3 out of 5 stars

Delphine Venner has been around a long time, whilst some people the same age as her have fading memories, she has not forgotten anything. She remembers being a child of war, and fighting for her life, she remembers the gateway and the world and terrifying creatures that live the other side of it. Most of all she remember those that she lost. She is offered a chance to pass through the gateway once again. On the other side of the gateway is someone who has been an assassin for centuries. She is waiting for her.

This assassin, Hagar, is planning one last kill, and this death will cost demand from her everything she has, but to do it she needs Delphine. She is there to find her father but is dragged unwittingly into this, the whole society descends into chaos. Venner must learn the art of fighting once again in the battle to destroy an ageless evil.

I hadn’t read the first in the series before picking this book up, and while you didn’t have to have read the first one, I think that the context from the first books would have helped me with a greater understanding of the characters. It has a complex plot with lots going on too and occasionally you have to put the books down and take a moment to get it clear in your head just what was happening. It has a frantic pace at the end and probably not one for the squeamish at times. At times it was very weird but in a Miéville sort of way. That said, this is a richly imagined book of two linked worlds and a very different fantasy from what you might have read in the past. It has a sumptuous cover too.

4 out of 5 stars

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

We may think that we are a separate species from all the others but we are as much a part of the earth as the rocks and soil that we stand on. To start with we are made from the same elements and all the things that you can see around you we are an integral part of this planet. Secondly, if you know where to look and how to interpret the data you can see the traces of our long development in the rocks too.

To begin this story, Dartnell takes us back to that moment in time when we moved down a different and new branch of the family tree, along with other primates. This happened in East Africa in the rainforest belt around the equator, but instead of being dense forest, this part of the world was dry savannah grasslands and it was this difference that altered the trajectory from swinging primate to bipedal creatures. Why this part of the planet was so very different to similar latitudes was down to plate tectonics several million years earlier that led to the East African Rift, a wide deep valley with high mountainous ridges. These cause a rain shadow and stop the formation of forests, hence the dry landscape that was there.

This theme is repeated throughout the book. He looks at the geology of different regions and sees how human beings have exploited the water that seeps up through fault lines or taken advantage of the rich soils close to volcanoes. He explains why the civilisations of the Mediterranean were mostly on the northern coastlines, how we used the rocks beneath our feet to build our homes and how we used cooking to get more nutrients from food. He can even trace the voting patterns of the UK and US in the geology.

This is a book about deep time, how long some things take to come to fruition and pulling together these tiny but significant moments in our history. It also reinforces the view that I have that we are this complex interdependent system and that as a species we have pushed it to the very edge. It makes for a fascinating read and I really enjoyed it. Dartnell is an eloquent and engaging writer and I can highly recommend this.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Even as I write this with COVID-19 totally dominating the news, climate change is still one of our biggest challenges that we are facing as a planet and as a human race. There have been many books written on the science of what is happening, and the possible effects of what our planet could be like with a temperature rise of 4 degrees. There are fictional responses too, Stillicide by Cynan Jones and Doggerland by Ben Smith are two books set in a future UK that has suffered from the effects of climate change.

The barren shelves wait

For just in time deliveries to cities

Where no one can eat barcodes

But there aren’t many poetry books about this crisis, so when I was offered a copy of this to read, I jumped at the chance. This collection by Sam Love is split into four themed sections, Awakening, Origins, Impact and Recovering Hope. The emphasis for each section is fairly clear and the poems open up things that are important to him, such as the way the atmosphere traps the heat from the sun, the imagery of a Plastic bag as tumbleweed before joining the other detritus of our legacy is very poignant, the joy of picking fruit from a bush in your garden rather than a punnet that has travelled a quarter of the way around the world. The view that a forest is a sustainable resource for local people and not just a one-off source of profit for an outsider.

The butterfly’s bright wings offer a glimpse

That tomorrow the sunrise will paint the landscape

What comes across most in the short collection is the fury that he has about the way that we have reached the situation that we are in. The final section gives us a little hope that this is merely a transitory phase and that there will be some positives on the other side of this crisis.

Three (ish) Favourite Poems

Our Legacy

Crazy Water

Ghost Stumps

Awakenings

4 out of 5 stars

There are parts of Europe that rarely get mentioned, these out of the way places often have turbulent and complicated pasts. One of these places is mountainous borderlands of North Macedonia, Albania, and Greece. The border of the three countries passes through the two ancient lakes formed by tectonic activity and are joined by underground rivers, Ohrid and Prespa.

