queen of Crime gets her own mood. She kind of has to, I have two books a month by her being delivered (by Bert’s Books and their amazing Agatha Christie subscription), so I really have to justify the expense and the space, so she has become a reading mood. And the vast majority of the time I can pick up a book by her and read it, and love it. ‘The Big Four‘ has been the only exception so far, and I do genuinely love having a little spate of reading a few books by her in a row. In the week leading up to Will Dean burning me I had ready several Agatha’s back to back while on holiday in a reader’s equivalent to chain-smoking.
I have only ever had one false start reading an Agatha, and that was ‘And Then There Was None’ because it was a rare book I needed to read. Like actually needed to read, to the extent I asked for it to be bumped up my delivery order so I could read it before I want to see the play at the theatre. I got it, and then for some weird reason tried to read the damn thing on a train journey that was too short for me to get very far, with a book with lots of character names to get acquainted with, and when my mood was definitely more focused on the excitement of going to see ‘The Way Old Friends Do‘ at the theatre that evening.
It took me until literally the weekend before I was due to see ‘And Then There Were None’ at the theatre itself before I plucked up the courage to try again because I had worked myself up into a knot of anxiety about whether I was going to like this masterpiece of crime writing or not because of the false start. I did, but boy did that book weighed on my mind for a while.
And that is what mood reading is like for me. It is a massive emotional investment sometimes, and over the years I’ve had to learn to read my moods, and also care for myself. I know lots of people don’t agree with not finishing books, but I am very much an advocate for spending your time wisely, especially if picking up and reading a book doesn’t come easily to you. Don’t put yourself off, especially if reading is something you enjoy.
Summary: What happened to Wendy after Neverland. It’s a dark tale, but in my mind it isn’t a re-telling, merely a telling of Wendy’s story when she has a better perspective on real life and how unfair it can be when you are woman.
I watched the animated Peter Pan film as a kid. I even have a fond memory of going to the cinema to see the live action in 2003 because it was the only time I ever went to the cinema with my grandparents and they introduced me to the notion that cinemas used to have cloakrooms, and they had been expected there to still be one. I loved Peter Pan because of the magic involved, and I adore the film Hook (for the context of this discussion Wendy Darling in that film is one of the reasons I love Maggie Smith so much, and her Wendy is quite rightly honoured for her accomplishments in life, so I like it even more for that recognition) However, the original Peter Pan story wasn’t one of the tales I stayed fond of as I got older.
For one main reason: why was Wendy’s entire role in the story to either be ‘Mother’ or the girl with unrequited love with a boy who won’t grow up, won’t act responsibly and is quite frankly very arrogant and reckless. Life is not a game, but it is how Peter views it.
This book had been on my radar for a while, and when I came across it in Aviemore on holiday, I bought it straight away, and began reading it within hours, which is not like me. And I love it; it is still the best book I have read in 2023 so far. It is a very dark story about what happens to Wendy after Neverland, but it is in my mind a better story, the one Wendy deserves, because it shows how strong and capable she can be.
There are two main threads to the plot: one is the journey Wendy goes on when her daughter Jane is kidnapped by Peter to be the new ‘Mother’. Jane is not smitten like Wendy was though, and her perspective of Peter is that of a gaslighting bully. Wendy follows her, determined to be the mother she was cast as all those years ago in order to save her daughter from what she knows is a very real threat, and as it turns out, a Neverland unlike any you have read before.
The second story though is a flash back to how Wendy Darling, became the strong woman who follows her daughter, and it is dark. However the history of women who didn’t conform to the expectations placed on them is dark. Wendy refuses to give up her ‘fantasy’ of Neverland, which in fairness wasn’t dissimilar to the expectation in real life: be a wife, be a mother, only with magic. She’s institutionalised by her brothers, and it becomes her tale of surviving that ordeal intact.
And it is fantastic: it is a story about unfair gender roles, unfair treatment of women who dare to have ideas of their own, and it is about a woman who is a mother, and does conform to expectations eventually, but does so on her own terms. If you are someone who loves Peter Pan because he is the epitome of youthfulness and child-like joy, this book might not be for you. If like me you were always left with a bitter taste in your mouth because woman=mother and nothing else, then I highly recommend it. It is not for the faint of heart, but it is the story Wendy Darling always deserved (in addition to being honoured for looking after orphans for decades).
Summary: A fun end of the world story…well you know as fun as they can be.
The Third Wheel is one of those rare books I came across because I have been following someone on social media for a while and I eventually did take the plunge and try their book (yeah sorry influencers I’m not the sort of person marketing/exposure really works on). Given it is also an end of the world story, and comes with the warning that it is gory (I think Michael literally warned me of that as he was selling it to me – yeah complicated he’s a bookseller as well as an author, and I was visiting the store he works at), it was a daring choice for me as I generally don’t read books that include peril anymore.
However, I was attracted by the idea of the book because of the play of words in the title and how it would matter if aliens came to invade earth. And it was hilarious. It was a book I didn’t want to put down (and because it was a Friday night when I read it, and I had no other plans, I didn’t – it was a one sitting read), and for me wanting to turn page after page is a great sign. Dexter is a very witty character, who doesn’t shy away from the horrors that his friends and him are facing, but he is determined to survive and being single becomes the least of his problems.
In fact it’s an advantage, as being part of a couple just makes you more of a target to invaders. I mentioned gore…yeah the couples in this book do not get off lightly.
The comparisons between being single and being coupled up can be a little bit on the nose at the time, however that’s to be expected. It’s written from Dexter’s perspective, and being single when everyone else comes as a pair had been something weighing on his mind before the aliens came, and the focus is relevant to the plot.
