amyvl93's reviews
898 reviews

One of those reads that just wasn't for me. Beautifully evocative writing from both authors but I just found being dropped into this setting slightly unmooring and felt there wasn't enough explanation or exposition in the narrative to root me, because of this, I struggled to connect the central love story as well.

Mutual Aid came across my timeline as part of recommended reads in light of the re-election of Donald Trump, and where we go from here. I found the first part of this book far more enlightening than the second, which becomes a kind of 'how to' guide to running groups which - despite Spade's distrust of corporations - feels very familiar to me.

I appreciated the examples of mutual aid work, and how this differentiates itself from my institution led intervention. I think Spade's arguments that non-profits bad, mutual aid good seemed a little too black and white, and in itself is diluted as you progress through the book - but this is a useful starting point.

Nothing hurts more than giving this rating. The original Noughts & Crosses quartet is one of my all-time favourite series, and blew my young tween mind when I first read them.

Years later, Malorie Blackman revisited the series - adding Crossfire and Endgame to the story, and I really wish they'd been left alone. My feelings on the former was that it felt like half a novel and this also feels the case for this one too. I really feel like they could have been combined and edited into quite a compelling narrative, but split into two they felt like they slightly dragged out character developments and relationships.

Speaking of development and relationships, my main challenge with Endgame is that a lot of the characters behave in a way that feels deeply out of kilter with their personalities that have been established in previous novels. We had whole plot lines opened up which go nowhere, and a redemption arc for certain characters that I really feel were not deserving of them.

I was compelled by the central mystery in this novel, and I enjoyed the way that Blackman wove in real life events into her fictional world and news coverage. However, unless you are a true completist, the original quartet is enough content.

One of my weirdly niche interests is scammers - I'm always interested in how they reel people in, how people fall for them and their lasting impact. One of the most corporatised version of this is Multi-Level Marketing schemes, or scams that people don't even realise are scams.

I've listened to a number of podcasts and watched docs about large MLMs, so Emily Lynn Paulson's memoir/exploration of MLMs had to go on my to read list. Paulson rose to being close to the top of her MLM, drawing in huge amounts of money each month and with a sprawling 'downline'. This enables her to draw a really compelling picture of what it really looks like to 'work for yourself', the pressures that remain as you scale the pyramid - and the way MLMs try and weave their way into your entire life. I found Hey Hun to be at its most compelling when it really leaned into the memoir side of it all, Paulson is genuinely a compelling person (it was clear why she had the reach she did to draw people into the MLM) and I found her reckoning with her addiction issues and how that became a route out of the company.

Paulson does weave some limited social commentary through the book, but I felt this was slightly less impactful. She reflects on the tone-deaf responses of her company to the BLM movement and the inherent conservatism rife in the movement, that includes policing member behaviours at conferences and beyond. However, I think the tension between memoir and non-fiction piece didn't quite get resolved.

However if, like me, you're super interested in MLMs this is an interesting read.

Amor Towles' two previous novels are favourites of mine, I loved their characters and settings and so a new full length novel was hotly awaited. However, unfortunately The Lincoln Highway didn't really do it for me. 

The novel follows Emmett, who has been released from youth prison following a freak accident, and returns to his farm home following the death of his father. He plans to travel with his brother to a new life in California but this plan is derailed when his fellow inmates Duchess and Woolly have escaped with him and have their owns plans to head to New York.

Now whilst this may not have hit the heights for me of his previous works, Towles writing is excellent as ever. There's something about his prose that can really sweep you up into a story, and the sense of place was excellent - both the rural small town settings and the streets of New York.  This is an American road trip novel, which is a tradition I'm not steeped in, so I'm aware that I may have missed some references to novels and films, as there were definitely times where I found the zany cast of characters that the characters came across got a little wearing. 

My biggest challenge with this novel was the fundamentally unlikeable character of Duchess. I think the text wanted us to find sympathy for him; and I definitely recognised the pain of his upbringing but other than that I found him a horrendously selfish character and I struggled to spend time with his perspective. Whilst all the characters, except maybe Billy - Emmett's brother, were complex flawed characters, but Duchess had my back right up as I could never quite understand his motivations for any of his choices. 

It's a shame this didn't live up to my expectations, but I still look forward to what Towles writes next.

Coming to the end of my re-read ahead of picking up Think Again and this is definitely my least favourite of the bunch. This final original instalment picks up with Ellie still utterly obsessed with Russell who shows himself to be a real piece of work in this book; meanwhile the friendship that has propelled the series gets pulled at the seams and does make me wonder what could be keeping Nadine, Magda and Ellie together given they barely seem to like each other at times. The ending felt both overly neat and very frustrating - I'm hopefully that Think Again will take us back to a little more charm and relatability than this.

