thereadingmum's reviews
772 reviews

It's very hard to rate biographies because I feel like I'm rating someone's life. However, I have given this a rating based on the writing, because it felt a lot like she was practising her writing in her entries. The annoying thing is that she writes so well even in her private journal. Although she is very typical of an angsty teenage girl in the first half. She writes incessantly about men and her romantic prospects. 

Discharged nurse, Laura Iven, goes back to the battlefield of WWI to search for her missing brother, Fred, presumed dead. There she and her two fellow nurses have a strange encounter in the midst of battle, stumbling into a hotel of sorts where the proprietor plays the violin with unnatural beauty. She thinks she spots Fred in the room. Then the fury of battle and caring for its broken men engulfs her once again. Told in conjunction is Fred's story of waking trapped in an overturned concrete pillbox with a wounded German soldier. Together, they manage to get out and decide to journey together back to civilisation. On the way, Fred loses himself when he commits an unforgiveable act to save the man he has forged an unlikely bond with. They encounter the strange violin-playing hotelier and Fred is forced to trade himself for Winter's life. 

This story really really reminds me of another yet I can't pinpoint what it is and it is driving me crazy. Anyone who knows, please let me know! It's the plot of a mysterious pseudo evil character during war time luring people to trade their lives for a favour. In any case, this was why I gave it a lower rating because the story felt rehashed and done before.

However, ultimately I loved this book because of the characters and felt a bit teary when Laura finally had that moment of allowing herself hope. If you loved Arden's Winternight trilogy, this is totally different. It's more realistic and the fantasy element is woven in. Whereas in the trilogy it was much more evident.

Ordeal by Innocence is a standalone novel written in the late 1950s and set in the same period.

Arthur Calgary returns from a polar expedition and realises that he is the alibi for a convicted murderer who died in prison. He tells the family of the dead man, thinking they would be relieved that their brother/son has been exonerated. However, instead, it throws everyone else in the family into suspicion for the murder of their mother.

I found this, like And Then There Were None, to be more psychologically thrilling with more of a sense of menace than her usual cosy murder mystery formats. It was well-plotted and kept me guessing with a good resolution to the mystery. My only bug-bear were the two romantic relationships between much older men and young women. Not that I don't understand how they occurred and it was likely more common and isn't that icky given they're both adult women, but still irked me slightly.

 Know what I love about cosy murder mysteries? They always have a happy ending. The murdered is unmasked or gets their comeuppence somehow.

So oddly enough, I would classify A Town Called Treachery as a cosy murder mystery. Instead of a large house/estate, you have a small Australian coastal town. You still have your insular society where suspects abound. One or two amateur detectives and red herrings.

I liked all the characters and enjoyed the coming-of-age aspect thrown in with an unlikely boyish friendship between school outcast and ex-bikkie's son. 

My favourite of the series so far. Much easier to follow than the first two books. Perhaps I'm just more familiar with the world. LOLed several times. Loved the Wuthering Heights chapter. 

Just not interested in astrology and it's too technical for me at the start so very hard to connect to the story. 

This was a great book, just not what I would have picked as the Booker prize winner. Admittedly, I have only read one other on the shortlist for 2008, A Fraction of the Whole, but I loved that one more. The White Tiger is not quite as brilliant. 

While I enjoyed Aravind's voice and the techniques he employed, much of the story is already fading in my mind a few weeks after reading it. Perhaps it has to do with not liking the MC or any of the other characters very much. There is very little redemption in this book, which I also don't like. 

This is a conflicted review. On the one hand, I enjoyed the historical part. I can also see what the writer is trying to achieve. However, I didn't really enjoy the modern part. I wanted to like this much more than I actually did.

It started off well and I can sort of empathise. Though I studied Mandarin for 12 years, it is far from fluent. I took a job that required that I peruse the Mandarin newspapers for relevant articles and then summarise them in English. This was when Google Translate was still in its early stages and not as sophisticated. Also, the newspapers often did not publish the digital version in time and I could not copy and paste the text. By the time I took this job it was about 12 years since I had to read the language so it was very rusty. I survived. I surprised myself reading this by being able to read about 85% of the Mandarin and did not resort to an app. 

I really got into the story of the sociopathic Emperor and his minotaurian tale. However, once #badchinese got to China and the whole ghost city used by the Emperor's modern counterpart, Baby Bao, for his own sociopathic fantasies, my interest started waning. I know that this is mainly due to my own personal peeve with modern China and all that it stands for. I also have a thing about not having to pander to one's ancestral roots. Just because I am born a certain race, doesn't mean I love everything about my "people". This doesn't make me an anglophile or xenophobic, I just believe in my own values, regardless of my birth culture. 

So, while I recognise the writerly value of this book and am very grateful for having been gifted a copy by the author himself, I have given it less than 4 stars because I would not classify it as "great". It is almost great but certainly good. 

Fun and often funny mystery story that doesn't take itself seriously. I can see why this was such a hit. Stevenson takes the p out of the whole cozy murder genre, yet still manages to weave a novel that reminds me of the movie Clue with Tim Curry, particularly near the end where Tim Curry's character whirls you through all the possible solutions like a crazy dervish. 

Will definitely be reading his other work. Especially when I need something silly.