Category: Review (Page 19 of 132)

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Life has a way of throwing curveballs at you when you least expect it; I know I am living through one of them at the moment. For Nancy Campbell though it came in three parts. Firstly there was the pandemic, this huge disrupter to life as we had known it. On top of that, she had a phone call whilst she was in Germany. It was a call that could not be ignored and it was to tell her that her partner had had a stroke. The final curveball for her was knowing that their relationship had reached an end.

Adrift from all that she once held dear, she tries to think about what she would be best doing. There were various options but she is persuaded to spend £750 that she really doesn’t have on a caravan. It is towed to a spot between the canal and railway by a new friend called Sven. She is in good company there, others live on the canal who are on the fringes of society in Oxford and they welcome her into the community.

This is a diary of the summer months in 2021 as she adapts to her new life alone. It is full of the detail of her new life as she adapts to living in a tiny tin box. But there is much more than that in this memoir, She is very open with her thoughts and feelings, showing at times some really raw emotions and her own medical condition. She also uses her diary to reflect on the events in the wider world and the mundane moments that go to make up life.

She has a way with words that is memorising and this is a book that has life and death, love and pain in equal measure. I liked this a lot and it doesn’t feel heavily edited either, entries for some days are long and thoughtful and others are just a note of what happened that particular day. One entry was blank, quite a poignant moment in itself. This is not going to be an easy read for some people, but her calm amidst the storms that swirl around her is inspirational.

3.5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

This is a dual review of two new RSPB spotlight guides that are the most recent additions to the range that now has twelve in it. There are short guides on moths, butterflies, birds of prey and caterpillars. The two that I was kindly sent are Garden Bugs and Ducks, Geese and Swans.

They are a fold-out format printed on card and with a high gloss finish which I think may resist a small amount of water should it be damp when using them outside. One-half of the fold-out pages have brief information on the subject matter at hand, so for the ducks and geese, there is information on the habitat, behaviour and conservation. The other side of these pages has beautiful illustrations by Stephen Message.

I thought that these were well-produced small guide books. Strongly recommend these for the budding naturalist who may not want a detailed guidebook just yet, but still wants to know what they have seen on a lake or found in their garden.

3.5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

I have always found that the is something special about the ancient monuments that are still present in our modern landscape. They are, what some would call, thin places, where this world meets other realms and I find that they have a tranquillity about them that I don’t always find elsewhere.

The most famous stone circle is probably Stonehenge, but there are present in every county. Sadly Dorset has only two according to the book, A Guide to the Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany by Aubrey Burl, a book that I was fortunate to find in a charity shop and still have to read at some point. In Cumbria though, more stone circles there than in any other county, fifty according to the research that I have done. In this book, Stan Abbott visits twenty-nine of them on his new electric bike just as the country emerged from the lockdowns in 2021.

The book is a mix of travelogue and ancient history as he travels around the region searching for these circles. I gather from the text, that he visited some before, but there are others that are new to him. There is some personal speculation in the book about why these were built by neolithic peoples and why they were aligned in a particular way, but thankfully there is no outlandish ideas. He does take the easy solution though and put it down to ritual. Though what those were is anyone’s guess.

There were parts of this book that I really liked, but I did have a couple of issues with it. I liked the way he was concentrating on one part of the country seeking out these ancient stone circles and trying to think about the context in which they were built. He does not have any agenda either, which was refreshing. Instead, he is travelling just to see them and enjoy the moments spent there. He does speculate why they may have been built as well as look at the wider context with the monuments in Wiltshire and Orkney. I had a couple of issues though, I would have really liked to have photographs in this book of some or all of the places that he visited and I would like to have had a better map as the one at the front of the book is tiny!

3.5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

The mix of nitrogen and oxygen that we breathe every day without fail has kept us and countless other humans and other animals alive for hundreds of millions of years now. But since the industrial revolution, the amount of particulates and pollution has increased in the atmosphere relentlessly. This low-quality air is what we breathe in now and it is contributing to seven million deaths each year.

But what are these substances that we are breathing in? How do they affect us? And what is being done to reduce this pollution? In this fascinating book, Mark Broomfield sets about trying to answer some of these questions on a journey that begins on another planet and will take us all around the world to discover where this pollution comes from and the most recent science on how it affects us.

