A Love Story for Bewildered Girls - Emma Morgan

46%

13.10.24

I was bewildered about the point of this book. As with The Rachel Incident, what's interesting about young adults behaving like teenagers? It was readable enough but not particularly well written - I often had to stop and reread passages to work out who was doing what and when. The perfect tense exists for a reason and that reason is clarity.

(This also belongs to a subset of contemporary books with a prejudice against people with no siblings. Usually, kids are quite happy to be only children and their parents are quite happy to have only one. It is not going to mess anyone up or make them somehow incomplete.)

Blood and Feathers - Lou Morgan

56%
15.12.12

A quirky take on Paradise Lost, readable enough, with some decent fight scenes and a lovingly invented vision of Hell. Under-edited, though - it needs more appropriate placing of humour and better signposting to clarify what is going on, with which minor characters, and why, as I had no idea in many places. Great cover.

The Ambitious Stepmother - Fidelis Morgan

54%
31.01.09

A ridiculous Jacobean romp, ostensibly a crime mystery but really an excuse for the extravagantly named author to show off her research into a colourful historical period. Too confusing to guess the ending and too many characters for clarity - but an easy and fun read all the same.