This book was for the vast majority of the first half of 2023 this was the book I kept saying was the best book I’d read so far in the year, and it while it was eventually toppled off the top (by ‘Wendy, Darling’ A.C Wise) it is still in the top five books I’ve read this year. It has the lovely balance of being hilarious and horrifying, in the same sort of way Shaun of the Dead is fun but with peril. Except Dexter’s motley crew is competent (I mean yeah that’s not difficult in this comparison, but the plan is marginally more sound than going to the pub). It is a fun book to read, and I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a book about the end of the world that makes you laugh.
Summary: The Last Passenger by Will Dean is known as The Last One in America. What if you woke up on your cruise and you were the last person on board? What a premise!
It is very rare that I buy a book in hardback and it’s quite rare that I read thrillers, however there was a lot of hype about Will Dean’s book and the premise: what if you woke up on a cruise and you were the only person on board? Sold. What was even better was Will Dean visited the Biscuit Factory in Newcastle, during a week I was on vacation, on the day I was returning to Newcastle from a trip away, and I was able to go to the talk about the book, and meet the lovely man himself.
The set up for reading this book was perfect, and don’t get me wrong I loved the book, but it burned me out. I’ve mentioned this several times now in previous posts, but I couldn’t read for three weeks afterwards. I couldn’t even contemplate picking up a book to try. My reading quota had been filled up, and over spilled, and I just couldn’t… I don’t know if this is a sign of a good book or not. I don’t generally read thrillers because they do exhaust me, and boy this one exhausted me.
And it was worth it.
And as was proved in the talk I went to, it is impossible to talk about this book beyond the premise without giving away massive spoilers. It’s good and the end will throw a final knockout punch at you.
So how do I recommend this book? Well if you like thrillers that’s a great start. This is a controversial comparison because not everyone liked Speed 2: Cruise Control (I love it) but in terms of the setting on a Cruise Ship it’s not a bad comparison because it is a similar environment to be trapped in. If you like strong female characters who aren’t afraid to admit they are terrified out of their life and they aren’t perfect, then you will love Caz Ripley, in the same way that if you loved Katniss Everdeen and the Hunger Games trilogy, you will love the dystopian vibe of The Last Passenger.
It’s great, but if you’re going on a cruise and you have sailing days to fill…yeah pick a different book for that scenario.
SPOILERS: I can’t talk about this book without mentioning specifics that go on in it. Spoiler free summary: it’s a dystopian novel where cannibalism has been legalised because all other meat is unsafe to eat. The protagonist works for a slaughterhouse, and the story follows him as he navigates his own personal losses, and also his day to day life as he tours breeding plants, butcher shops, and other markets where the ‘heads’ are required and sold. It’s more readable than you would imagine but it is not for the faint of heart.
Spoilers from here on out
It is very, very rare I read a book with the expectation that I’m going to hate it. I’m not someone for whom being able to sit and read a book is an easy thing to relax enough to do. I’m certainly don’t do it with a book that I expect to hate. I approach books with the hope I’m at least going to like it. My colleague had picked up this book, and had been making comments about going vegetarian for the duration of time they were was reading it, and I knew enough about it from people on social media I follow to think it just wasn’t a book for me.
I don’t read dystopian novels anymore, and cannibalism was not appealing, but the book is doing the rounds in my office at the moment, and for once, just once, I have actually read a book because of peer pressure. Light touch peer pressure, let’s not be too harsh, and admittedly I only let myself be convinced because I felt the subject matter was controversial enough that if I turned up to the office and passed it onto the next colleague due to read it and admitted I didn’t finish it, no-one would find that unreasonable.
Trust me no-one is more surprised than I am that not only did I finish it (admittedly my approach was to find a couple of hours of spare time and just crack on with reading it in one sitting. If I had put it down there is a very good chance I might not have finished it) but dare I say it, I really appreciate I challenged myself to read it. I can’t say love, or really even like, but I also didn’t hate it. Morbid curiosity about what everyone found so horrific about it drew me in, and I found it a compelling read, which has made me think.
I am a meat eater, and I am fortunate enough to be a one who is relatively well off so I can afford to buy the best quality cuts of meat that I can acquire, but I have never denied that I am eating an animal that has been breed, raised and slaughtered for food. I eat to the best of my ability, meat that when it was alive, had a good life. I’ve always been honest with myself as a meat eater; it isn’t just slabs of flesh that comes from a supermarket. It was alive, and I respect that, and I make sure not to waste anything if it can be helped.
If you read this book having never really truly sat and thought about where meat comes from before, nor exposed yourself to some of the practices, then I can quite understand you might find yourself having a horrific reaction to the descriptions of forced breeding; the descriptions of the slaughtering process; the butchering; the laboratories where experimentation on living creatures takes place; and the descriptions of hunters on a game reserve who then later sit and laugh about how pathetic their prey was and how superior they themselves are as the predator.
People have always hunted, and in this book all parts are used. In some cultures hunting has always been about respecting the living creature and using as much of it as possible. Hunting and animal husbandry like that where the animal wasn’t made to suffer has never bothered me, in much the same way a lion hunting on the Savannah doesn’t bother me, because a lion won’t sit and laugh over it’s meal. Only people do that, and while yes I was familiar with many of the practices described so coldly in this book, it was sickening to think that yes this is just a dystopian novel where the livestock are humans not pigs or cows, but this is what happens to pigs and cows in real life. I’ve always found it shocking when talking to people in the past that they have never thought to question where their food comes from; I have which is possibly why this book didn’t shock me that much and why I make the best choices I can in what I purchase.
