Halfman, Halfbook

3 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Who says that blokes don’t read romance? That is quite a few of you then… Romance is the genre that I deliberately avoid, or more appropriately, run screaming from the boudoir… However, this is one of the fine offerings from the British Library’s Tales of the Weird Series, and the title Doomed Romances bring a whole different connotation to the word…

The Invisible Girl by Mary Shelley

This is the first Mary Shelley story that I have ever read! It is a strange tale of love and loss with whispers of folklore ad fairy tale woven in. But the strongest theme is the gothic melodrama that permeates the prose completely.

Carmilla by J. Sheridan le Fanu

A very gothic melodrama with vampires. I felt it was very overwritten; why use one word when you could use twenty instead? There is a strong lesbian theme between the daughter and the lady who is staying as a guest in the house.

Mr. Captain and the Nymph by Wilkie Collins

Somewhere in the Pacific, a ship encounters an island. The natives that live there seem friendly and welcoming, so the sailors go ashore, and it allows them to restock supplies. Alongside the main island is another, and they are curious as to what or who is on there. The natives strongly recommend that they do not set foot on the island as it is the home of a sorcerer, and it is a taboo for anyone else but him and the nymph to be there. The captain of the ship is told about her, and when he sees her through the telescope, he becomes besotted. So much so that he is brave and foolish enough to venture onto the island…

Little Woman in Black by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Miss Sarah Pawlett was engaged to be married to Lord Bellenden. The relationship was a little unusual as she wasn’t from the aristocracy, as would be expected at the time. But this didn’t deter, Lord Bellenden.

The only problem, though, was that Sarah was head over heels in love with another actor called Ned Langley. Plus, there was a sense that she was being watched continually, and there was a small lady dressed entirely in black who sat in the same seat for every performance each night.

Who this lady was, though, would soon be revealed…

White Magic by Ella D’Arcy

I wasn’t overly enamoured with this story. It is a conversation between the narrator and their friend, but having read it twice, I wasn’t completely sure what was going on or what were the subtleties of the plot.

The Tiger Charm by Alice Perrin

This is a story set in the time of the British Raj in India. A blustering colonel sets out on a tiger hunt, dragging his wife with him. They are separated after an incident and she ends up switching to another elephant and then they are separated. When she returns, he accuses her of all sorts of transgressions that might have taken place with her new companion in his drunken rant. He still wants to shoot a tiger, though, so he sets out with her companion, with a darker motive in mind…

One Remained Behind by Marjorie Bowen

A student called Rudolph is desperate to acquire a grimoire, a book full of magic and ancient rituals and ends up arguing with an antique bookseller whose shop it is in. With a trick and some emotional blackmail, he manages to make the book his.

He wastes no time in using the book to gain fame and fortune. However, he had not ever thought through the consequences of his actions, and it all starts to unravel.
I really liked this story a lot. There is something quite satisfying about Karma…

The Lady of the House of Love by Angela Carter

I thought that this was the story that best suited the title of the book, Doomed Romances. The young lady is in a decrepit mansion with a crone as a servant. There is an innocent young soldier who stops for the night. There is a building tension as I, the reader, can second-guess his possible fate.

That said, I didn’t find it that scary. But it does have a brooding intensity that made it my top story in the collection.

The Glass Bottle Trick by Nalo Hopkinson

This is a really dark story about a man who has been widowed twice before and is now married to his third wife. They had married fairly quickly after meeting and courting, and were soon to learn that his moods were dark and his temper short.

Passing on her news was going to be a challenge that she wasn’t sure she could do…
I thought this was an incredibly intense and fast-paced story.

Could You Wear My Eyes? by Kalumu Ya Salaam

I thought that this was a well-crafted story about a man who thought that having his late wife’s eyes implanted to replace his.
What he didn’t realise was what the effect of seeing everything from her perspective would be like…

I’ll Be Your Mirror by Tracy Fahey
A story of love, anatomy and discovery by a woman who becomes obsessed by an anatomical Venus, a life-sized wax model. Very much more macabre than romantic, and has a very dark plotline.

