Apologies for the delay, hello May!
Had a slow start to April, reading wise, but somehow managed to finish 4 fiction novels, 1 non fiction novel and an absolutely fantastic poetry collection. Onto the books!
Skipped to the end of this one. This is a novel published by Hot Key Books. Set in 1993 in South Africa, the novel follows Meg as she makes friends with a rebellious girl in her class called Xanthe and well, you know how the story goes. I got about 200 pages into this one before giving up, it felt really flat and boring. And life really is too short for shitty books. However, I did like one aspect. The characters would often use South African words throughout the book and the author (being South African themself) would have the translations of certain words in the footers of the pages. That I thought was cool.
More Than This – Patrick Ness.
More Than This is a fantastic, thrilling, thought provoking and also extremely hard to talk about without dropping some massive spoilers. At the start of the novel, the main character, Seth, is out at sea drowning. And then he wakes up and seems to be the only person in the town. This book was so addicting and I flew through it, considering it’s 500+ pages. There was always something shocking around every corner that I definitely never saw coming. I highly recommend this book if you’re looking for something thrilling. I’m so glad I decided to give Patrick Ness another go after not enjoying The Knife Of Never Letting Go way back when.
Hold Your Own is one of the best poetry collections I’ve ever read. Kate Tempest has a fantastic way with words. The rhyming structure of every single poem in this collection was brilliantly crafted and mastered and made them so easy to read and recite to myself. Inspired by greek myths, the poetry collection tackles themes of love, sex, age and gender. I should note, I don’t know a whole lot about greek mythology and I loved that Kate Tempest incorporated it into her work. I recommend this to those wanting to read some really great contemporary poetry and if you are into mythology.
Silence Is Goldfish – Annabel Pitcher
Silence Is Goldfish is a wonderful YA book about a girl named Tess who after discovering a family secret, decides to mute herself. It’s a wonderful book that I adored and I did a full review of it here where you can see more of my thoughts!
This is a wonderful biography about Shakespeare well written and well researched with warmth by Bill Bryson. It’s not just an average book about Shakespeare though. The book discovers and busts myths about Shakespeare and his life. The book also presents the time period Shakespeare was alive in, as well, which was really interesting to look at. I gave this book 4 stars on Goodreads though, because a lot of points ended along the lines of “… but a lot of evidence regarding this has been lost”. Bryson’s writing still entertained me though! And I used the book as inspiration for a post I did about Shakespeare on his day of death which you can read about here!
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson.
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is a fictional novel but it’s loosely based on the author’s real life in some parts. The novel follows the main character Jeanette who is adopted into a family of Christian missionaries. However, Jeanette packs up and leaves the church and her family as she falls in love with a woman. This book was definitely well written. I had previously read The Gap Of Time by Winterson and with Oranges being her debut, this felt like a different book. I think this book was originally published in 1996 so it was interesting to see her writing develop. Oranges took a while for me to get into, even though it’s short in length. It took such a long time to get to the main chunk of the story where Jeanette meets Katy and develops a relationship with her. But even upon finishing the book, I still felt like nothing happened. And occasionally, there were paragraphs of fairy tales that would pop up during the narrative. Which I didn’t get or it went over my head cause I didn’t see how they were relevant at all. This is a really well written novel about being LGBT and religious excess. If you’re looking for a slow burner then I would recommend.
Thanks for reading!
Until next time,
Hayley.
Categories: books!
Hayley Sprout 