If swapping out the pigs and cows with humans is what was needed to make people start to ask questions, then good on Agustina Bazterrica for doing this; start asking questions about where your food comes from, and if you were horrified by human women being forced to carry children then have a good look not only at the ethics of legislation being used against women’s choices with their own bodies, but have a really good look at concepts like puppy farms where bitches are breed over and over too. The ethics in this book isn’t just about whether it is right to do this to humans, it’s to any living creature, as the scenes of human experimentation for ‘the betterment of science’ at the end proves.
There is also a great deal of subtlety in the book; it isn’t just about the breeding and slaughtering of humans for meat. It is the themes of where capitalism’s concerns lie that truly makes this an insidious read. The concerns about welfare are related not to the living creature, but to the effect on profit. Make sure the flayed skin isn’t damaged because it can’t be used for leather then. Do we have a good supply of this skin tone coming because a fashion designer has made it popular? This book will teach you how to mutilate a living creature and keep it alive longer as you cut it up piece by piece and have a supply of fresh meat to hand. Make sure to cut off the arms and legs of the females you artificially inseminated so they can’t hurt the foetus. Make sure the vocal cords of these humans, but don’t call them humans call them ‘heads’, make sure to cut out their ability to scream because we wouldn’t want that now would we? And make sure you don’t ever admit to eating someone ‘with a first and last name’ because that just wouldn’t do. Make sure you witness your loved ones being cremated so they aren’t eaten on the black market that quickly laid waste to all the immigrants and poor who couldn’t protect themselves. We don’t use hearses anymore or your beloved ones might be eaten by the people in the world who are still left starving in a world that has reduced it’s overpopulation problem, but has still left some people to go hungry.
One by one by one the insidious subtly wielded ideas about consummerism and equality in this dystopia come to light and add up to a horrific portrayal.
And, oh yes that too many people on the planet problem, yeah make sure you don’t question anything the government has told you too much, because they “said” all the animals had now been infected and had to be killed en masse, and their meat wasn’t safe to eat, but human meat is fine now, because this virus that infected the animals, that didn’t mean us, did it? When has a virus ever crossed over from animal to human? But you also have to eat meat, because you can’t get all the amino acids you need from plants alone. And those of you breeding humans for consumption, make sure you give them this chemical that makes eating their meat addictive.
One by one, layer on layer.
This statement about not getting the right nutritions from a plant-based diet came very early on in the book, and it is what I found compelling about it. You can get all your amino acids from plants if you combine them with enough variety. You can even get vitamin B12 from vegan sources (from some types of seaweed I believe), but given the way some people think about vegetarians and vegans, I find it incredibly believable that a world of people could be convinced they have to eat meat. There has always been a bias against people who forego meat, and there is a little throwaway comment in this book that India has only just legalised the consumption of human meat years after everyone else had already done it. Given it is a country where vegetarianism has been long established this idea that they resisted cannibalism added to the realism.
The hint that is never quite confirmed that this dystopian vision has come about because the governments of the world have tapped into the ability to spread a paranoia about animals, which then convinced people to eat each other to sort out the problems with overpopulation, that isn’t a theme I’ve seen other people discuss when I read around the book, but that vague hint that’s never really discussed, that’s why I finished the book.
Because the idea it was all happening because people can be easily convinced to accept a new way of life is what as at the heart of every truly brilliant dystopian novel. It is in ‘Never Let Me Go’ where getting an organ donation doesn’t involve waiting for someone to die of natural causes; it is in ‘The Man in the High Castle‘ where the victors are the Nazis and their allies the Japanese and they carve up North America as their spoils of war and don’t meet the level of resistance you’d expect. It is in ‘Brave New World’ where the idea of being physically born naturally via a woman’s womb is abhorrent, and being monogamous is seen in the same abhorrent light some folks in the real world view people who have sex with multiple partners and shock/horror do so outside of wedlock. ‘We‘ is an early example of a dystopian novel, where people are happy for their lives to be run like they are a machine and without individuality, because the artificial intelligence who is their overlord has convinced them their lives are content being this strictly organised.
And it is in ‘Tender is the Flesh’ because even the sympathetic protagonist eventually proves he can adjust to this way of life where some humans in the world are little more than cattle, but aren’t even treated with the same respect afforded to most animals. I’ve mentioned so far the forced pregnancies; there is of course rape as well, from the start, because even in the breeding centres they think it’s useful not to castrate all the men, but to leave a few sterilised but whole. They are used to indicate when a woman is ready to breed, because if they mount them, then that of course must be a sign they’ve come to their prime. In the end the fact the protagonist is himself a rapist, and you hear tell of female ‘domestic’ heads being kept in coffin like boxes under beds by men ‘enjoying themselves’ tells you everything you need to know about how degenerate the people of this book become if you change just one thing: the meat you need to eat now is your fellow man, and to achieve that it means some of their fellow man is now little more than cattle.
Yeah, this book is shocking, but at no point was I surprised or found anything that was done to be unrealistic, because there are plenty of people in the world who are sexist, racist, homophobic and transphobic, and think of other people as lesser than themselves already. The fact in Bazterrica’s they’ve started to eat each other isn’t too much of a step away from reality for this book to be so convincing in its vision, which is probably why people find it so damn horrific.
Summary: I certainly had a mixed reaction to this book; I loved it but I was also grateful it was short, and the week I came to read it certainly came with a few weird coincidences.
I’ve been in a restless state lately; after the spurt of re-reading I had back in August I just didn’t find any of my books were grabbing my attention in the way I need for me to be compelled to pick them up. I’ve been struggling to connect with anything creative lately, but the end of September when I read this book, and first contemplated my reaction to it, can be like that for me. Every year, I’m just busy at work.
