25 Jan 2019

Book reviews Christmas holidays 2018


If you are interested in crime, dystopian or fantasy books, these are my top picks from my Christmas reading!


Spinning silver by Naomi Novik


I loved this book set in Russia in the depths of winter. Miryem is the daughter of an unsuccessful moneylender who takes over the job herself to stop her family from starving. Her success attracts the attention of the Fairy King of Winter who kidnaps her so that she can turn his silver into gold. In her desperation to succeed she unwittingly draws in Irina, a daughter of a lord, whose father wants her to marry the Tzar who harbours a demon that could destroy them all. Echoes of various fairy tales including Rumpelstiltskin but beautifully done and good and evil are not always what they seem. Oh, and never make bargains with demons or fairy kings!

The book of M by Peng Shepherd.
A debut author with a great original story. People all over the world suddenly start losing their shadows and discover that this means that they also start losing their memories. The novel follows a husband and wife who hole up in a deserted shack safe until Max loses her shadow. Terrified she is going to forget Ory and become dangerous to him, she runs away and Ory tries to follow her. The story tells of their separate journeys, the people they meet and the link between forgetting and the power of magic. It is part dystopia, part fantasy and part a human story of dementia with Indian myths and legends thrown in. The last half of book is much faster in pace than the first so you need to stick with the story because right at the end there is an unexpected but very poignant ending that stayed with me and threw up interesting moral questions on what it means to be who we are. I would thoroughly recommend it.

Bodies from the library edited by Tony Medawar.
Lost tales of detectives, mystery and suspense by various authors, all previously unpublished and all written in the ‘Golden Age of Crime Fiction’ i.e. between the two World Wars. Some authors like Agatha Christie I had heard of and others were completely unknown. Amazingly, all the stories were really good, not usually the case in a short story collection. After each story, the editor had written a short biography of that author which was interesting and enabled one to put the author in context. A must read for anyone into crime fiction and very enjoyable.

Mrs Godden