Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for ‘The Bone Code’ by Kathy Reichs, the latest in the forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan series of thrillers.
With thanks to Random Things Tours and publisher Simon and Schuster for my copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Many thanks to Helen Richardson for inviting me onto the blog tour for ‘The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls’ by Mona Eltahawy.
This non-fiction feminist book creates a manifesto for women’s action and was published yesterday (22nd April) by Tramp Press.
From the Publisher:
‘She is here for your liberation, and that of every woman and girl, from Nunavut to Namibia’
REBECCA SOLNIT, author of MEN EXPLAIN THINGS TO ME
‘Shocking, brave, gloriously unfeminine, and right on time’
GLORIA STEINEM, writer and feminist activist
‘It is as piercingly intelligent as it is uncompromising. Every woman should read this’
MAAZA MENGISTE, Booker Prize shortlisted author of THE SHADOW KING
Feminism should terrify the patriarchy. It should put patriarchy on notice that we demand nothing short of its destruction. We need fewer road maps toward a peace treaty with patriarchy and more manifestos on how to destroy it. The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls is my manifesto’ – Mona Eltahawy
The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls identifies seven ‘sins’ women and girls are socialised to avoid–anger, attention, profanity, ambition, power, violence and lust. With essays on each, Mona Eltahawy creates a stunning manifesto encouraging women worldwide to defy, disobey and disrupt the patriarchy. Drawing on her own life and the work of intersectional activists from around the world, #MeToo and the Arab Spring, Eltahawy’s work defines what it is to be a feminist now.
My Review:
I was intrigued to read this book – the idea of a feminist manifesto was hugely appealing. I was also interested to see that this collection of essays offers a more global view of feminism – I’m very conscious that a lot of the feminist books I read are by white UK or US-based women, whereas Eltahawy is of Egyptian heritage and offers examples and analysis across many countries.
Finally, I liked the sound of Eltahawy’s active approach to the problems faced by women around the world – she advocates action and a rejection of patriarchy rather than women accepting the ‘crumbs’ offered to them by a male-dominated society.
Although I wasn’t aware of Eltahawy’s work before, she definitely proved herself a strong voice worth listening to in this book!
The seven essays in this collection offer insights into seven ‘sins’ that women are raised not to commit – anger, wanting attention, profanity, ambition, the desire for power, violence and lust are seen as ‘unfeminine’ and to be avoided. However, Eltahawy suggests that these things are exactly what women need to reclaim and do in order to dismantle the patriarchy. After all, what is the sense in following patriarchal rules if they keep women down?
Eltahawy is a persuasive and engaging voice throughout the essays. She sometimes takes a shocking stance – such as the war against patriarchy section in which she imagines the unprovoked killing of men – before contextualising it in regards to what women face every day. It’s a surprising and effective tactic and definitely kept me reading.
Although she isn’t actually advocating the random killing of men, she certainly leads by example with regard to taking dramatic action. Part of the book covers Eltahawy’s arrests in both Egypt and the US, plus her reasons for wanting to take a stand – right from her experiences with a Cairo flasher when she was 4 years old and her assault during prayers that inspired her to start #MosqueMeToo for Muslim women with similar experiences.
What I loved about the book was the breadth of focus. Eltahawy seamlessly moves across the globe, selecting examples from places as diverse as Ireland and Iraq, the US and Russia, India and Uganda. What unites the examples is women’s oppression and its place in her call to arms. It is an eye-opening trip around the world and did make me feel angry at what women face simply for being female in a male-dominated system.
This international dimension was particularly interesting as it added to my understanding of intersectional feminism – the sense that not all women have the same experiences as some face the double oppression of being female and Black, for example (in what Moya Bailey refers to as ‘misogynoir’). I also loved the idea that minority groups should stand together as patriarchy undermines us all – not a new idea, but one that I’ve not seen presented as eloquently and fiercely before.
Given Eltahawy’s dual Egyptian and American citizenship, it was fascinating to read about her take on the Trump presidency – this book was written while he was in office. She suggests that women (called ‘patriarchy’s foot soldiers’ by Eltahawy) helped to facilitate the election of Trump and accepted the ‘crumbs’ offered to them to support his power. She posits that women deserve more than being token women who are granted some limited power as a tool of Trump and the patriarchy.