I was beyond excited when it was announced that Jacqueline Wilson would be releasing her first novel for adults this year - and especially when it was announced that it would be picking up with Ellie, Magda and Nadine from her Girls series. My re-read of the series in advance of Think Again had me interested to see how their friendship would build and be stronger in their adulthood, and how they were all getting on decades later - unfortunately, Think Again didn't really answer too much of this.

We're back with Ellie, who is now 40 and working as an art teacher and illustrator, having been a single Mum to her daughter Lotte, whose off to university. Her friendship with Magda, now dating an older man with kids and trying to fit in with the Joneses, and Nadine, a model (?) who is yet to settle down, feels very on the periphery of this book. The main focus is Ellie's chance meeting with Alice, a woman at her local swimming pool who agrees to help her with a graphic novel, and her reconnecting with Gary aka Mr Windsor the Art Teacher.

Ellie still feels very much like her 13-year-old self which on the one hand was instantly nostalgic, and on the other felt a little bit stuck in time. I know I'm not 40, but I definitely felt that Ellie was overly mature in terms of both her vocabulary and way of engaging with the world - I don't know many 40-year-olds who are clueless when it comes to things like mobiles and the internet. In keeping with her younger self, she still feels a bit judgey of other people's choices which whilst true for a teenager felt a little tiresome as an adult.

As pure nostalgia bait I can't bring myself to give this too low a rating, I did find it super readable and I think there were some plotlines that were handled well (view spoiler), and it was nice to revisit some of the characters as adults - Russell turns out how you expect, and Eggs is a pleasant surprise. However, if this is the start of another new series I'm hoping for some better endings and editors.

Maybe I need to stop believing in internet hype quite so hard. Beartown and Fredrik Backman's books generally are so beloved online that I went into this fully expecting it to be a total slamdunk. However, whilst I found Beartown undeniably engaging it didn't hit the heights that I hoped it to.

The novel follows the community of Beartown in Sweden, a small town which has been left behind by economic changes and so puts their entire belief in the future on the shoulders of the teenage hockey team whose success in their upcoming tournament, they believe, will lead to investment and success for the town. We therefore have numerous perspectives that we dive into, from the star hockey player to his coach to the owner of the team to other players and students in the town. Backman does a great job at making Beartown feel like a very vivid and populated town - the sense of place was excellent.

The plot of the novel really kicks off when there is an incident of rape (this is important to know I think going into the novel) and the town divides into those who believe the victim, and those who think the perpetrator's future is more important than the truth- and people who fall somewhere in between. Backman does a good, if infuriating, job at capturing exactly how a town like Beartown would respond to such news.

However, what worked less well for me was Backman's quite heavy-handed lesson signalling that happened within chapters, or random sentences that I think were supposed to give us a sense of group think but I found a little grating, especially as we dipped into some quite serious topics. I also disliked...most of the characters in the novel, which is fine as we don't need likeable protagonists, but having been sold this book on its 'lovable' cast of characters I found that slightly baffling.

A good read, but I won't be reading the rest of the series.

This novel was everywhere last year and so I was excited to be picking up this novel at last; and was left having had a good reading experience but not one that I think will stay with me in the way that I wanted it to.

Bright Young Women is a fictionalised look at the final murders and arrest of Ted Bundy, told from the perspective of women whose lives were changed forever by him - one, Pamela - the president of the sorority shaken by the murders of their friends and the other, Ruth, who is learning to find herself and her identity away from her overbearing mother after the death of her father.

Knoll clearly has a message that she wants to share through this novel - which is that a fascination with serial killers and the rise of true crime risks further magnifying and amplifying men who were not that special, and whose stories shield those of the people whose lives they have either ended or affected forever. Bundy goes unnamed within the text, and his smart suaveness that we've come to hear as a given from numerous stories about him is consistently disrupted through the pages of this novel.

However, Bundy is not the only man who comes out poorly within this novel. There are bad boyfriends, journalists who see the potential of a career gain as of greater importance than reporting the truth, police forces who want to take the most straightforward way out and members of the judicial system who struggle to see a charming man as anything other than a potential victim. Knoll is excellent at building this just pile-up of male incompetence throughout the novel, in direct contrast to the women who are coming together to support each other and never let the truth go. Knoll also brings to life the pain of women with bright lights and lives ahead of them being cut short which are usually buried in our considerations of true crime narratives.

I did feel that there was a lot going on within the pages of this novel though, and did feel like there were opportunities for it to be tighter. The fictionalisation also didn't necessarily always work for me, it was slightly distracting knowing we were talking about a real man but that the women in the story were largely creations. Whilst I'm sure this was out of respect for the real victims, it felt that the narrative was almost saying that their real stories were not of interest enough for a novel to be created about them. I would have almost preferred Knoll to create an entirely fictitious scenario, with nods to Bundy, instead.