“Lying brings bad karma. Even a small lie can make something really bad happen and the karma will grow to match it.”
✮ ✮ ✮ 1/2
*** anything 3 star and a“Lying brings bad karma. Even a small lie can make something really bad happen and the karma will grow to match it.”
✮ ✮ ✮ 1/2
*** anything 3 star and above is still a positive review. I consider a three star review to be more of a positive-neutral review.
Jess Kidd based this book on the real life Batavia wreckage in 1629. I have never personally read about this historic event before but Jess Kidd portrays the pure barbaric behaviour and brutality surrounding the survivors of the shipwreck, and turned it into a truly moving work of fiction with factual accuracies.
The characters were incredibly written, especially Mayken, a child aboard the Batavia. The tale is told alternating between 1629 and 1989, but this is the part that baffles me. Maybe I didn’t quite understand the book properly, but I don’t understand how the fate of the children involved in the two different timelines were connected. Gil (the child in 1989) had an interest in the Batavia when he saw the divers, but he was living a completely different storyline, and that wasn’t his focus. But again, maybe that’s me just not quite gripping this storyline entirely.
The historical fiction storyline running in the 1600s was incredible and I could have read a whole book based solely around that. These chapters kept me intrigued, learning about the secrets of the ship was absolutely page-turning. And while I felt Gil’s tale also intriguing, to me they didn’t fit together, and they felt a little out of sync.
Overall, it was a really interesting book reading about the Batavia in fiction, but it just wasn’t for me. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.
Thank you to Canongate Books for gifting me a finished copy....more
“That's the thing with time, isn't it? It's not all the same. Some days - some years - some decades - are empty. There is nothing to them. It's just f“That's the thing with time, isn't it? It's not all the same. Some days - some years - some decades - are empty. There is nothing to them. It's just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.”
✮ ✮ ✮ ✮
Thank you to Canongate Books for providing me with a gifted copy of the new paperback edition!
I don’t know where to start with this one. I really liked it, the whole idea behind the book is completely different from anything I’ve ever read. That somewhere beside us, some people could be living hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Ageing slower than the rest of us ‘mayfly’s’.
I’ve never read anything by Matt Haig, but this was great. I found it was more of a slow burn book for me, not something I could rush through. There was too much emotion and meaning between the pages, that it would be like rushing someone’s life away to inhale this. I felt really impacted by the journey in this book, and how important love is, how important life is, to actually live and not let it pass you by.
Haig blends between the past and the present seamlessly, the story flowed nicely, which for a book like this really does take a talent. Some people compare it to a time travel book, but it is not that at all. It is so much more. I feel like this is one of my favourite books, and I urge anyone to read it!...more
“Not that she was poor — her dad was a high-up cop, after all — but in Parris, poor is relative. You don’t have the ocean view and the museum benefit “Not that she was poor — her dad was a high-up cop, after all — but in Parris, poor is relative. You don’t have the ocean view and the museum benefit list and the housekeeper who you never actually see? Then you’re not rich.”
✮ ✮ ✮ ✮ ✮
This book was everything AND MORE. Thank you so much to Hot Key Books for the free proof copy! I literally could not put this book down. I think I read it in just two sittings! It was so captivating and the emotions were flying and I even caught myself nail biting at one point.
The story itself was told really well. From the start the reader is aware that every few years someone dies in Parris, and that there is a “curse”, or so the residents call it. While the main character is constantly trying to work out who or what is responsible, it held me in suspense. I would have loved to see a few chapters from different perspectives, maybe one each from Naomi, Jada, and Madeline, but just having Luca’s perspective did work really, really well. The ending was sort of slightly unresolved, in a way, it ended in utter disaster for a few characters, and I would like to know what happened a few years down the line. Maybe Rebecca could do a sequel from Jada’s perspective, that would be incredible!
The main character was a plus-size, mixed-race, queer girl with a firecracker personality! She was utterly relatable, made the story compelling and incredibly unique. You were always rooting for Luca!
This book was a work of art and I highly, highly recommend for anyone! Would make a great film too!...more
“People don’t get murdered for writing novels,’ Marsh murmured to herself while sifting through the contents. ‘At least none that I’ve read are worth “People don’t get murdered for writing novels,’ Marsh murmured to herself while sifting through the contents. ‘At least none that I’ve read are worth dying for.”
✮ ✮ ✮
*** a 3 star review is still a positive review. I consider a three star review to be more of a positive-neutral review.
I love a good thriller, and this one was focused around radicalisation into terrorist organisations, which I found super interesting as a Forensic Psychology student.
I really enjoyed the plot of this book, but I honestly felt it was a little overwhelming. The plot could have been split into more than one book, and the book kept jumping back and forth which was a little frustrating. But, it was well thought out, and all ends were tied up.
The characters were really relatable again, as they have been throughout the other books. Drake with his ‘Zelda’ obsession is probably the biggest mystery that is fully unsolved.
“Defect and perfect are so close, only two letters apart. If you say them fast, defect perfect defect perfect, they almost sound the same.”
✮✮✮✮
Rynn is“Defect and perfect are so close, only two letters apart. If you say them fast, defect perfect defect perfect, they almost sound the same.”
✮✮✮✮
Rynn is adopted and her relationship with her adoptive mother isn’t great. The relationship fractures more when her mother finds out that Rynn is looking for her family of blood. After finding out she can’t look until she is 18 due to a closed adoption, she does a search online and finds that she has a sister in a nearby town. This is the story of the challenges of family.
This book broke me. Like physically and mentally broke me. I have never read anything so devastating in my entire life. The family and friendships in this book were so well portrayed. I loved particularly how it shows that friends can be more like family than your own family can, and how they will go to the ends of the earth for you too. The ending wasn’t quite what I was anticipating but the character was happy in her own way.
I’ve never read a fiction book written in verse before so this was a new one for me, and it worked. I was kind of nervous before I started it because I didn’t know what to expect, but it made it so much easier to read, with it all broken into bite size chunks.
Highly recommend for a moving read of familial issues and reconnection!...more
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