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nocto's reviews
1263 reviews
White Horse by Joss Stirling
adventurous
funny
mysterious
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
This is the followup to Black River and this time Jess is investigating a young woman whose mother is concerned that she’s entered a cult and gone incommunicado. Coincidentally Inspector Leo George, also from the first book, is investigating the death of another young woman who was wearing one of the cult’s robes when she died on the White Horse at Uffington. There’s a good scenic backdrop to this one.
Like the first book it’s a well written interesting plot. I really like the characters, not just the central ones but a lot of the peripheral ones were very believable as well. I didn’t have any trouble believing in the kind of cult portrayed here, like Jess I found a lot of what the cult were after quite refreshing and could see why the various different personalities here went in for it.
Though the cover of the books only bill these as the “Jess Bridges” mystery series I think it’s going to be “Bridges and George” all the way, and that is fine by me - though that’s possibly shortchanging Michael Harrison who is also involved in both books and I can’t imagine he is going away any time soon either. We find out a lot more about Leo in this book. And it ends on the kind of cliffhanger that I swear you never used to find in books but happens more and more nowadays as you get hooked into reading the next in the series. I don’t mind since I was coming back for more anyway.
Prime Suspects: The Anatomy of Integers and Permutations by Andrew Granville, Jennifer Granville
challenging
informative
mysterious
slow-paced
4.0
Subtitled “The Anatomy of Integers and Permutations” this is a murder mystery like none I’ve ever read before, and it’s fair to say that I’ve read quite a few. I don’t normally look in the graphic novel section of the library but Darren does and brought me this as it was mathsy. I think he expected me to reject it for the maths being too simple, and it’s definitely not! It’s a walk through the connections between prime numbers and permutations that starts with explaining what each of those are, so it’s pretty accessible, but it keeps going, up and up and up.
Though I trained as a mathematician there are days when I feel like I’ve forgotten more than I knew, and a lot of the stuff here is stuff I never knew properly to start with. At university I dived into the applied and computational side of maths and it’s only years later that I feel I missed out on a lot of pure maths. You certainly don’t need to understand every last thing going on in the maths to enjoy the story here, I didn’t keep up with all of it. There’s an appendix that covers the mathematical content in a more usual written format, and that made me nostalgic for my time reading research papers. The appendix also points out a lot of the hidden treasures or Easter eggs in the story, little things happening in the background that have meaning, so it’s worth a read even if you don’t really want the maths explained any more.
I think the story itself is reasonably entertaining even if you just treated the maths components like some kind of weird fantasy woven around a murder mystery but I’d hesitate to recommend it to anyone who really wasn’t interested in maths. If you’ve any interest at all though it’s worth a read.
Though I trained as a mathematician there are days when I feel like I’ve forgotten more than I knew, and a lot of the stuff here is stuff I never knew properly to start with. At university I dived into the applied and computational side of maths and it’s only years later that I feel I missed out on a lot of pure maths. You certainly don’t need to understand every last thing going on in the maths to enjoy the story here, I didn’t keep up with all of it. There’s an appendix that covers the mathematical content in a more usual written format, and that made me nostalgic for my time reading research papers. The appendix also points out a lot of the hidden treasures or Easter eggs in the story, little things happening in the background that have meaning, so it’s worth a read even if you don’t really want the maths explained any more.
I think the story itself is reasonably entertaining even if you just treated the maths components like some kind of weird fantasy woven around a murder mystery but I’d hesitate to recommend it to anyone who really wasn’t interested in maths. If you’ve any interest at all though it’s worth a read.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
emotional
reflective
sad
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
I picked this up in a shiny new paperback copy thinking it was a new Anne Tyler; well it was a brand new copy at the library of a new printing of a 1981 book. Which is fine by me1. We start the book with Pearl Tull who is a dying old lady in 1979. Now that’s long enough ago that there’s now plenty of historical fiction written set around then, and it’s funny how a contemporary view of 1979 from 1981 isn’t quite the same as one that’s being written about in 2024. There’s no looking back sentimentally through rose tinted glasses, no random mentions of tech that doesn’t exist yet but might do one day and definitely no anachronous words or gadgets. Just an old lady with her family of three children gathering around her and then we go back in time to see her life, starting with when she meets her husband and merging into the children’s stories as they too grow up.