This is a compelling and engaging argument for women defying male control and dismantling the patriarchal structures that limit them. Eltahawy calls for women to stand up and seize power – which cannot be done within the existing societal model. This is a powerful book that calls on female rage – and it certainly hit the spot for me.
About the Author:
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author and award-winning commentator and public speaker. Her work has been published in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications around the world. She is frequent commenter on current affairs on the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera and other media outlets, where her goal is always to disrupt patriarchy. She is the author of Headscarves and Hymens and recently launchedher newsletter, Feminist Giant. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram:@monaeltahawy
About Tramp Press:
Tramp Press was launched in 2014 to find, nurture and publish exceptional literary talent. Based in Dublin and Glasgow, they publish internationally. Tramp Press authors have won, been shortlisted and nominated for many prizes including the AnPost Irish Book of the Year,the Booker Prize, the Costa, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Guardian First Book Award.
Thanks to the lovely people at Harper Collins for inviting me on the blog tour for ‘The Therapist’ by B A Paris, a tense psychological suspense novel that is out today!
My Review:
Continue reading Blog Tour: ‘The Therapist’ by B A ParisThanks to The Write Reads for inviting me onto this Ultimate Blog Tour for the YA thriller ‘What Beauty There Is’.
From the Publisher:
When everything you love is in danger, how long can you keep running to survive?
Life can be brutal
Winter in Idaho. The sky is dark. It is cold enough to crack bones.
Jack knew it
Jack Dahl has nothing left. Except his younger brother, Matty, who he’d die for. Their mother is gone, and their funds are quickly dwindling, Jack needs to make a choice: lose his brother to foster care, or find the drug money that sent his father to prison.
So did I
Ava lives in isolation, a life of silence. For seventeen years her father, a merciless man, has controlled her fate. He has taught her to love no one.
Did I feel the flutter of wings when Jack and I met? Did I sense the coming tornado?
But now Ava wants to break the rules – to let Jack in and open her heart. Then she discovers that Jack and her father are stalking the same money, and suddenly Ava is faced with a terrible choice: remain silent or speak out and help the brothers survive.
Looking back, I think I did . . .
Perfect for fans of Patrick Ness, Meg Rosoff and Daniel Woodrell, What Beauty There Is an unforgettable debut novel that is as compulsive as it is beautiful, and unflinchingly explores the power of determination, survival and love.
Ruta Sepetys, bestselling author of Between Shades of Grey
‘Beautifully written and superbly constructed, Anderson pulls you onto a chilling footpath of love and loss and keeps you there until you’ve read every last word’
My Review:
I was drawn to this book by the interesting setting – with the action unfolding under the dark, brooding skies of Idaho in winter. What I wasn’t prepared for was a book that was also so dark in content!
The story follows Jack Dahl, a teenager who is left caring for his younger brother after the suicide of their mother. His father is in prison, leading Jack to embark on a scramble to find his hidden drug money. However, Jack isn’t the only one on the trail…
I’ll admit that this was not an easy read – the story is bleak and there are points that are really heartbreaking, for example Jack’s fleeting hope of having a job which is then snatched away from him because of his family name. And any scene with Matty in – the child unquestioningly trusting his big brother to protect him while Jack makes increasingly desperate decisions.
However, there are also some excellent reasons to read this book:
This book is not for the faint-hearted. It is gritty, brutal and unflinchingly violent in places – definitely one to check the trigger warnings on before you read. However, if your preferred reading is on the shadowy end of the spectrum, this could well be a great book for you.
About the Author:
Cory Anderson is a winner of the League of Utah Writers Young Adult Novel Award and Grand Prize in the Storymakers Conference First Chapter Contest. She lives in Utah with her family. What Beauty There Is is her debut novel.
Twitter: @coryanderwrites
Website: https://coryanderson.us/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coryanderwrites/
Amazon UK Link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Beauty-There-Cory-Anderson/dp/0241441714/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=what+beauty+there+is&qid=1616251655&sr=8-1
Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for ‘Last Place You Look’ by Louisa Scarr. This fab new police procedural will be published by Canelo Crime in paperback and digital formats on 8th April 2021.