Dancehall Devil by V. Castro
I thought that this was probably the closest story in the book to horror. A woman has just entered a club and she is approached by a man who has absolutely no idea what her has just let himself in for…

3 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Fred Fredricks has an important delivery to make to someone on the moon. It is his first time there, and everything about the trip is strange. On the space flight over, he meets Ta Shu, a celebrity travel reporter and feng shui expert who agrees to meet with him again later in their visit to the moon. It is all going well until Fredricks meets the recipient of the package he is delivering, and it rapidly goes horribly wrong.

Fredricks is taken into custody following the incident. As he is an American and working for a Swiss company, there is a diplomatic standoff. Somehow, he manages to escape and joins a lady called Chan Qi, who is being sent back to Earth. They travel back with Ta Shu to China, where they evade the authorities on arrival and head to a safe house for a while. After being couped up, it gets to them, and they make a miscalculation on just how close the people looking for them are. They have to go on the run again, but they know the authorities are closing in on them.

One of the myriad factions in the Chinese security services that is sympathetic to Chan Qi has made the decision that they would be safer back on the moon and not be a distraction to the other factions on Earth. Once again, they are dispatched back on a space flight to stay in a super-rich gentleman’s called Fang Fei’s place. He is a businessman, and he has a separate base on the moon.

Even though she is 238,000 miles away, there are still people after her. They decide to hitch a ride with a couple of helium miners to an even more remote part of the moon. She decides that this is the time to send a coded message to her supporters in China, to add to the disruption as a power struggle for the president of China begins.

I have tried to keep the plot details as sparse as possible, to minimise spoilers, but there are a few. I would say that I liked rather than loved this; I had expected it to be entirely set on the moon, and was a little disappointed that it wasn’t. I would have liked it if Fred’s character had played a larger role in the story too; he was there as a bit of a stooge to the main character, Chan Qi. I felt it could have been a bit shorter, too. There were times when it dragged a bit, until the last quarter, when it flew by. Not bad overall, but not the best of his that I have read.

4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Be a traveller, not a tourist, is a phrase that is often attributed to the late Anthony Bourdain. But is there a difference between a traveller and a tourist, though? Some people think that there is, and surprise, surprise, others don’t… Though I do like Paul Theroux’s definition: Tourists don’t know where they have been, travellers don’t know where they are going.

Daniel Maurer considered himself a traveller, following in the footsteps of Bourdain, but it slowly dawned on him that maybe he was just a tourist.

Travel for almost everyone stopped during the pandemic. It took a while, but the world slowly opened up again, and Maurer became, not by choice, a digital nomad.

He ends up in Mexico and tries to find an authentic town to live in that isn’t overrun with tourists (sic). In this modern world, just the mention of a place can see massive crowds of people flocking to visit. This can have an enormous detrimental effect on the are and the people when this happens.

He is only moderately scathing on travel influencers and the lack of transparency that they have with regard to their sponsors. He is even less enamoured by AI assistants, seeing them as boring, predictable and often error-prone.

Being a travel nomad puts him in the gig economy. Yes, living is much cheaper in Mexico than in the States, but getting paid work meant that he had to lower his prices.

Moving on to Argentina, he finds that having dollars in his pocket means that he can live like a king. However, he soon learns to keep quiet about this as Argentinians are suffering from the effects of high inflation. As the economy there slowly implodes, he decides that he would be better off in Spain, the home country of his mother.

It is another country that is suffering from a massive hike in tourists and all of the accompanying problems that they bring with them. This is a phenomenon that is happening all around the world at the moment as locals struggle to cope with increasing self-entitled tourists. Instagrammable sites are super popular and these are now getting restrictions on the number of visitors that can attend.

The arrival of lots of digital nomads means that the local economies have changed completely. Rents and other expenses rise dramatically, locking out locals from the homes that they need. We have seen this effect in Cornwall and other places in the UK. Countries that were once offering golden visas are quietly dropping them. Plus, there is a concerted effort in Europe to restrict the number of short-term rental properties available.

During the time that he spends in Barcelona, he comes to see for himself how the tourists or guiri, and they are known there, are becoming less and less welcome. The city is beginning to restrict how many shops selling tourist tat are allowed. In July 2024, there was a huge protest against tourism; visitors were squirted with water pistols and attractions were cordoned off with fake police tape.