It’s a pretty straightforward format, but the story is anything but. It’s a tale of people who don’t get what they want, except sometimes they do and then maybe it isn’t what they want. And in one particularly memorable part of the story someone else gets what they want and no one is really happy but what can you do except live with it. The characters felt very real to me, often not because they are the kind of people you’d want to be friends or family with, but because probably you know you already are friends and/or family with people who have things in common with these people. There are disjoint parts of people’s lives that don’t add up, except they do in real life, and so it is in this book. There’s nothing totally weird in this book but a lot of it seems strange when written as fiction.
There’s plenty more Anne Tyler I haven’t read yet and I’m looking forward to getting through it all eventually.
Footnotes
one minor niggle, this has obviously been scanned and re-typeset at some point and several “rn”s (that’s R N) have turned into “m”s (that’s M); I do wish publishers would check for that common error. ↩
It’s a pretty straightforward format, but the story is anything but. It’s a tale of people who don’t get what they want, except sometimes they do and then maybe it isn’t what they want. And in one particularly memorable part of the story someone else gets what they want and no one is really happy but what can you do except live with it. The characters felt very real to me, often not because they are the kind of people you’d want to be friends or family with, but because probably you know you already are friends and/or family with people who have things in common with these people. There are disjoint parts of people’s lives that don’t add up, except they do in real life, and so it is in this book. There’s nothing totally weird in this book but a lot of it seems strange when written as fiction.
There’s plenty more Anne Tyler I haven’t read yet and I’m looking forward to getting through it all eventually.
Footnotes
one minor niggle, this has obviously been scanned and re-typeset at some point and several “rn”s (that’s R N) have turned into “m”s (that’s M); I do wish publishers would check for that common error. ↩
The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow
informative
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
The followup to Red Team Blues goes back in time and starts at the time of the dot com boom (and the subsequent crash). And, my God, this makes me feel old! I’ve got used to books set in the 1970s and 1980s having nudged into the historical or period fiction categories nowadays but I am not ready for the early twenty-first century to be plundered like this. The good news is that Cory was there too, and I think I was reading his blog at the latest soon after that, so it’s thankfully all good from a detail perspective.
There’s a lot about pyramid schemes here and then the tale has a friend of Marty’s end up in jail and proceeds to go deep down the rabbit hole of how corporate prison systems work, or more accurately, don’t work. I learnt more about Catalina Island in California which I otherwise only know from it being one of the location names that got repurposed as MacOS names.
If I have an issue with the book it’s that there were true stories in here and fictional ones, and it wasn’t entirely clear which were which - a nod to those which were true at the end of the book would have been nice to have. I knew one of the stories was sadly true, but had to fact check another. Part of the point here is that these are all things that could have happened, or are very similar to things that did happen, this is the dystopia we are living in, and not calling out explicitly those that were literally true seemed an oversight.
The Locked Room by Elly Griffiths
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
The main point of this write up should be that I raced through the book in less than a day and enjoyed it. I'm also pleased Elly Griffiths didn't decide to break with setting her books in real world time and skip past 2020 as if nothing happened. There are some series that are just set in generic contemporary times whose authors can get away with that but this series of books have always had actual dates in them and the characters have proper birth dates and age appropriately. All of which is stuff that I appreciate.
So I'm pleased to be back in 2020 (kind of? very much in a "fictional reliving only!" sense) where we're seeing the first wave of Covid and lockdowns through Ruth's eyes. I had issues with how much the characters disregarded the restrictions that were in place in the UK at the time though. Most of it had purpose in the plot, and the criminal bits seem completely reasonable. There was just a bit too much "exceptional" stuff going on for my liking, and I thought some of it was out of character.