I liked this book, Broomfield, obviously knows his facts, which you would kind of hope for given his background and experience, but he has made the subject of air pollution both readable and interesting. He has laid the book out in a logical order too moving from the air that we breathe around us right up to the stratosphere. It is a popular science book, so sometimes the really technical details aren’t there, but there is a comprehensive series of notes in the rear of the book should they be needed. There were a couple of flaws, the occasional attempt at humour wasn’t really needed, and for me, the final chapter on one possible future ahead I didn’t think was really necessary. I would have preferred action points on how to go about improving the air quality around us. Worth reading if you are concerned with air pollution.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Flying as a method of transport is not the most thrilling way of moving around the world. You are stuck in a metal tube, but not for long and you do get to look out the window. The thought of being cooped up in a black metal tube, an unspecified depth under the sea for months at a time has no appeal at all.

But this is what the elite submariners do day in, day out in the oceans of the world for us. They have a fixed day, not one clue where they are and have no personal space and bugger all privacy. They are crammed into a 430ft x 33ft steel tube with 140 other smelly sweaty bodies and need to be able to work under pressure constantly. If that isn’t enough, there are nuclear weapons on board and it is powered by a reactor…

Richard Humphrey’s joined when he was 18 and served at the end of the 1980s. It was this time when no one knew if the cold war would suddenly go hot. The threat of being discovered by the Soviets was a real and the thought would chill his bones regularly.

My father was in the Navy and joined at the age of 15. When I was younger he tried to persuade me to sign up too, but it had no appeal at all. He never went into submarines, staying above the waves for a number of years. Having read this I think that I made the correct decision. In Under Pressure, Humphrey’s account of his time spent deep in the Atlantic Ocean has a lot to commend it. To begin with, you don’t have to go down in one of those boats and he gives a fairly decent account of life under the waves.

The balance of detail and atmosphere is about right too, I guess a certain amount has been withheld from the narrative as these are part of our nuclear security, but he is an entertaining writer. He is honest too, telling what he liked about this career and the part of navy life that he detested. There were even certain parts that made me laugh. If you have ever considered the submarine service, or want confirmation that this is never going to be for you, then you should read this.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Dee has been on the ship for six months now and she raging about the circumstances that led her to be on there as well as the events that happened after they had left. She wants to find was responsible, but her limited privileges on the ship mean she is making no progress on it at all.

She has been noticed though by someone in authority. She is asked to provide some analysis for them and they are happy with her results and work. She gets paid for it and there is the offer of more work, and most importantly, access to databases that she never knew existed. On top of that, she has been invited to play in some of the games or mersives by a designer.

These games are incredibly intense, unlike anything that she has tried up until now. It is only after she returns to normal life that she realises that one of the people in the game she was playing is now actually dead on the ship. Her friend, Carl is asked to investigate. And whilst she knows the game felt real, she really doesn’t believe that it was that real. Or was it? Perhaps the chatbot that only seems to be talking to her may have the answer. On not. She really doesn’t know…

Given how much of a blast the previous book was, I had high hopes for this, the final book in the series. And don’t get me wrong, It was good in various ways, however, I was disappointed for a few reasons that I will come to in a moment. I really liked the AI and the tech that they use to live on this ship that was made from the information in the capsule. The characters were engaging too, though Carl from book 2 was a little two-dimensional in this. Some of the details of the plot were good, the way that the action in the ‘mersives was having an impact on real life on the ship, blurring the differences between the real world and the virtual worlds. I had a problem with a couple of the aspects of the plot though, firstly it seemed too easy for events to take place given how monitored the passengers on the ship were and it kind of felt that it was rushed to a conclusion. I had hope for other things to happen, but sadly that wasn’t to be.

Generally, I thought it was a good series though with some high points and only the odd low one. I kind of hope there is going to be the fifth book in the series, as there are so many unanswered questions, but haven’t seen anything about it.

4.5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Anna Kubrin has been travelling for months to get to Mars. She is fortunate to get a position, as the rest of the team has been there for a while and while her position as artist-in-residence is a little controversial, she can bring her skills as a geologist to the planet too. She has left on Earth a husband and small daughter and she is hoping that the year that she will be here with not damage that connection that she had with them.

But not everything seems right on the Mars base. She has a cool reception from one of the members of the team there, but she understands that some might not understand the reason that she is here. When she is shown the room that she will be staying in, she finds a painted note in her style advising her not to trust the colony psychologist. She recognises her writing but has no recollection of writing it. Her wedding ring has been changed too, and the engraving that was inside has gone.

