28.07.26
It's set in 1976, you know. 1976! Yes, 1976! Can you tell? Can you tell? Are there enough irrelevant pop culture details and political references and endless updates on the heatwave (which actually sounds quite mild compared with 2026's brutal summer) to hint at it being, you'd never guess, 1976? And let's add so much background description that readers might not notice the flimsy, predictable plot.
57%
18.07.26I'm reviewing these two books together because the whole series might as well have been a single, continuous story, and there's not much to tell them apart anyway. Because it's fun, fairly feminist, vivid (if slightly stereotyped characters) and has a not-entirely-predictable storyline, I'll overlook the lack of editing in places, and how some parts didn't really make sense.
14.07.26
I liked this book more than the Trinidad Tourist Office probably does, and more than I should when the author had to justify some of her narrative choices in an endnote. It did a good job of juxtaposing Trinidad's violence and poverty with its aspiration and luxury, and managed to stay engaging despite having so few sympathetic characters.
58%
12.07.26This was slightly messier than the previous book in the series and could have done with a slightly more thorough edit at times but was still good violent fun with some deeper messages in amongst the craziness.
60%
09.07.26Since I have free Kindle Unlimited again, I couldn't resist returning to Lauretta Hignett's urban (well, smalltown) fantasy world. I was right about the first in the series just acting as a springboard as this was much better. The humour is balanced with a fair helping of violence, darkness and angst, along with strong character development.
47%
06.07.26Passable Heyer / Austen / Quinn fanfic that would have worked better if it hadn't tried so hard to shove in irrelevant historical events and 21st-century sensibilities.
30.06.26
A competent smalltown 'kids on bikes' (well, teens in cars) mystery that wasn't particularly distinct from similar YA stories and TV shows.
52%
25.06.26I liked the bold feminism (and having a nice and not entirely useless husband seemed like a subversive move) but the main character was so unlikable and unrelatable both before and after her 'transformation', and the situations so exaggerated, that it didn't please me very much.
(Apparently, I read a book with the same title last year, which I have absolutely no memory of. I doubt I'll remember this one either.)
56%
24.05.26The pacing is poor, there's too much exposition, the fact checking is still dodgy (has the author ever actually listened to a podcast?), the characters are underdeveloped but still I keep reading this series so there must be something about it that engages me. Maybe I just hope that this time it will be better.
68%
21.06.26This was marvellous in all senses, with the added bonus of featuring my local city Norwich and its Theatre Royal. It's a strange, hypnotic, poetic fever dream that's certainly a fresh take on, well, everything. But it's let down by wandering too far into the grotesque, and the author's ugly drawings don't do it any favours either.
60%
17.06.26Who doesn't love a psychopathic narrator with no redemption arc? Well, lots of readers if you go by the reviews. But a bad person does not make a bad novel - in fact, it's cleverly paced and the emphasis here is definitely on the fun. (Apart from when she killed a cat. Oh, yeah, and a couple of people too, but there's no excuse for killing a cat.)
56%
15.06.26It's not a bad book (it's in fact well written, well characterised, quite well plotted) but it's so unrelentingly depressing that I simply didn't want to read it. But, after many attempts, I forced my way to the end, but that was somehow even more depressing (spoiler! But this is Liz Nugent, after all: evidence #1; evidence #2).
14.06.26
This was as messy and illogical as Harriet's performance on Traitors.
08.06.26
This wasn't as tragic as some of Joyce's other books but it was still pretty dark. But it was frustrating, too. Beautifully written, of course, but it didn't finish where it should have done and I was hoping that karma would get the utterly unlikable and entitled adult siblings, too dependent on their manipulative father, and it sort of did, but then... it didn't. Because having siblings is apparently always preferable to not, even if they're horrible.
02.06.26
I wasn't sure what to make of this character-led slice of life. Time was treated interestingly - the narrator looks back and forth on a surprisingly modern 1950s - and the scenes, especially of publishing, clearly had some basis in an amusing and awkward reality. But the plot, such as it was, seemed bolted on, and the odd and slightly unreliable narrator never seemed to get to the point. I doubt I'll remember it in a couple of months.
43%
26.05.26This was... exuberant, with strong sense of place (Manchester) and time (the 1980s), although the pop culture references were rather shoehorned in. And that was the problem - a better edit would have sorted the awkwardness, poor pacing and repetition. In particular, characters rolled their eyes on almost every page, which must be as tiring for them as it is for the reader.
23.05.26
My verdict on Grisham's novels is either great or guilty of being poor - the best thing about this one is the marketing strapline on the cover. The interesting idea was badly paced and even more badly written, with cardboard characters and details that have horribly (and fascinatingly) dated over the thirty years since it was written.
21.05.26
Like the designs in the story, great idea, poorly executed.
12.05.26
I liked the refreshingly fun, irreverent tone and vivid worldbuilding. I didn't like the inevitable power-imbalanced, male-possessive romance, the narrative inconsistencies or the main couple being the only characters with character, and not particularly likable ones at that. But a refreshingly fun, irreverent tone and vivid worldbuilding counts for a lot.