By way of other nitpicking I thought using the "Locked Room" in the title and not really having much of a Christie-esque locked room mystery was a bit of a missed opportunity. But I've said before that I don't come to these mysteries for the plots as much as to be back with a familiar cast of characters. I don't watch soap operas but I enjoy long running book series and the personal developments in this one were interesting although they threw up some strange coincidences that I'd like to have seen resolved as well.
So basically I could sit here all day and pull holes in the book, but I really enjoyed reading it. It ends, as this series often do, on a bit of a cliffhanger and I'll no doubt get on with the reading the next in the series soon even though I know my opinion is very likely to be much the same as it is for this one.
So I'm pleased to be back in 2020 (kind of? very much in a "fictional reliving only!" sense) where we're seeing the first wave of Covid and lockdowns through Ruth's eyes. I had issues with how much the characters disregarded the restrictions that were in place in the UK at the time though. Most of it had purpose in the plot, and the criminal bits seem completely reasonable. There was just a bit too much "exceptional" stuff going on for my liking, and I thought some of it was out of character.
By way of other nitpicking I thought using the "Locked Room" in the title and not really having much of a Christie-esque locked room mystery was a bit of a missed opportunity. But I've said before that I don't come to these mysteries for the plots as much as to be back with a familiar cast of characters. I don't watch soap operas but I enjoy long running book series and the personal developments in this one were interesting although they threw up some strange coincidences that I'd like to have seen resolved as well.
So basically I could sit here all day and pull holes in the book, but I really enjoyed reading it. It ends, as this series often do, on a bit of a cliffhanger and I'll no doubt get on with the reading the next in the series soon even though I know my opinion is very likely to be much the same as it is for this one.
Educated by Tara Westover
dark
informative
reflective
4.0
I'm not generally a big fan of biographies of any sort. They tend to be tales of how luck worked in your favour (see celebrity autobiographies) or how luck worked against you (see misery memoirs), though I haven't really got enough experience of either of those sub-genres to make either of those claims. There's something I find a little bit creepy reading about someone's not fictional life and wondering how much of it is actually fiction. And with that background I'm not really sure why I picked this book up to read other than I'd seen it recommended in several different places and, anyway, I like trying things that are a bit out of my comfort zone. And I realised that there is something interesting in reading about other people's lives; that's what history books are after all, so first of all I realised that if this story had been written by someone a little more removed from the events within it then I'd have been happier with it, and that's obviously my problem and not the author's. But when I looked at it that way I realised that if I'd read a second hand account of this story then I'd have wished it was a first person account. So, yes, my brain's a confusing place. But so is everyone's.
The author of this story is the youngest daughter in a very religious family in Idaho who grew up, through the 1990s, with parents who were preparing the end of the world. The family rejected authority and their youngest children's births didn't even get registered. Injuries resulting from car crashes and major health and safety at work failures went untreated as they didn't agree with modern medicine. Although some of her older siblings had some school education the author only remembers receiving a very basic education at home. And that's ostensibly the main thrust of the story. How she went from pretty much no education apart from learning to read religious texts to gain a place at university and ultimately excelled in academia but what a battle it was. But though it's the title that's not really the main bit of the story. Intertwined throughout the story about education are her memories of abuse, physical and mental, from members of her family, and her struggles to reconcile these.
Even while I was still reading I knew that when I finished the book and went to look online I would find 'balancing' points of view from those family members, because of course you would deny the seriousness of these things if anyone accused you of them, no matter that the author has presented her case in a very careful and considerate manner. There are pseudonyms used in the book but since the author has used her real name and is talking about her family that pseudonymity can be no more than a polite veneer. The book goes on perhaps longer than it should have done because she's trying to walk a balance beam explaining the details and the maybes and the perhapses and it makes sense to me that she struggled with her mental health whilst trying to come to terms with her family's actions.
Would I have been happier as a reader if the story had been fictionalised even if everything didn't get neatly wrapped up at the end? Probably, but that would have made it a different story. And my conclusion is that the heart of this story is a conundrum about how memory matters. We all have stories of things we've experienced where other people's memories of those same events don't match up with ours. I don't doubt that abusers don't think they are abusive, but I don't think that matters to their victims who have to live with their own memories. The book was well written, opened my eyes to a world I know little about and gave me a lot of think about.