This tour is organised by Damp Pebbles. As always, thanks to the publisher, author and tour organiser for my gifted copy in exchange for an honest review.
Continue reading Blog Tour: ‘Last Place You Look’ by Louisa ScarrWelcome to my stop on the blog tour for ‘The Shadow in the Glass’ by JJA Harwood.
This tour was organised by Random Things Tours. The novel was published in hardback on 18th March, 2021.
Thank you to the tour organiser and publisher for my review copy – this has not influenced my views and opinions are – as always – entirely my own.
Welcome to my stop on this blog tour for ‘The Three Locks’, a Sherlock Holmes adventure, by Bonnie MacBird.
This tour is organised by Random Things Tours. The novel was published on 18th March, 2021, by Collins Crime Club.
I’m thrilled to be welcoming you to my blog tour stop for ‘Comeback’ by Chris Limb, a quirky, modern myth retelling published by Unbound.
This tour has been organised by Damp Pebbles.
My stop is a guest post from Chris himself… details about the book and author follow Chris’s post below.
They say that the only thing better than writing a novel is having written one.
One of the best parts of having written a novel is getting feedback when other people have read it. It doesn’t always have to be good feedback (although that’s nice too); finding out what did work and what didn’t can be very useful during the drafting and editing process, which is why I appreciated people who agreed to beta read the novel over the years.
Sometimes of course you’ll get two diametrically opposed reactions – if this happens I tend to assume that I probably got it about right in the first place. After all, the old saying about not being able to please all of the people all of the time arose for a reason.
One unexpected piece of positive feedback I received on a number of occasions – not just for Comeback but also for other fiction I’d written over the years – was that I wrote women well.
This surprised me, as I wasn’t even aware that I should have been writing characters differently depending upon their gender. As far as I was concerned I had just been writing people. Furthermore my experience of the inner monologue of members of the human species was confined to what I’d been able to glean from my own experiences. You could almost say that I’d just been writing me, albeit different aspects of me, different people I could imagine being.
Maybe that’s why it worked – by just writing people rather than consciously writing men or women I was drawing on the common experience of being a person, which meant that whoever read it could relate to it in some way.
It is possible that this is an aspect of writing I’ve missed out on – deliberately putting the narrative in the head of someone I can’t relate to, a person who is so different from me I can’t help but write them as other. On the other hand the way I do write works for me, and it makes the characters more relatable to the reader then that’s good.
As it turned out the main characters in Comeback were women, and even though that does affect their experience of the world within the novel, that wasn’t why they were there. They just turned up when I started writing and their experiences shaped the novel itself. They were interesting.
Characters being interesting can mean any number of things. It can even mean being flawed, having your own personal strengths and weaknesses, your own inner demons to fight. It’s these complex things that make characters zip and which give them verisimilitude, whatever gender they are.
To misquote the alleged old Chinese curse “May you live with interesting characters.”
Returning to the subject of feedback, once the book has gone to print then there’s nothing more that can be done about it so the purpose of the feedback changes. Nevertheless it’s still one of the best bits of having written a book and I still appreciate it!
And that is another odd, exciting and unexpected thing – now that Comeback is “out there” then after all these years the narrative has finally solidified into its final form. It took almost exactly ten years from first typing The End to publication. As a confirmed pantser – or ‘archaeologist’ as I prefer to call it – it is as if I am finally seeing the story clearly after years of groping towards it. After years of existing solely (mostly) in my own head, illuminated only by my personal point of view, it is now in the open and lit from all angles.
Maybe this means that people will start to discover new things in it, things I hadn’t even been aware of. These means that the exhilarating process of discovery inherent in being a pantser / archaeologist actually continues well after the story has come onto being, which is another completely unexpected pleasure of having written a book.
Book Blurb:
Genie has everything – a BRIT award, a singing career, the attention of the press and Oliver Fox, a pretty boy who looks good on her arm.
Until he dies.
His death brings Genie’s long buried feelings bubbling to the surface. Her grief over the death of her lover Wendi who introduced her to this world. Her self doubt and fear that she will be exposed as a fraud.
How far is she prepared to go to fix things?
The afterlife isn’t the most comfortable of places for anyone who’s still alive, but Genie’s not going to take any crap from the dead – she’s got years of experience in the music business.
