Edith Holler - Edward Carey

68%

21.06.26

This 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.

The Theatre of Glass and Shadows - Anne Corlett

47%

11.05.25

This was promising - after all, immersive theatre is inherently ripe for endless stories. And the author obviously loves the idea of it, spending page after page describing every detail. But I'm not a visual person and all that worldbuilding didn't necessarily progress the (ultimately very confusing) plot or make the dopey main character any less annoying. As with the otherwise very different Life of Zanna, an unsympathetic protagonist needs to have something for you to root for, but this one just kept running back to trouble and spurning potential friends for no good reason. And it needed a better edit - I started playing 'the older woman' - and, later, 'the other girl' - bingo. It's so distracting not to use the character's name or 'her'.

The Unforgetting - Rose Black

 

46%

07.06.21

Perhaps the barely literate style choice of omitting conjunctions and pronouns at the start of run-on sentences was to distract attention from the incoherent story and forgettable characters. So it was no surprise that it ended as if some pages were missing.

City of Girls - Elizabeth Gilbert

 57%

23.05.21

This is a superficial book masquerading as a superficial book with hidden depths. It starts out engagingly enough, reviving a well-researched lost world, but loses its focus when most of the main characters are forgotten and new, less interesting characters take their place.

Shadowplay - Joseph O'Connor

 

59%

20.02.21 

Well, it was a confidently written reimagining of the relationship between three very interesting (real) people that got me checking their achievements on Wikipedia. The possible influences on the development of 'Dracula' were cleverly handled. It was also on the wrong side of pretentious and went on even after the main story had ended. And on. And on some more. 

The Zig Zag Girl - Elly Griffths

59%
31.01.19

I wondered what Griffiths' 'other' series was like. It was quite different, not just because of its 1950s Brighton setting, and the characters lack the baggage of their Norfolk counterparts in this first book. A pleasant enough read, but not particularly memorable.

Fools and Mortals - Bernard Cornwell

64%
04.09.18

It seems I've never read any Bernard Cornwell before and apparently this isn't typical of his portfolio, but I enjoyed the historical detail, confident prose and mischievous re-imagining of Shakespeare (and his less intelligent but more engaging fictional brother).

The Swish of the Curtain - Pamela Brown

67%
13.06.18

With a sudden burst of nostalgia for this childhood favourite, I ordered the new edition from the library. And, while it's not exactly the epic tale of theatre folk I remembered, it's still a delightful, perceptive and engaging account of a group of overachieving children (mostly aged 13+ but teenagers had not yet been invented). It's even more extraordinary for having been written by a 14 year old, evidently an overachiever herself.