The author of this story is the youngest daughter in a very religious family in Idaho who grew up, through the 1990s, with parents who were preparing the end of the world. The family rejected authority and their youngest children's births didn't even get registered. Injuries resulting from car crashes and major health and safety at work failures went untreated as they didn't agree with modern medicine. Although some of her older siblings had some school education the author only remembers receiving a very basic education at home. And that's ostensibly the main thrust of the story. How she went from pretty much no education apart from learning to read religious texts to gain a place at university and ultimately excelled in academia but what a battle it was. But though it's the title that's not really the main bit of the story. Intertwined throughout the story about education are her memories of abuse, physical and mental, from members of her family, and her struggles to reconcile these.
Even while I was still reading I knew that when I finished the book and went to look online I would find 'balancing' points of view from those family members, because of course you would deny the seriousness of these things if anyone accused you of them, no matter that the author has presented her case in a very careful and considerate manner. There are pseudonyms used in the book but since the author has used her real name and is talking about her family that pseudonymity can be no more than a polite veneer. The book goes on perhaps longer than it should have done because she's trying to walk a balance beam explaining the details and the maybes and the perhapses and it makes sense to me that she struggled with her mental health whilst trying to come to terms with her family's actions.
Would I have been happier as a reader if the story had been fictionalised even if everything didn't get neatly wrapped up at the end? Probably, but that would have made it a different story. And my conclusion is that the heart of this story is a conundrum about how memory matters. We all have stories of things we've experienced where other people's memories of those same events don't match up with ours. I don't doubt that abusers don't think they are abusive, but I don't think that matters to their victims who have to live with their own memories. The book was well written, opened my eyes to a world I know little about and gave me a lot of think about.
Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller
emotional
reflective
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
I really enjoyed Bitter Orange by the same author but found The Memory of Animals to be interesting but slightly too loopy really so I wasn't quite sure what to expect this time. Happily I really liked it, not as good as Bitter Orange but still a very good read. It's a book that's made by the characters as much as the plot. Though there is quite a lot of plot. Half of the book is a series of letters that Ingrid writes to her absent husband in the early 1990s before she goes missing leaving her two daughters behind. And the other half of the book is Ingrid's now grown up daughter Flora dealing with her aging father.
Ingrid's half of the story starts when she meets Gil, a much older man who is her tutor on a creative writing course and the letters narrate in detail the ups and down of the relationship between the two of them. I often felt that the letters didn't really feel like letters, though whether the recipient was ever meant to read them is an open question in the book. There was a purpose to them being letters though and the story would perhaps not have worked quite the same if those sections had simply been narrated by the author.
The balance between the two halves of the story is pretty good, I couldn't pick which half I liked better and flipping back and forth between Flora and Ingrid never got tiring. It didn't feel like two separate stories that happened to go together as books like this sometimes do, the plot flowed through the two halves as we found out more about Ingrid, and the reader always knows more than Flora does. A good read all around.
Ingrid's half of the story starts when she meets Gil, a much older man who is her tutor on a creative writing course and the letters narrate in detail the ups and down of the relationship between the two of them. I often felt that the letters didn't really feel like letters, though whether the recipient was ever meant to read them is an open question in the book. There was a purpose to them being letters though and the story would perhaps not have worked quite the same if those sections had simply been narrated by the author.
The balance between the two halves of the story is pretty good, I couldn't pick which half I liked better and flipping back and forth between Flora and Ingrid never got tiring. It didn't feel like two separate stories that happened to go together as books like this sometimes do, the plot flowed through the two halves as we found out more about Ingrid, and the reader always knows more than Flora does. A good read all around.
The Lantern's Dance by Laurie R. King
adventurous
mysterious
relaxing
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
I had this on my list of new release books to watch out for this year but didn't actually realise it was due for release so early in the year and the first I knew of it being released was when it popped up on the new additions shelf at the library. Result!