‘The idea of ‘I’m not like the others’ is very egocentric,’ Pardo said. ‘I think it isn’t possible nowadays to come to Barcelona and not be a tourist. If you come, you must accept it: you are just another piece of the mass. And it’s not each person, it’s the mass that is killing the city.

Cruise ships are also becoming a target for locals’ ire. The island of Ibitha can get three huge ships a day, and these can bring 10,00 disembarking from the ships. 10,000! This huge influx of people, coupled with the fact that the ships pollute a lot, are not particularly green and sustainable. Some countries are now starting to limit the number of ships docking and are insisting that low-sulphur fuels are used to combat pollution.

Other places are pushing back on anti-social behaviour too, restricting drink sales for example. In a twist of irony that you couldn’t make up, the anti-tourism protests have become a tourist attraction in their own right.

Like in other countries, migration is becoming a political hot potato, and this is causing some countries to lurch towards right-wing parties. Strangely, though, the predominantly right-wing capitalist system demands that low-paid workers exist to maximise company profits and executive pay. Utterly mad system when you think about it.

Maurer visits Expo 2025 to see what the future of travel offers from a corporate point of view and would it would look like. Having read his description of the event, I think it sounds horrendous… Whilst tech and apps could offer assistance in finding lovely places to visit, it struck me most as being a way to fleece consumers from increasingly larger sums of money.

One good this was that countries are now offering regenerative tourism. You help in some way or other, and you are granted benefits in kind. Key to it is that you are helping the area that you are staying in, rather than money disappearing into the corporate coffers.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell – Edward Abbey

How do we answer that Maurer poses at the end of the book:

Can we learn to move as thoughtfully as we can, as carefully as we can?

I thought that this was a really interesting book. Through numerous examples, he asks some very thought-provoking questions about the nature of travel and tourism and it made me think about just how it is affecting people and places that are becoming inundated with thousands of people on a regular basis.

I do feel, though, that he didn’t fully answer the question that he posed in the book; so, what do we do about travel? Not that this is a fault, he wants you to think about the consequences of what you do and where you go and the choices that you make. We have to make sensible and sustainable decisions going forward.

If you like to travel, then this book would be a great place to start before you book that next flight or holiday.

4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Like all good plans, the idea for this trip formed over a few beers one evening. With his friends, Danny, they had been putting the world to rights before Danny finally got around to asking him the question that had been distracting him for a while. Had he heard of Interrail? Quite a daft question to ask a travel writer.

Of course, he had.

The reason for the question was that Danny had seen that they were having a half-price sale to celebrate 50 years of the service. Danny had the idea that they should spend an entire month travelling around Europe. He was so enthused by the idea he had even broached the subject with his wife and been given a provisional pass.

They bought tickets there and then on the bench in Soho Square, before heading to Stanford’s to get a couple of maps. It didn’t take them long to concoct a plan, and they both knew the destination: Istanbul.

Sadly, a half-price Interrail ticket wouldn’t let them go on the horrendously priced Orient Express. Instead of spending vast amounts of time sorting their itinerary out, they decided to let serendipity reign and follow their instincts and the tracks. This, they hoped, would add a level of jeopardy to the trip and help them see a completely different range of places and people.

They arrived at St Pancras for the Eurostar in good time. There was a slight concern that their first destination, Paris, had been on fire because of riots. They were both slightly apprehensive as they disembarked the train in the station.

However, all seemed well as they alighted in Paris and they headed to their hotel, which just so happened to be in the same area that George Orwell stayed in many years before. They had a night out on and returned late to the hotel. Strasbourg was tomorrow’s destination and they had a train to catch early afternoon.

This was the beginning of the long winding route that would take them across Europe on their way to Istanbul. They pass through Germany, Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria; almost exclusively on trains, but with one trip on a bus because of strikes. It makes for entertaining reading, too, which, if you have read any of Chesshyre’s work before, you’d be familiar with. They get on really well and their account of their travels out there did make me laugh a lot at times.

After they reached Istanbul, Danny had elected to fly back home to relieve his wife from looking after the three children. Chesshyre was going to have to make his own way home, a challenge he relished. Rather than go back the way he had come, he chose a route that would take him through Greece, across the Adriatic to Italy and along one of the world’s most beautiful railway lines in Switzerland and then onward to the Netherlands.