It is not long before she is allowed out onto the surface of the planet so she can gain some inspiration for her art. She heads over to a place that no one has visited before, and behind a rock fits a footprint. It is from a boot similar to hers. There is no explanation as to why it is there and the colony AI is not particularly helpful when questioned about it. In some of the photos that she takes in preparation for her painting, there is something strange in the background of one that isn’t in the others

She wants to find out what happened and have an explanation for these strange events. This is mostly to prove that she is not losing her mind, but as she digs deeper she realises that this might not be a truth that she wants to know after all…

This book threw me a little, to begin with. It didn’t seem to follow the same timeline as the previous book, After Atlas. Part way through, I realised that whilst it is a series, it is the story of a series of events seen from a variety of characters perspectives. This book was much darker than the previous ones for a variety of reasons, that you will have to find out by reading the book. I am not going to say much more than that, just that if you like your sci-fi with an original take on a dystopian future then this series is really good and this is the best in the series so far.

4.5 out of 5 stars

Carlos Moreno was only a baby when Atlas left the earth. His mother was on the ship and his life changed forever at that point. He was left with his father who had not made the selection for the ship and they ended up in the hands of the religious cult known as the Circle run by the charismatic leader called Alejandro Casales. That was forty years ago and attention is being focused on the capsule that was left as it is going to be opened soon.

He left that cult and made his way to the UK where he now works for the Ministry of Justice as an investigator. He is called in by his seniors to investigate a death. Alejandro Casales has been found in his hotel room and they think that he will be the best person to find out who did it. Given the profile of Casaleshas, there are a lot of interested parties and the inevitable legal teams from various gov-corps around the world who have an interest in knowing what happened.
He will have to ignore all his shared history with Casaleshas, but as he uncovers each clue he realises that he is getting into murkier and murkier territory.

I thought this was a big step up from her first book in this series. The pace of it is really fast as she throughs her main character through the emotional and physical mill whilst trying to solve this mysterious case. I got halfway through the book and realised that he couldn’t have solved the case already. He hadn’t, there was just so much more to unpack in the story. I really liked how she has built the society, it feels very dystopian with a pervasive tech that is built into people when they are chipped at the age of 16. The way that the super rich can influence governments is equally worrying, it feels like she has created a natural extrapolation of where we are in society at the moment. Excellent stuff and onto the next now.

3.5 out of 5 stars

It has been twenty-two years since Ren and the others in the colony arrived on this planet far beyond earth. It was a place that was untainted by overpopulation, pollution, and war and held a promise to reveal our place in the cosmos. They made their home at the bottom of an organic alien structure and in that structure is Lee Suh-Mi the founder of the colony.

But the truth of what happened to Suh-Mi is not known to the other colonists, Renata Ghali is one of the few who knows exactly what happened and she has kept that secret since. The arrival in the colony of a stranger from one of the other ships threatens the status quo, especially when they learn that he is related to Suh-Mi. He is there for a reason and if the other colonists were to discover the truth, who knows what might happen

I really liked this story. The world-building is very well done, in particular the alien structure and the way that the characters interact with it. I liked the varied characters, there is an unreliable narrator, the disrupter and the sneaky type and they all go to make the story work really well. The plot was well mapped out and there was enough in there to keep me reading it, which is always a good thing. If there was one flaw, there were too many loose ends and unanswered questions in this, but it is the first in a series of four, so I am hoping that they get answered in the rest!

3.5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

The seven deadly sins are a list of vices within Christian teachings and currently are; lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath and envy. I say currently as the order has been different in the past, as well as having others included in the list in the early church, where they had nine at one point!

But what is the modern take on these vices? To answer that seven of the most exciting, vibrant voices in Catalan literature, Raül Garrigasait, Jordi Graupera, Oriol Ponsatí-Murlà, Marina Porras, Anna Punsoda, Adrià Pujol, and Oriol Quintana have been asked to chose one and write about it in any way they like.

It makes for a wide-ranging and interesting series of essays too, with subjects covered as diverse as relationships with others at the age of 14, a lesson learnt about pride at a delicatessen and a young girl first learning about lust, when a neighbour left his wife for a Russian girl thirty years younger than him.

I really enjoyed reading these. Each author has a vice they have chosen to write about and this makes them all very different in terms of the context, specific subjects and even if they think it is a vice or not. I didn’t really have a favourite and they all complement each other so well. As an aside, I think that the translator has done a great job too, finding the individual voices and making a cohesive book.