But then after some time alone because my husband and gone on holiday with his Dad, and they’d come back, my copy of Companion Piece by Ali Smith started to call out to me as I was sat with them (jealously going though their gorgeous photos of Western Scotland after a very busy week at work where my view was of my desk) and every time I was looking at my husband talking, from the bookcase in the same line of sight, the purple spine of this book popped in my eyes. The fact I had been quite isolated before I came to read this book set in 2021 as the Covid-19 pandemic and the isolation people faced was still having an effect was the first of a series of weird coincidences with this book which I started the next morning on my way to work.
I’ve never read Ali Smith before, but being popular books I have, of course, been exposed to them often in bookstores. I’ve even picked them up and considered them, but I’ve never been compelled enough to try reading one. I bought Companion Piece when I visited Bert’s Books in Swindon at the beginning of June this year. It came home on the train with me as part of a pile of twenty odd books, and of all of the books I bought, it was the only one I couldn’t later explain to myself why I had bought it. Whenever I re-read the blurb when trawling my TBR I couldn’t remember what had attracted me to it enough to pop it in my basket.
Unless it was the purple cover, as I am fond of amethyst hues and woodland scenes. It could have course been some internalised thought of mine, a sort of fear of missing out perhaps, telling me I need to try Ali Smith, and even if her Seasonal Quartet didn’t draw me in perhaps this compelling idea of connecting to something medieval would be for me. As a historian who particularly enjoys that era of time in European history, yes perhaps that was what made me think this one is for me. And the pretty purple cover, I’m going to be honest, it might have been the fact the cover is my favourite colour and that will have weighted heavily in its favour.
Except, as I realised about half way through the book, I’m not sure it is for me; this revelation came to me as I concluded I would finish the book, but I was grateful it was neither taxing nor long. I’ve never been a one for reading literary pieces, and Ali Smith is definitely a literary writer. The plot is disjointed, and a little bit too inconclusive for my liking. Smith’s prose irritated me for not using speech marks and capital letters where I would expect them, however, as much as I’m saying this book isn’t for me, I also absolutely loved it. There were parts I could have done without, then there are other sections of gorgeous prose and ideas that I fell in love with instantly.
In one early chapter I was most definitively connecting with poor Martina struggling with an E.E. Cummings poem. I read it and went ‘huh?’, which isn’t a good sign as by sheer coincidence last week I bought a collection of his poetry as I felt it was time to be familiar with more than just ‘I Carry Your Heart With Me(I carry it in)’. This weird coincidence of Companion Piece calling to me the same week I bought that collection, and having a chapter dedicated to E.E. Cummings, and connecting strongly to Martina saying ‘Nothing about it means anything‘ as she tries to interpret one his poems, sums up for me why I stopped studying English Literature after I sat my GCSEs. Trying to discuss the meaning, the themes, the symbolism, and dare I say it, the intention of the writer was something as a teenager I feared would kill my love of literature.
So I stopped, and with Companion Piece, I did feel at times like I was Martina when trying to read this book, not just that poem. I’m not even going to try to work out what Ali Smith intended, or work out the themes and meanings, but say simply this; I enjoyed reading most of it. Not all of it, but most of it. I dipped in and out over several commutes and lunch breaks, and I escaped into the next little excerpt of story, the next episodic little mini tale that all wove together into a larger narrative. I found the twins to be infuriatingly presumptuous, but still human enough for you to occasionally empathise with them. I felt Sandy’s pain and hopelessness while trying to handle her reaction to her father being ill and isolated away from her in hospital, and I felt her despair at people not even trying to understand why she wasn’t being welcoming.
The oppositions and contrasts in this book have been lovingly crafted, and the final weird coincidence for me was the idea that his book, did just suddenly call to me to read it. The purple of it’s cover popped more than it has in the months since it has lived on my shelves, and I felt eerily drawn to it, in the same way the stories told between characters in the book echoed themes of calling and connection, in this case to a medieval lock and it’s maker who lived during post-Black Death-pandemic Britain in contrast to post/mid-Covid 19-pandemic Britain.
and then there is this girl, the young and talented blacksmith, whose tale in the last third of the book was for me the most compelling to read, whose connection to the modern characters invoked invigoration and even change in them, to seemingly the despair of those around them, who demand their changes in their lives to be accepted and how they identify themselves are to be respected, but then they are reduced to anger when they can’t accept a change in their parent. The hypocrisy was what irritated me the most.
The woes and troubles of medieval times, and the themes of feeling trapped and stuck, and not accepted simply because of who you are, were alien and familiar all at the same time; the pain and suffering of the plague still having an effect in the girl’s life echoed and resonated as a beautiful contrast with Sandy’s story. And her resilience was invigorating, and a refreshing look that life in the 21st century could be much worse, because even though we have all just gone through a time of restricted freedoms, I’m grateful of the freedom we have now, that just wasn’t even a concept in the 14th century: to wander the world freely without fear of being accused of being a vagabond and branded for it.
The story from the medieval times justified the words ‘more than five hundred years ago’ on the blurb being a good enough reason to buy the book in the first place, but I will admit to having struggled with the writing style and the plot of the contemporaneous timeline. I recommend it, and you certainly don’t need to have read Ali Smith before to appreciate it, but I’ll be honest, I’ve not been compelled to try anything else by her. Her Companion Piece for me, is a piece that will not have it’s companions join it on my shelves.
You were ours
Greater than what we saw
Strong, not sick
More than just pretty
What memories you must have,
pray tell?
Love proclaimed under your leaves
Kind words whispered in the not so gentle northern breeze
That you withstood better
Than the stumbled curses or two
From a few, slipping and climbing
On sides steeper than imagined
Or recalled mistakenly by knees
that knew them in younger days.
What skies you must have seen,
pray tell?
Iron grey with white snow?
Aurora glow?
Stars wielding overhead
Clouds whirling
Sun, rain, mixed days?