Sometimes going to Hell and back takes a lifetime…
About Chris Limb:
Chris is a writer based in UK, who has had a number of short stories published over the past few years, blogs on a regular basis and occasionally reviews books and audios for the British Fantasy Society.
Chris wrote a short pop memoir which was published in 2011 and went down well with its core-audience. It continues to sell at a steady rate to this day.
Chris also plays bass guitar and performs random acts of web and graphic design for a diverse selection of clients.
Social Media:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/catmachine
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/comebacknovel
Website: https://chrislimb.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/catmachine/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5347555.Chris_Limb
Purchase Links:
Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08PCM8XXY
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/comeback-chris-limb/1138397379
The Hive: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/CHRIS–LIMB/COMEBACK/25566980
Blackwells: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/COMEBACK-by-LIMB-CHRIS/9781789650891
Waterstones: https://www.waterstones.com/book/comeback/chris-limb/9781789650891
Publishing Information:
Published in paperback and digital formats by Unbound on 21st January 2021
Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for ‘Behind Closed Doors’ by Catherine Alliott.
This book was published on 4th March by Michael Joseph and I thank the publisher for my copy of the book in exchange for an honest review, plus the invitation to join the tour.
I’ve read a lot of Catherine Alliott’s books, although not so recently, so I thought I knew what I was getting myself into with this one. Absolutely not so!
In this book, Lucy Palmer seems to have it all – a big house in London, a job writing cosy crime novels, a handsome husband and two grown-up children who are both successful in their own ways. However, this is all a facade and Lucy’s marriage is about to end spectacularly and suddenly – and, when is does, she has some work to do in dealing with her past. Leaving London, she goes to care for her elderly and bordering-on-alcoholic parents in the country where she starts to rebuild her life.
This is an altogether darker story than I am used to from Alliott, both in the truth about Lucy’s husband, Michael, and the events surrounding the end of the marriage. It also touches on some poignant issues, especially caring for elderly parents and ageing.
However, everything else I expected from Alliott is also there, so this slightly darker turn works well. It still has elements of humour – I really loved Lucy’s parents and their hectic social life of boozy octogenarian parties, plus the sassy teenage twins who have much more of a finger on the pulse than the adults. There’s also romantic strands to the story, although these aren’t as central as I would have expected given what I’ve read of Alliott’s writing previously. Instead, the love story is quite understated and works really well given Lucy’s situation.
I really loved the family dynamic that is at the heart of this book. Lucy is at the centre of a supportive, if slightly eccentric, family network and this is one of the real strengths of the novel. There’s the ageing parents, growing old disgracefully but still frail, Lucy’s sister (Helena) who absolutely has control of everything except her own children, plus Lucy’s children – the strong and reliable Imo and thoughtful, calm Ned. I especially liked the strong women in the novel – Helena and Imo being my favourites, although there are other surprisingly awesome women (and a few men!) along the way.
Although this was not what I wholly expected when I picked up this book, I’d recommend it. It is certainly less cosy than I was anticipating and includes some difficult issues, not least domestic abuse, but it is an immersive and engaging read. I genuinely struggled to put it down and loved the clever, understated explorations of relationships and dependencies between people.
Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for ‘Nick’ by Michael Farris Smith, a book that imagines the life of the character of Nick Carraway before he ends up as narrator of ‘The Great Gatsby’.
This blog tour is organised by Oldcastle Books/No Exit Press and I am thrilled to have been asked to join the tour!
From the Publisher:
This rich and imaginative novel from critically acclaimed author Michael Farris Smith breathes new life into a character that many know only from the periphery. Before Nick Carraway moved to West Egg and into Gatsby’s world, he was at the centre of a very different story – one taking place along the trenches and deep within the tunnels of World War I. Floundering in the wake of the destruction he witnessed first-hand, Nick embarks on a redemptive journey that takes him from a whirlwind Paris romance – doomed from the very beginning – to the dizzying frenzy of New
Orleans, rife with its own flavour of debauchery and violence.