I have read a number of Chesshyre’s books in the past, so I was really looking forward to this, and I am glad to say, it didn’t disappoint at all. It is both an entertaining and informative read. He has a keen eye for detail and particularly likes the variety of stations and the architectural differences they have. I haven’t expanded on the events of the route, because I think that this is something you should read and discover for yourselves when you read it. This is something that I can wholeheartedly recommend that you do.

4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Unless you are a geologist or a quarryman, most people don’t think about rocks at all during their day. I know I am one of those people. I may take more notice when out and about, but then we’re spoilt here on the Jurassic coast. Rocks are the very foundation of our planet, our homes and our cities. They have been venerated by our ancestors for millennia too, hence why Anjana starts this book at some of the most famous rocks in the world, Stonehenge.

Why these stones were erected in this way and for what purpose, we will never really know, though modern archaeology and theories have gained a little insight into the Stone Age mind. We do know the use of some of the stone artefacts left behind, though. These tools were made by Mesolithic humans and are instantly recognisable as the shape and functions are still valid today. There is a photo of a beautiful banded gneiss mace head found in the Thames in the book. The rock it was made from is 2.7 billion years old.

That is quite an age for a rock; however, the oldest rock on Earth discovered so far is 4.4 billion years old. This fact staggered me, as this must have been one of the first rocks to solidify from lava. The zircon in the rock acts as a record of how old they are and allows scientists to look back in time. The ancient gneiss of Canada is found in more than its geological records. The rock can be found in the creation stories and rituals of the First Nation people there.
Continental drift was originally proposed as a theory in the early 20th century, but it was first proven in 1957 and is now known as plate tectonics. The speed of movement is mm per year for the fastest plates and almost no movement for others. Except for some that then, when they do move, go so quickly that it causes earthquakes and tsunamis and are a reminder that for all man’s mastery over the planet, we’re only here for a short time, and our existence is very short compared to the rocks beneath our feet.

Indigenous people coped with this natural onslaught by performing rituals to Mother Earth. Seeing the planet as a female is very common in these cultures; Gaia, Bhumi Deu and Pachamama are just three examples. Their creation stories go some way to explaining the seismic activity in these areas that the local population could understand. The ancient reverence that the New Zealand people have for a rock called Pounamu is carried forward to the rugby team, who have a Māori stone that all players touch before a game. A similar reverence for Mother Earth, but with very different rituals, can be found in her own faith, Hinduism. Mother Bhumi is the earth goddess who must be treated with due respect and not be injured by people’s labour.
Rock has a timeless quality about it; probably because geological time is on a completely different scale to human time. Our three score and ten is a mere blink of an eye compared to 55 million years or longer.

Walking into a tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt is walking deep into the past. Not just the historical elements, the hieroglyphs and the way that the tomb was carved from the rock, but the limestone rock itself has its own story to tell. Rocks can bring trouble to people, too, not just from falling on people. There is arsenic present in the Himalayas, and the silt that washes down to Bangladesh causes all manner of health problems. The discovery of gold in the West of America caused the obliteration of a number of First Nation tribes in the region because of greed.
The rock that started Khatwa on her geological journey came from a volcano in the Tsavo National Park over three decades ago. She picked up this vesicular basalt whilst on a family holiday and from that moment on was hooked on rocks and has made a career from it. These deadly natural phenomena are some of the most dramatic natural processes of geology we can see in certain places around the world. The closest I have knowingly been to a volcano was when on holiday in Sicily. We didn’t get to go and see Etna, whilst there, maybe another day. If you want to have red hot rocks thrown at you, then the place to go is Iceland; genuinely the land of ice and fire.

Being classed as a space invader is not a reference to a slightly rubbish game of the 1980s, but a phrase that she is told about as she walks through the Chilterns. It is a phrase that hang heavily with her as she goes on to write about the way that colonial invaders have taken over land and resources in Brazil and other parts of South America and the efforts that the indigenous people are taking to push back and reclaim what is rightfully theirs.