It was pretty slow in the beginning and after a handful of chapters I was idly wondering if my enthusiasm was misplaced. But then it all started to come to life. One thread of the story has Mary Russell, nursing a badly sprained ankle in a rural France, translating a coded journal she has found. The other thread has Holmes running off elsewhere in France looking for his missing son - the son King created for him and Irene Adler previously in this series. I love it when the two threads start to throw up clues that the reader can see and put together before either of the detectives can.
There's many, if not all, the classic hallmarks of a Holmes story here, and all the ones that make a good Russell plot as well. I like how the Holmes universe has been extended and this was the first one for a while that made me want to go back and read Conan Doyle again as well.
It was pretty slow in the beginning and after a handful of chapters I was idly wondering if my enthusiasm was misplaced. But then it all started to come to life. One thread of the story has Mary Russell, nursing a badly sprained ankle in a rural France, translating a coded journal she has found. The other thread has Holmes running off elsewhere in France looking for his missing son - the son King created for him and Irene Adler previously in this series. I love it when the two threads start to throw up clues that the reader can see and put together before either of the detectives can.
There's many, if not all, the classic hallmarks of a Holmes story here, and all the ones that make a good Russell plot as well. I like how the Holmes universe has been extended and this was the first one for a while that made me want to go back and read Conan Doyle again as well.
Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
This was fabulous. Told from the first person point of view of the mother of a heroin addict daughter who pretty much kidnaps her baby granddaughter, it's a tale of very mundane details that somehow adds up to a lot more. We gradually see more about Ruth's past as she cares for the baby and we watch the baby, Lily, grow up. There's not a great deal of the daughter, Eleanor, in the book but her absence is felt by everyone.
I was disappointed by the lack of realism of the characters and the relationships in the last [Susie Boyt book](/books/only-human-by-susie-boyt) I read. Happily, in this book I definitely wasn't. These were great characters. It occurs to me now that we don't see a lot of most of them first hand. For much of the book I feel we only learn about Ruth's set of schoolgirl friends and her teaching colleague Jean from what Ruth tells us but then when they step onto the scene we understand why they are there.
And I wasn't disappointed by the ending of the book, it was really well played, leaving you optimistic and sad at the same time but with a definite sense of closure.
I was disappointed by the lack of realism of the characters and the relationships in the last [Susie Boyt book](/books/only-human-by-susie-boyt) I read. Happily, in this book I definitely wasn't. These were great characters. It occurs to me now that we don't see a lot of most of them first hand. For much of the book I feel we only learn about Ruth's set of schoolgirl friends and her teaching colleague Jean from what Ruth tells us but then when they step onto the scene we understand why they are there.
And I wasn't disappointed by the ending of the book, it was really well played, leaving you optimistic and sad at the same time but with a definite sense of closure.
The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
I read this off the back of enjoying the Lady Astronaut series a lot but not fancying the author’s other books that look to be historical romances. This was science fiction and it also turned out to be a murder mystery so right up my street really.
Tesla is on her honeymoon - a cruise ship from Earth to Mars - when her and her newlywed spouse, Shal, come across a dying person outside their cabin, who quickly becomes a dead person and Shal is accused of the murder. It’s a good setup and a lively story. There’s lots of nice futuristic technological bits muddled up with the recognisable banality of cruise ships which stay the same no matter where they are headed. The human elements of a story don’t change no matter the setting, and the authors romance fiction background shows. I mean that in a positive way, the relationships between the characters are interesting and it’ll keep your attention even if you’re not sure about the science fiction aspect of it.
There’s lot of nice stuff here, as well as the cruise ship aspect there’s lots about the nature of celebrity and trauma. The chapters all have related cocktail recipes, which is cute and thematic, though it wasn’t clear to me until the end that they were mostly (maybe entirely) alcohol-free in this version of the future which obliviates the worries I had whilst reading about the characters all day drinking. Not to mention the service dog.
I also felt the murder mystery plot was pretty decent, no strange space shenanigans were hiding the culprit. I think the cruise ship setting led it to have a feel out of the golden age of mysteries whilst very much not being of that era. All in all, I enjoyed it a lot.