As at your roots, feet tread
Following a wall
Stopping
At you towering tall
Nature meeting History
Melded
Only you know all the tales of the gap
Of the long dead
The far away
Everything done in your time
Pray tell...
...oh yeah you...
You were ours in so many ways &
we were supposed
to be yours to remember.
Summary: 30 years on and it is still a fantastic film, and going to the cinema is one of the best ways to see films.
I’ve written about Jurassic Park before back in 2016, and having just re-read what I wrote then, I still firmly believe what I said seven years ago. Jurassic Park is a brilliant film about humans wanting to recreate the past in a combination of museum and zoo, and the true villains of the story aren’t the man-eating dinosaurs, but the people who don’t stop to think about the power they are wielding, and the consequences of thinking you have control over something as unpredictable as a living creature, because ‘Life will find a way’.
Wow, yes I can tell I am a combination of Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum’s characters here.
The reason I’m writing about it again though is because it is the 30th Anniversary of the original release and I was lucky enough to be able to see the film in a format I’ve never seen it before: on a cinema screen.
I was five the first time Jurassic Park came out. I never saw it at the cinema I was too young, and I was about ten when I saw it the first time. One of the things I really love to do is go to the cinema, especially to see classic films I know and love in the format they were designed to be seen in. I did it for Inception, which I missed when it was released, but got re-released during the early days of the pandemic when cinemas were open again but nothing new was being released. I’ve seen Back to the Future several times on the big screen. I haven’t done it in a while but I have in the past done a Lord of the Rings marathon. I have plans this Christmas to go to my local independent cinema (Tyneside Cinema) and see some classic Christmas films on the big screen. I adore doing it, and I have all my life, especially because I was lucky enough to be the right age to see the original Star Wars Trilogy for the first time in the cinema when that was re-released in the late 90s. I do credit that experience with being one of the reasons why I fell in love with cinema.
I spoke recently about the (brace yourself folks that word is coming again) Joy of Re-reading Books , well I get a lot of joy out of films, and for me going the cinema is a joy. The real punch in the gut about going to see Jurassic Park at the cinema recently was that it is likely one of the last classic films I know and love that I hadn’t previously seen on the big screen before because I’m getting to the age now where I’ve either already been to a screening of a film I really love, or I very likely saw it on the big screen the first time around. Momentarily remembering I’m not getting any younger was a bit of a wobble, but that just made me remember to embrace the joy.
And also, being older now, and while I haven’t been directly involved in procurement, I know people who have, and ‘No expense spared’ is the biggest lie in the film. Having read the book I know that Dennis got the job he has because his company underbid to win the contract and he has lots of financial problems. So ‘No Expense Spared’ such really be ‘No expense spared, except when it comes to the guy who runs the computers, can control the entire park and whose annoyance with Hammond is pivotal to the entire plot’. As a grown up, that makes me chuckle, and it’s okay to laugh because the people who died are fictional.
Summary: If you know, you know. One of the most famous crime books ever written.
The first time I read ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ it will have been part of my Mum’s collection of Agatha’s, and I was too young to really understand the impact of this book. I will have learnt the twist from watching the David Suchet adaptation and I will be honest, I have spent the vast majority of my life not really liking this story. It was a bit dull to me as a kid.
However, while it has been a while since I posted about Agatha (see my reviews of The Mysterious Affair at Styles and Murder on the Links here) that’s because generally my blog kind of went away again for a year, and I might even address that at some point, however I have still been reading Agatha and I’m still getting two books delivered a month by my Bert’s Books subscription. And next on the list was ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’.
And what can I say I was a dumb kid when I formed my first opinion of it. My adult grown up opinion is that ‘duh, of course this is one of Agatha’s most famous books, it’s fantastic!’. And it really is; the plot drives you forward to find out the truth, but it’s not so complicated you end up dizzy. It is incredibly easy to read, like I find most Agatha Christie’s are, and I really appreciate that. I want plot, but sometimes what I want is light prose.
There are two ways you can approach this book: you know, or you don’t know. I’m not going to say it, even though the twist is fairly well known (I mean the book is 97 years old) but you can read ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ either way and it is a fantastic book. And if you fall into the ‘know’ category that scene will send a chill down your spine. Go back if you’re reading this book for the first time, and maybe even re-read it, because it is completely different reading it when you know the ending.
It is a classic crime novel for a reason, because it is an incredibly well written book, and that is why I recommend it. Crime novels are a popular genre and this is one of the classics; its contemporary impact was enormous and is one of the reasons Agatha Christie grew to be so famous.
Try it you won’t regret it, because while I was a dumb kid who didn’t really get it first time around, as an adult I can say it is an enjoyable read.
This was another one of the books that I got caught up re-reading when I went on my spurt of seeking joy from books I already knew the other week. I definitely went through a bit of a phase of reading LGBTQIA+ books. I do love a good G romance, and I love a fake dating trope. It will have been a combination of those things that drew me to this book when I came across Jackson’s book last year.
I remember I picked up on it from a list of ‘if you liked this TV show you will love this book’. It was an American list (I’m British), and I hadn’t heard of half the TV shows, and I know the TV show associated with this book would be one of the last things I’d ever watch on television (I don’t recall exactly what it was but it was a reality TV format and that doesn’t appeal to me) and maybe this should have been a bit of a warning for me.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the book and it is a very good, well written book, and I would recommend it, but honestly I don’t love it. I mean I should; fake dating, gay romance. It ticks plenty of boxes for me but it just doesn’t quite click. And the only thing I can think is a bit different than the usual fake dating books I read is that Kian and Hudson have dated before. This is fake dating because Hudson hadn’t told his family he had broken up with Kian, and they end up being invited to a family wedding together.