Sedimentary rocks are formed from organic matter or minerals that have collected in a depression. As layers form above them, they are crushed and become rock. This process takes millions of years, but the formations that it creates are magnificent. Khatwa is in Petra looking at the rocks there, they are multicoloured, with strips of yellow, pink, white and orange, and are a thing of beauty. Leaving Petra through the narrow gorge of Siq is an experience that she has never had before; the way that the light flows around the rock is exquisite.
The Arches National Park in America is home to a number of First Nation Tribes who consider the landscapes as portals. The photos in the book only hint at how stunning they are. The reverence that they hold for the arches shows a deep spiritual dimension for the place and the rocks from which they are created from. Sadly, this often clashes with the Western view that can only see these as a source of income and possible scientific gain.

She is searching for fossils on the beautiful beaches of West Dorset. They get lucky and find an ammonite and the vertebra of an ichthyosaur. Both have been in and become part of the rocks for millions of years. Even though I have looked on the same beaches a few times, I still haven’t found either yet!
Rocks have been a constant in her life, as well as giving her qualifications and a career; they helped her get through a traumatic breakup when she was a young mother.
Rocks also undergo traumatic changes during their incredibly long life spans as they are absorbed into the crust and subjected to massive temperatures and pressures. These forces change their structure and composition to become something better and stronger after. We can have a similar recovery from life events, becoming more resilient after them.

Mountains are large and immovable objects, and people tend to see them as indestructible. They are, but also they aren’t. Something as simple as water can break them; constant freezing and thawing over countless years cracks the mountain into boulders, stone and sand, and couple that with erosion, then they do not stand a chance with geological time. Sometimes the roots of these once great mountains are the only things left. New York is an example, and the grey slate quarries in the Welsh hills are two that she explores in the book.
Erratics are those boulders that are found on the surface but are utterly different to the underlying bedrock. Nobody really knew how they had got there, so all sorts of folkloric stories were invented to explain how they arrived there. Most of them had some variation of the devil throwing them, but there are other local variations. The real explanation is much simpler: glaciers carried these enormous stones to their new resting places, but it took quite a while for science to work it out.
I must admit I don’t think about rocks a huge amount. I like looking at them when we are out and about, particularly the rocks along the beautiful Jurassic Coast in my home county. I am always a little concerned about how long the cliffs are going to last at West Bay, though.

What Khatwa does in this book is to blend the hard science of geology with the softer, more human story and how indigenous people have seen the rocks in their landscapes as an almost living entity. The rocks have whispered their own stories to the people that lived around them, and they, in turn, have made them central to their culture.

One generation of rock equals many, many generations of humans, but in a kind of strange way, the collective memory of humans overlaps the rock era. What I liked most about this book is that it opened my eyes to a new way of looking and thinking about the way humans have and need to co-exist with the landscapes around them in this only planet we have. I thought this was well worth reading.

4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

When I was going to school, which feels like a hundred years ago, having any label associated with you would make you a target for bullies. Back then, these labels were demeaning and patronising, and if you weren’t one of the cool kids and didn’t fit in with most of the regular students, your difference made you a target.

Even if you didn’t have a label, some kids found it really difficult to fit in with the majority of pupils. You either were lonely, or if lucky, you might find a small niche group that has similar interests. I was one of those pupils, and Joe Harkness was another. Joe has been diagnosed, and that has helped him come to terms with the way he is. I haven’t gone down that rout,e and at the moment, I am not considering following up on this. In those days, you’d be considered odd. Nowadays, in this partially enlightened time, you can get a diagnosis that is covered by the broad description of neurodivergent.

This book is Harkness’s journey into nature with his and other people’s neurodiversity. He conducted lots of interviews with people who work in all sorts of roles in nature and the conservation world. A lot were conducted face to face, but time and other circumstances meant that some took place online or by other methods. A lot were happy to share their names, details of where they worked, and any specific diagnosis, and some chose to remain anonymous. The conversations are about how they cope with life, work, the universe and moths…

There is almost no research into the effects that nature has on those with neurodiversity diagnoses. But where there have been studies, most concentrate on younger people. That is understandable, but it does miss swathes of people out. The studies showed that neurodivergent young people could concentrate much better when in a woodland setting when compared to an urban setting.