Robert Olen Butler
‘NICK is so pitch-perfect, so rich in character and
action, so remarkable a combination of elegance
and passion, so striking in felt originality that I am
almost tempted to say – book gods forgive me – that
The Great Gatsby will forever feel like NICK’s splendid
but somewhat paler sequel. Almost tempted to say. But
I have no intention of taking back the sincere passing
thought of it. Michael Farris Smith’s book is that good’
2021 WILL MARK 125TH ANNIVERSARY OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S BIRTH
‘Anybody who believes that the war is
Richard Russo
over when the enemy surrenders and
the troops come home needs to read
Michael Farris Smith’s masterful new
novel NICK. Its stark, unvarnished
truth will haunt you’
Chris Whitaker
‘Stylish, evocative, haunting and
wholly original, Michael Farris Smith
has paid tribute to a classic and made
it his own. A remarkable achievement
that should sit at the very top of
everyone’s must-read list’
My Review:
I’m a huge fan of ‘The Great Gatsby’, so I absolutely jumped at the opportunity to read this book, a kind of ‘prequel’ to the 1925 novel. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for granting me an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.
This book focused on the story of Nick Carraway, the narrator of F Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’. In the original novel, a few things are revealed about the character – the fact he is a Midwesterner, the fact he served in World War I and the fact he finds himself in West Egg (where ‘Gatsby’ is set) aged 29. This gives Michael Farris Smith considerable scope to imagine Nick’s life up to that point and it is a challenge he seems to embrace wholeheartedly.
The story opens in Paris where Nick is on leave from fighting in the trenches of World War I. He meets a young woman and the initial part of the book is their (short) relationship before Nick is called back to combat. A period in the trenches follows – brutal, grim and shocking – before Nick goes to New Orleans and starts to search for his life back in America.
The varied settings of the novel are fascinating as Nick explores a corner of wartime Paris, the trenches and tunnels of the front line in France, the seedy quarter of New Orleans where the speakeasies and brothels are, before finally moving on to West Egg and his future. These places – a theatre attic, a bar, an apartment – are vividly evoked and make Nick’s story jump from the page.
I don’t want to give any spoilers, but it is clear that Nick is suffering from PTSD and a lot of his subsequent experiences are tinged with tragedy. This is a novel that doesn’t shy away from some big themes, from war to grief, revenge to violence, love to loss. Some of the novel, especially the scenes in the trenches and the post-war life of war veteran Judah, is hard to read but extremely powerful.
The writing is vivid and Michael Farris Smith presents a range of characters who engage the reader in their lives and hopes and dreams. Personally, I was most interested in the lives of the women of the novel – the survival instincts of both Colette and Ella in their different ways was interesting. I’d have loved to read more of Ella’s story as she was a mysterious figure in the novel in a lot of ways.
There were a couple of things I found a little jarring that took me out of the richly-imagined world of ‘Nick’ but I think these may be personal things. I found reported speech to be written oddly – totally a stylistic choice by the writer, but one I found tricky to follow sometimes. I also was thrown by a reference to possums – I won’t elaborate but it felt unusual in the context.
So, the big question. Has Michael Farris Smith successfully recreated a Nick Carraway that fits with the character written by F Scott Fitzgerald? My honest answer is that I don’t know. I suspect I would read ‘The Great Gatsby’ with a different view of Nick now, but I’d say the main ingredients are there in Smith’s portrayal. His Nick is honest, introspective and often an observer even in his own life – all features of Fitzgerald’s narrator too. The decision to narrate ‘Nick’ in the third person (as opposed to first person in ‘Gatsby’) escapes the need to recreate Nick’s exact voice, but I’d say these two Nicks could credibly be the same person.
Overall, I would say that I was caught up in Nick’s story and enjoyed the narrative decisions made by Smith to explain how Nick comes to be in West Egg at the start of ‘Gatsby’, plus his emotional baggage. It isn’t always a comfortable read, but I did find it immersive and interesting. If you love ‘The Great Gatsby’, this is definitely worth reading and may give you a different understanding of Nick. If you haven’t read ‘The Great Gatsby’, this is absolutely worth picking up on its own merits. Either way, I’d recommend it.
About the Author:
No Exit Press also publish Michael Farris Smith’s novels Desperation Road, The Fighter and most recently Blackwood. Farris Smith has been a finalist for the Gold Dagger Award in the UK, and the Grand Prix des Lectrices in France, and his essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife and daughters.