It is a fake dating story, but not a but are they or aren’t they going to get back together, and they have a messy relationship. It is told from Kian’s viewpoint and the break up was bad for him, and professionally he’s not in as secure a position as Hudson
SUMMARY: A brilliantly atmospheric book about love within a boy band. The atmosphere is very well written based on what I know happens when you’re on the inside of a globally successful pop group.
It wasn’t long after I read Red, White and Royal Blue (R,W & RB) by Casey McQuiston that I also read ‘If This Gets Out’ by Sophie Gonzales and Cale Dietrich back in 2022. Like with R,W &RB, ‘If This Gets Out’ is also one of the books I’ve re-read recently because I wanted to feel the joy of re-reading the story (I am beginning to sound very much like Marie Kondo in my overuse of the work joy: I don’t care). And like with R,W & RB the reason I was drawn to the book, beyond it being a gay romance, was the premise.
What would happen if two members of a boy band were to fall in love with each other?
The premise won me over, joy sparked, and hell the frustration begins straightaway, because Zach and Ruben might be in a globally successful boy band but they have very little control over their own lives. Their hair is picked for them, their clothes are picked for them, they are choreographed, well-rehearsed, and not just when they are singing and dancing; everything they say publicly is vetted by Chorus Management. And for Ruben this has been going on from the very beginning of the band because he is not allowed to come out publicly as gay.
When I’ve been on my re-reading journey lately I wanted to do it because I love re-reading books more than I enjoy reading them for the first time, mainly because I find not knowing the ending so stressful I rush myself through books. Even knowing the ending of ‘If This Gets Out’, the frustrations of Zach and Ruben as they navigate a hectic life, sexual confusion and love were just as strong the second time as it was the first time. The only difference was I did find it easier to put the book down and not carry on reading if life needed my attention.
It is exceptionally well written. I’ve never been a fan of a boy band, not really. I had a short-lived interest in 911 at one point in the late 90s but that was very much just a phase, not a devotion. I did however in the late 00s find myself with a man-band obsession, a man-band who had been a boy-band in the early 90s and had come back.
I present to you Take That.
I was too young the first time around, but they had a big enough cultural impact I had heard of them as a kid. I was an adult when I discovered them in the 00s. In the obsession days I watched quite a lot of documentaries about the band, because I wanted to know more than just the songs. I wanted to know what happened in the 90s, their journey, and their reunion (oh yeah spoilers: they had a horrendous falling out). Having that background knowledge about their experiences in the 90s and the dynamics of relationships in a boy band (platonic and estranged in TT’s case) makes reading ‘If This Gets Out’ just that little bit more uncomfortable.
Take That is my example; I’m fairly certain you could have been a fan of anyone from the Backstreet Boys to One Direction to BTS, and the atmosphere written in this book would resonate with you, whether it’s just the lifestyle of being in a band; the relationship with their management; or just their bonds with each other. The claustrophobia, the lack of a personal voice, the lack of creative control, the manufacturing of a public image, and the measures band members might end up resorting to in order to cope could have all been written by Gonzales and Dietrich as if they were writing about the real life experiences of a real life boy band, because what Zach and Ruben (and Jon and Angel) go through as Saturday is hauntingly accurate.
There is one scene in particular when all that happens to Zach is a fan in a screaming crowd brushes their hand down his neck; it reminds me every time of member’s of Take That’s more crude descriptions of crowds groping them, and one image in particular of one of them being punched by accident by a fan reaching out for them. The fear of the crowd is strong in Saturday, and it’s a fear I share. I’m not a fan of crowds generally; fan crowds utterly terrify me. I don’t get the screaming; I whoop and clap along at concerts, but I don’t scream and grab. But people do, and it makes for uncomfortable reading, because of the ‘What If?’ that hangs over this story.
What If This Gets Out? What will the fans think? What will the pursestrings held by Mum and Dad think? The fanbase in this book is a fantastic example of how a crowd can be a character too.
And that is what makes the book brilliant. It isn’t just the story between Zach and Ruben, the atmosphere it’s happening in has been executed perfectly by Gonzales and Dietrich, and I highly recommend it.
SUMMARY: I love a good fake dating trope, and Sher Lee’s story between Dylan, who aspires to win a mooncake making contest to help his Aunt, and Theo, the son of a billionaire looking to learn more about his mother’s heritage, is a perfectly romantic tale to escape into.
I love a good fake dating trope; I know what triggered my liking for them (To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before) but I can’t pinpoint exactly what is about them that I love so much. I might never know, but when by chance on social media I came across Sher Lee talking about her book Fake Dates and Mooncakes, about a week or so before it was due to be released, I just knew I had to have it. When I went to ask my favourite independent bookseller (Bert’s Books in Swindon) to add it to their website I discovered they’d coincidentally already added it less than an hour beforehand. I knew it was fate.
And I was not wrong. I loved it the first time I read it, and I loved it even more when I re-read it recently and got even more joy from it (I talk more about the joy of re-reading books here). Theo and Dylan don’t meet under the best of circumstances (well Dylan definitely appreciates Theo was only in his boxers) when Theo’s friend Adrian is less than pleasant to Dylan about the food delivery Dylan’s just made. When Theo and Dylan meet again the very next day, it gets very cute and romantic from there on in; there is nothing fake about Dylan’s feelings. Except when he’s trying to fake to Theo that he doesn’t like him. Teenagers, huh?
There are two main drivers to the plot: Dylan wishes to honour his mother’s memory by entering a mooncake making contest as part of the Mid-Autumn Festivities taking place in New York, which will also help his Aunt’s Singaporean takeout business should he win. Theo wishes to be with Dylan on his journey to learn more about his own late mother’s culture, and the book beautifully explores Singaporean cuisine and culture, as Dylan and Theo bond together because they understand the grief of losing their mother’s, and wanting to respect the culture they came from, which Theo hasn’t really been able to do before.
