The Ballad of Smallhope and Pennyroyal - Jodi Taylor

47%

10.11.25

Perhaps it's my own fault for reading the original story of characters I didn't know from a series I haven't read but it was supposed to be standalone and, well, funny and exciting, but instead it felt like an in-joke that hadn't been explained with a very ragged plot. And it would have been much more interesting if they hadn't (spoiler) fallen in love at the end.

(This novel gets incredibly high ratings on Amazon and Goodreads but I've tried and failed to get on with Taylor's books before so clearly everyone else is wrong.)

A View of the Harbour - Elizabeth Taylor

60%
14.09.17

Like a muted Under Milkwood, this captures particular community at a particular time. The characters and location are deftly sketched and not much happens very convincingly.

The Nothing Girl - Jodi Taylor

52%
17.12.16

A fairly standard cutesy romcom, enlivened by the narrator's mentor, an invisible talking horse, but unfortunately that disappears two-thirds of the way through. Well written but its distractingly self-published feel could have been solved with a decent structural edit.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor

61%
16.02.14

Either all contemporary YA books are similar or I just choose to read those in the violent fantasy genre. This one is readable and inventive enough, but not as accomplished as Patrick Ness, poorly proofread with several continuity errors, and generally trying rather too hard. The second in the inevitable trilogy isn't top of my endless TBR pile.

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor

73%

17.03.13

I'm not a great fan of tragi-comedy - there's nothing very funny about tragedy. But this rather wonderful story succeeds in being both wry and devastating in its dissection of old age - its loneliness, its small joys, its humour, its social embarrassments - and that in fact, this is the stuff of life at any age. Some say it's depressing, but the complexity of character and plot in such a short novel, combined with the beauty of its writing and power of its final pages, rather makes it oddly uplifting, the sort of book that sticks in your mind.

NB: Oddly, I wasn't too impressed by another of Taylor's novels, 'A Game of Hide and Seek'.

A Game of Hide and Seek - Elizabeth Taylor

50%
27.04.09

No, not that Elizabeth Taylor. An exquisitely written but deeply strange and detached book, with very little plot. A man and woman fall in love and then... nothing happens except a lot of buttoned up Britishness. Makes 'Brief Encounter' look like a thriller.