The natural world is seen as a non-judgmental space; it doesn’t tell people off, and it forgives. A balm for neurodivergent individuals. For them, being in nature is stimulating, but not excessively so. ADHD and autistic people tend to explore rather than exploit an environment, and it is a reminder of how indigenous people treat the landscape around them.
He considers if working in the conservation sector is good for neurodivergent people. Jobs in the UK are either government or NGO (RSPB and so on), and these are wide-ranging and varied. These roles can be especially suited to autistic people, the daily routines and rituals can remain the same, but the day varies because the location is different, the wildlife they observe changes, different weather and seasonal variations. The conservation sector is inherently caring; they are trying their best to look after the planet after all. There is nominally a chain of command, but this is often circumvented as the person with the best ideas and experience often takes the lead.

I thought that the Out Of The Box chapter was really interesting. He is looking at the theory that ADHD and autism are superpowers. Harkness’ initial opinion is that they aren’t. However, he talks to people who feel that their ability to hyperfocus on a task gives them a noticeable edge for certain skills, bird song identification, for example. Another individual he speaks to has dyslexia, and they feel that this gives them an ability to distil ideas that they then become meaningful and understandable to many others. Someone else has the ability to walk around a nature reserve once and have a map imprinted in their memory.

Lots of people have very niche specialist interests, some of which Harkness talks about with them. A good organisation can harness this mix of skills and by having both neurodivergent and non- neurodivergent staff will make for a stronger and more balanced team. One individual Harkness interviews, went from almost being excluded at school to creating a $50b scheme for mangrove restoration. And this is one of many stories of the successes of neurodivergent people working in conservation.

Even though things are improving for neurodivergent people, the barriers for some to gain employment in the conservation sector are sometimes set really high. It is difficult to gain entry when it feels like some of these decisions have already been taken prior to interviews. Having to undertake voluntary work in the sector only works when you have a supportive and fairly wealthy family. Should they overcome these hurdles a get the job, a starting salary of £18k is laughable but very common. So if you’re a female, neurodivergent and coloured, then it is almost impossible to be able to get a job, which hence why there are only 6% coloured people working in conservation. Less than 50% of the organisations have anything resembling an equality, diversity and inclusion policy (EDI). Link that to endemic institutionalised racism, and it isn’t going to change anytime soon.

Companies have a legal requirement to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ when employing people to ensure that all employees have a level playing field. However, the term ‘reasonable ‘ is very broad… Sadly, making a potential employer aware of your disability is a sure-fire way to not get the job. Harkness himself has had mixed responses and support from employers in the past and outlines the good and the bad. He does hear the horror stories and also writes about the organisations that are doing things really well. He notes that for some neurodivergent people, it is the interactions that they have with other people that is the problem, not the interactions that they have with nature.

Harkness looks at some of the well-known conservation organisations and their policies and, more importantly, their actions on EDI and neurodiversity. He even gets to talk to a government department about their policies. It was interesting to see that a substantial number of people who were responsible for this also have neurodivergent conditions. The better organisations use a workplace passport scheme for all employees; this makes it fair and reduces discrimination in the workplace.

Harkness also contacts a number of smaller conservation organisations to find out how they manage neurodivergent staff. About 50% of those he had contacted replied to him, and of those, they had policies and processes in place that helped neurodivergent staff to integrate and feel valued. Some of these conservation charities are tiny, only having six staff in some cases, so the office rules that bigger organisations have don’t really apply in these instances.

A friend of my wife runs a forest school, and until I read the chapter in this book, I must admit I didn’t really know a huge amount about it. The non-threatening environment works for everyone, especially the kids. He also visits a care farm that takes in kids who don’t really fit in the regular school system. If only more kids had these opportunities.

His final chapter talks about stories having a beginning, middle and end. Except life isn’t like that, especially if you’re neurodivergent or have ADHD, it is a super nova of themes, ideas, and threads to be followed. This book had come about from someone mentioning to Harkness that most people in the conservation sector were neurodivergent.

Overall, I thought this was a very interesting and informative book about how neurodivergent people can thrive in nature-centred organisations. Provided the organisation that they work for has put in place sympathetic schemes and systems for them. The thing to remember is that these systems work perfectly for ‘normal’ people too, unlike the other way around. Most of the people that Harkness has spoken to, to create this book, have had a positive experience with how they are treated, but there is the odd horror story in here! If you are or know anyone who is neurodivergent, then I think that you will find, as I did, this to be an informative and useful book. Bravo to Harkness for writing something that is very close to home and outside his comfort zone.