What drives Theo is the desire to have Dylan accompany him to a family wedding as his fake date in exchange for a favour he did for Dylan’s struggling family, because, as he tells Dylan, he doesn’t want to end up being set up on blind dates if he turns up alone. Of course, that’s not the entire story, Theo has an ulterior motive, and it is all connected to a simple fact about Theo, which makes him very different to Dylan: he is the son of a billionaire. The wedding they go as fake dates is full of, as Dylan puts it, ‘crazy rich drama’. It’s the perfect set up for the second half of the book and the problems Theo and Dylan face.
The book is charming, romantic, and I loved the obstacles Theo and Dylan face have literally nothing to do with the fact they are two gay teenage boys who are interested in each other. Their relationship isn’t a course for concern or elicits any homophobic response from other characters. This is quite simply about money and the differences in their lives Dylan perceives right from the beginning (I mean Theo drives a Ferrari which is pretty hard to miss). This difference makes him uncomfortable, despite his feelings for Theo. It makes Dylan feel worse when assumptions are made about why he wants to be with Theo.
I love this book, and if you are looking for a cute teenage romance story to lose yourself in, this is perfect. It will make you hungry though, especially if you google the Singaporean references as you go. There is some very delicious sounding food described in this book, and I’m certainly looking forward to seeing if I can try some when I get the chance. I recommend you read it with a snack to hand.
Summary: I got hooked in by the premise of this book, and then fell head long into Alex and Henry’s story from there.
I was a couple of years late to the game in coming across this book, which I first read in June 2022. I believe I first heard about it because some people I follow via the book community on social media were very excited when they heard Alex Claremont-Diaz, and Prince Henry had been cast for the film adaptation. I really love LGBTQIA+ romance stories, in particular G, and I got curious.
The premise was the hook for me: what if a Prince of the British Royal Family, falls in love with the First Son of the President of the United States? It’s a brilliant idea, and Casey McQuiston executes it wonderfully (not perfectly as I have a few quibbles on royal protocol and some of the royal titles, but wonderfully all the same).
The book is told entirely from the perspective of Alex Claremont-Diaz, the First Son of the President of the United States, Ellen Claremont, and the moment I really fell in love with it was when I realised that Casey McQuiston had written an alternative history. A one where Trump did not win and a female president was elected in 2016. The fact she also made the royal family completely fictitious compared to reality really helped matters. It is an alternative universe you can truly escape into.
Tweet by me on @kabrown4 on June 27th 2022 – First a cake then a cupboard; I’m hooked by Red, White and Royal Blue already and very sad that I have to now be responsible and go to bed for work tomorrow. Consoling myself by packing it for my commute. #reading (bought from @bertsbooks) (ALT Text: Photo is of my very pink copy of Red, White and Royal Blue, with a Bert’s Books bookmark poking out of the top).
And the first time I read it I fell into it head long. But not into a cake, or a cupboard, but simply into the pages of the book and an obsession. A short-lived obsession because I devoured the book within a couple of days interrupted only by the obligation I have to turn up to my job. Almost to my own detriment really: I read it too quickly and not carefully enough, and according to the time I tweeted, I was reading it late into the night when I was supposed to be asleep for work. Being tired probably didn’t help with the memory retention either.
Having now seen the film in the last few weeks (several times, I’m at the point where I can still use fingers to count, but I am onto two hands) I turned back to the book, mainly because when people were talking about aspects of the adaptation, I realised I couldn’t really remember much about the book. All I knew was that there was a lot more story, most of the secondary characters had a much richer more complex backstory than what made it into the adaptation, and some of the plot was missing entirely, especially with regards to the more political aspects of the American election.
So it is a book I have joyfully re-read in the last week or so, and it is a joy, because the love and affection between them is so beautifully conveyed in their emails and texts, and the brief moments they do get to be together as they carry on with their lives and love each other from a distance. The level of detail and research McQuiston must have gone to in order to get the quotes they send each other should be applauded in its own right as a tribute to all the lovers in the past separated from their other half and left longing.
It is a gay romance, with the main complication in their lives being not just out-dated homophobic attitudes, but also the complication of their station in life, and the hurdles they face as they do fall from lust into love, and the desire for a life together. And it is quite simply fantastic, and I very much love that I’ve gone back and re-read it, more slowly, more carefully, comforted I knew how it ended so I didn’t have to rush to find out this time. This love story is a journey that has been beautifully written; it is not just about finding out the answer to the question that haunts them both: how will people react if the wider public found out about them? It is also about a truth all people face when they fall in love: can they accept the love they have found?
I’m quite tempted to crack it open again for round three
SUMMARY: It’s a very enjoyable film in it’s own right and I very much recommend it, but it’s not got a lot in common with the book it is based on.
I absolutely adore this film; I love the actors, the cinematography, the editing and the choices made regarding the soundtrack. I’ve had Joan Jett’s Bad Reputation on loop with Vagabon’s If I Loved You rather a lot lately. I even agree with the filmmakers that objectively the deleted Cornetto scene that’s been doing the rounds on social media kind of deserved to be on the cutting room floor.
Subjectively though as a fan of the book first and foremost, I do understand why people wanted that scene. It’s important, because it’s the first time Alex starts seeing Prince Henry beyond the publicity machine he has been largely exposed to before. The deleted scene is nothing like the book’s scene; the filmmakers really didn’t do a good job adapting it and it wasn’t alone. Overall, and I do have to be truthful, I cannot hand on my heart tell you that Red, White and Royal Blue is a film adaption true to its original source material.
Beyond the fact it is a love story between a Prince from the British Royal Family, and the First Son of the President of the United States of America, there is actually very little that is similar between the book and the film bar a few key scenes, some of the dialogue and some of the references that are made.
