A dark dream-like fairytale that examines love and the horrors of war. Tinder is an exquisitely designed book, filled with a beautiful poetic prose, aA dark dream-like fairytale that examines love and the horrors of war. Tinder is an exquisitely designed book, filled with a beautiful poetic prose, and amazing angular black and white (and red) illustrations that interact in unique ways with the text. The story, inspired by Hans Christian Anderson's Tinderbox fairytale, which I have yet to read, was a real page turner and the atmosphere is so strongly conjured by Sally's individual and distinctive way of describing the world, and the the graphic quality of the illustrations, that it stays with you long after you finish reading. ...more
I loved the writing style, the world building, the characters, the relationships and the politics, both family politics and the larger themes of wealtI loved the writing style, the world building, the characters, the relationships and the politics, both family politics and the larger themes of wealth and privilege. It had a J D Salinger feel to it. I liked the hints of unreliability to Caddy the narrator from the start, and the fact that you don’t quite know what her deal is. I loved her romance with Gat, and her weird metaphors. and her relationship with her cousins. Her quality of teenage myopia.
I didn’t like the twist at all. I knew it was coming because the back of the book tells you there is an amazing twist that changes everything. But to me it felt too neat of an ending, but also, paradoxically too left field, and unrelated to the big themes of the book. I also didn’t quite believe it, for reasons that would be a bit spoilery to relate.
Having said all that, it was an engaging read, and there was much to love about the story....more
I loved Tally she's another great Eva Ibbotson heroine, but I didn't enjoy the story or the writing as much as The Star of Kazan, I felt it dragged inI loved Tally she's another great Eva Ibbotson heroine, but I didn't enjoy the story or the writing as much as The Star of Kazan, I felt it dragged in places and sometimes relied too much on narration. Though it's set during WWII it seemed to skip a little too lightly over the events of that conflict....more
I loved it, the characters are warm and fantastic, apart from the villains who are cold but still rounded and understandable people. The plot has someI loved it, the characters are warm and fantastic, apart from the villains who are cold but still rounded and understandable people. The plot has some great twists, which though I guessed at to a degree, still surprised me in the way they played out. The world of Vienna and the recipes and details were a delight...more
The introduction of the characters in the first couple of chapter was brilliantly funny and all of their banter and bravado had me smiling and laughinThe introduction of the characters in the first couple of chapter was brilliantly funny and all of their banter and bravado had me smiling and laughing out loud as I was reading. It's has that spine-tingly quality of a good horror set up, where the scares are cut with the laughter for relief - especially in the opening sequence with the summoning scene, which really captured that tone perfectly and was reminiscent of many a classic horror movie.
As the story develops it becomes more of a mystery than straightforward horror, and we start to learn about Mary and what happened to her, as we are drip-drip-drip fed little clues to how she met her untimely end. This dampened the scariness for me a little, because, as is always the case, the more times and the clearer you see the monster the less frightening they become. But I still loved the way the story developed and the overlap between Bobbie's and Mary's worlds. Bobbie and Naya and Caine make endearing and funny heroes and the nail-biting ending was a great nod to both Victorian gothic and modern horror movie type stories....more
A hilarious YA coming of age story about Hannah and Sam, two eighteen year olds who are searching for the 'one' in their last summer before uni, inbetA hilarious YA coming of age story about Hannah and Sam, two eighteen year olds who are searching for the 'one' in their last summer before uni, inbetween worrying about losing their virginity and obsessing about making the right impression with the opposite sex.
Lucy and Tom have done a great job capturing two authentic teenage voices and creating many laugh out loud moments. I especially loved the gags about Harry Potter and the fact that the Nan was called Audrey and she bought her grandaughter a graduation present from Tiffany's!...more
In the freezing cold ocean a boy struggles to keep his head above water, but the sea is strong and pulls him under. He drowns. Then wakes, alone, in aIn the freezing cold ocean a boy struggles to keep his head above water, but the sea is strong and pulls him under. He drowns. Then wakes, alone, in an empty street in a derelict town in England, the only human left on Earth. How can this be? Is he in the after life, or limbo? Or is this somehow a figment of his dying imagination? And what’s even odder, he knows this street from before. . .
Spoilers!!!
Structure-wise, More Than This is very similar to The Knife of Never Letting Go - a teenage boy discovering secrets about his past in a world which is entirely alien to him, meeting allies, and being pursued by a dark figure. In fact, it has the same chase-and-catch structure of Knife, the same concrete real-time adrenaline pumping storyline that gradually doles out secret pieces of the past.
There are also thematic similarities to Knife: an exploration of interior thoughts vs exterior world through science fiction; the same interest in the way thoughts and the world bleed together and interact. In More Than This, however, these ideas seem to work much more directly than in Knife. In Knife it’s like thoughts are a magic ESP that characters possess, whereas in More Than This there is the hint that thoughts (or consciousness) is what the world is made of, and perhaps the story you create from your random experience is all there is. Is the ‘more than this’.
I love the directness of Patrick Ness’s writing, his urgent cinematic style where we are over the shoulder of our lead character - Seth - and stay with him only. It is the perfect way to tell the story of a character questioning the nature of reality; lost in a world he doesn’t understand. To stay close to Seth and his thoughts is probably the only way that you can tell this tale because the most important thing is that we do not know more than he does. We are learning with him, and have no concrete answers to the question of whether there’s an external reality at all or whether this is a dream taking place in his mind.
Patrick Ness is brilliant at having Seth think his way through problems, reason and consider both sides of an issue, and even when his friends, Tomasz and Regine, give him answers or help him out he questions the nature of their advice, even questions whether they and the driver (the villain of the piece) exist. This is a great post-modern way to undercut the problem of some of the scifi cliches that come up in a chase and catch plot, that at points is in danger of becoming Terminator meets The Matrix, and also keep things on an unsteady keel.
I love the depiction of Seth’s relationship with Gudmund in ‘the past’. The fact he is a gay hero in a scifi-ish novel, but also that that is only a part of his loneliness and his self, a fragment of it, and not what the story is solely about.
I also love it when a character like Seth, who feels alive, thinking and autonomous, suddenly questions the nature of their reality, and you, the reader, feel they are conscious of you and at any moment may work out that they are in a novel.
When Seth first questions the convenience of certain things in the story and whether Regine and Thomas are really real, I thought this was what he meant. And perhaps there is a playful hint of this all the way through, although maybe I am reading that wrong? Seth only exists, in that stream of words, while he’s telling himself the story, or is that the story being read? Just as you only exist when your brain is telling your story to you, and perhaps the ambiguous ending hints at these things too?...more
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