Some key characters are missing entirely; other key characters have been merged into one character; some key characters who did make it into the film have literally no back story whatsoever. In one instance a key back story of two other characters who are dating each other is a key plot point in putting Alex and Henry back into touch with each other, and it comes out of the blue. They haven’t even met on screen, nor is it implied they’ve ever met off screen. I mean I can work out when they might have done, but I knew this was a plot point that was coming, because I’ve read the book. If you’ve only seen the film, and you were confused by this subplot in the concluding act of the film coming out of no-where, you have every right to be confused. It’s seeded much better in the book.
And then there is the fact that the Queen in the book is a King in the film. This particular decision is a one I’m really uncertain about why the filmmakers did this, beyond the fact they clearly wanted to cast Stephen Fry. As the members of the Royal Family in the story are all fictitious (they even have a different surname from reality) I didn’t really see the need to change a Queen for a King for the film. For some reason this really grated on me, even more than the fact Henry’s mother is missing entirely. The film didn’t need to change this to reflect the change from Queen to King in Britain in the last year; it’s a work of fiction and this was an unnecessary tweak in the adaption.
However, despite a couple of flaws and quibbles, I draw you back to my first comment on this post; I absolutely adore this film. I can’t help but make comparisons to the book, because I love the book, but if I separate the book and the film, and put them in different boxes in my head, I can love them both. Adapting a book to film is not easy, because a book can easily be more complex than a screenplay, whether than is for a film or a tv series, and while they didn’t get some things right, the filmmakers still made a fabulous film.
The adaption of the book might have only carried through to the screenplay the main plot of Alex and Henry falling in love, but is done really well, especially the depiction of their long-distance relationship. How the filmmakers portrayed their texts and emails in a visual media was brilliant, even if it didn’t carry though the depth affection found in the book, Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine more than made up for it. Alex and Henry were cast perfectly, and it is largely because of the two main actors that I love this film, because the chemistry between the two of them is sublime.
I highly recommend this film, because it is a wonderfully romantic story with a great premise, just don’t watch it and expect to watch a reconstruction of the book; that rarely happens with adaptations anyway, but in this case it really is best not to compare them. Just love the film for what it is; charming.
I have been a fan of Agatha Christie for a long as I can remember. I remember watching David Suchet as Poirot and Joan Hickson as Miss Marple growing up. My mum had lots of the books and I read them growing up. I have a vivid memory of being given a hardback copy of The Murder of on the Orient Express for Christmas or my birthday, and being told nothing of it except, “Go read it”.
Agatha Christie surprised me then, and she keeps on surprising me. I get two of her books delivered to me a month via a subscription from Bert’s Books. Reading and reviewing them all, and talking about the adaptations is something I want to do and something I have started, but with plans to only write a review on Saturday mornings, if I stuck to that for Agatha Christie then this blog pretty much would just become an Agatha Christie fan page. That’s not a bad thing but that’s not really my plan, so I think every other Wednesday I’ll devote an extra bit of time to her and gushing about her (apart from when she doesn’t impress me but no-one’s perfect, not even the Queen of Crime).
Here’s links to what I’ve written so far about the books:
SPOILERS – Sort of – The title of the film and the fact it is based on real life events does sort of give away that Prince Bertie will end up as the King. I won’t say how if you don’t know your 1930s British Royal Family History, but that is where this film is heading. Overall the plot is about Prince Bertie the second son of George V seeking to overcome his stammer.
I’m sure since 2010 when this film was first released I must have seen it more times than I remember, because I absolutely love it. Since it was released though I have watched a great deal more tv series (The Crown) and movies (The Queen, Spencer) about the British Royal Family than when I first saw the film, and certainly more since I last saw it several years ago. As subject matter for the little or the big screen they are a fascinating family to watch. The King’s Speech though is one of my favourites.
There is an air of mystery surrounding the British Royal Family and what happens behind closed doors, and for me The King’s Speech is one of the best outings that brings them to the screen. For a simple reason really; it highlights that they are merely human beings, with problems and struggles, just like everyone else, but with the added pressure that they shouldn’t have issues. This was especially true in the 1930s and even more true for a Prince and the son of the King. The “simple” act of making a speech is beyond Prince Bertie, but it is expected of him and his stammer is, from his family’s point of view, something he needs to get over which they berate him for not doing.
I particularly love the chemistry between Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter as Prince Bertie and his wife Elizabeth (the parents of Queen Elizabeth II), because they portray a happy, loving couple who were trying their best to perform their duties as expected and then take on more than they had ever imagined would be their duty to take on. It is his loving wife that is gentle with him, and takes him for treatments, and finds him Lionel Logue as a last resort.
Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue demanding that in his treatment room, he and the Prince are equals are some of my favourite scenes (I mean alright admittedly my favourite scene is Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth being reunited on screen again but that’s because I’m an Austen fan). The interplay between them is tense, and real, and interspersed with everyday domesticity (making tea, building air fix models) that I would presume Prince Bertie never really encountered, even in his more intimate domestic set up. It is a massive contrast to the other experts and their ideas about treating him; it is sometimes painful to watch, but very satisfying. Rush is forthright but tender and patience, and Firth has sweary outbursts of understandable frustration breaking up his very regal air as he stammers. However he slowly unpeels his royal exterior to trust Logue in his most vulnerable moments as the Prince turned unexpected King has more and more reasons thrust upon him to find help for his stammer.
Their performances are superb; they deserved every accolade they won or were nominated for at the time. I highly recommend it if you’ve never seen it before because it is a beautiful story, acted beautifully and the cinematography is wonderful. It is the perfect film for a relaxing Sunday afternoon.
A Young Writer's Notebook 