It is a place that is deeply rooted deeply in Kapka Kassabova’s heart too, her maternal grandmother was a huge influence on her and she came from the region. It was somewhere where she wants to go to and spend time there, but it hadn’t been appropriate until now. It was a region that had known conflict for years, but there had been peace for a little while now and there was no time like the present.

Amongst all the history here though and there has been an awful lot of history; wars and constantly changing borders and regimes, it is a place scarred deeply by conflict. It is now coming to terms with peace, and she is here for the human stories and to see if there are any traces of her family left. Landing at the airport in Albania, she immediately feels at home, the men who are hoping for work all look like her cousins. They pass through a medieval gate into the town on Ohrid on the way to the villa she was staying at. The owners looked familiar and it didn’t take long to realise that there was a family link.

Form this initial meeting she heads off around the region to meet and talk with the people of the region, from the fishermen, mothers, aunts, poets and border guards. She learns about how and when Sufism appeared in the region, speaks the those that got across the Iron Curtain and visits monasteries high in the mountains and walks in 2000-year-old tombs that were untouched until recently. But all of the trip out centre on these amazing lakes

As she travels between town and villages and crossing the lakes she keeps bumping into people that look familiar. Quite often after a short conversation with them, she invariably finds out that they are related in some way or another. And it is that sort of thing that sums this book up, it is a little-understood area of the world and through her wonderful prose, Kassabova untangles the people from the politics. Slowly the rifts are being healed, even when she is there it is finally agreed with Greece that Macedonia can formally be called North Macedonia. With all these things though, it is a process that has taken far too long, but it does show that even after years of conflict they still have so much more in common than the differences between them.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

We probably all have that one friend who if it wasn’t for bad luck, wouldn’t have any luck at all. And we have all had those situations where you are genuinely trying to be helpful and manage to put your foot right in it or say the wrong thing. One embarrassing moment was when we were out for dinner with friends and they happened to mention that they thought there was live music there sometimes. We said the last time we were there, there was this accordion player and were quite glad he wasn’t there tonight. Turn’s out that accordion player was her dad…

Keggie Carew is one of those people who has a natural ability to put her foot in it or more by chance to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This collection is her recollection of the most cringeworthy and embarrassing moment of her life. There is the story of the time when a purse went missing from her home when someone else was looking after it, a dinner party where she was completely oblivious to that fact she was sitting to a Hollywood film star, thinking it was his brother, Nigel. She learns that she is not cut out to be a waitress, mumbles her way through the Latin gardening terms and fails abysmally at matchmaking and camping in a VW Beetle in California.

These stories that Carew has recounted are always awkward, often funny, sometimes hilarious and occasionally terrifying. It shows the strength of her true character too, as what each story shows is her tenacity to keep going no matter how cringe-worthy or embarrassing they are to her. A nice light-hearted read.

4.5 out of 5 stars

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

Of all the creatures on this planet, humanity is the one that has been able to change the very face of the earth in a way that no other animal is able to. We can raze the densest forests, cut holes through rock, change the course of rivers and obliterate mountains. The only other thing that has this ability to change the very landscape is the earth-changing events of volcanos, earthquake and tsunamis or the out of this world asteroids.

Hoffman heads all over the world from his home in Greece to find these places that are right at the very end of their existence. He visits Kansas to watch the mating ritual of the leks or prairie chickens on the Konza prairie. This place has been under threat since the 1800s as the European settlers saw that the land was rich and put it under the plough. There is almost none (around 0.1%) of the original grasslands left.

We hear a lot about the tropical jungles, how it is being devastated by logging and agriculture. Hoffman travels to the northeasternmost state of India, Arunachal Pradesh where he is there to see the landscape of the Himalayan flood plain. The people here, the Nyishs, have managed to co-exist in this landscape with tigers and elephants for years. But it is only in the past few years that the realisation that the elephants have started to raid crops so they have reluctantly retreated from their rice paddies and plots. Their state bird is the hornbill, a species that is essential to their identity, customs and beliefs. This bird has a casque on its bill and it is this part of the bird that is used on the headdress of the tribe. The bird is under threat though and the Nyish tribe are looking at other ways of replicating this part of the dress.

It is not just exotic places that are under threat, closer to home we have woodlands in the UK that have been in existence for hundreds of years.  The British have a deep love for woodlands, as was seen when the government a few years ago thought it was a good idea to privatise the Forestry Commission. The backlash from the public forced a U-turn and a backtrack on this. The woodland he visits is just outside Sheffield and has been in existence since the 100’s. It was split in two after the M1 carved its way through it, and has recently been suffering because of those that go there for their leisure activity or riding through it with quad bikes. It is under threat again and local residents have formed groups to resist this, applying for village green status to protect what is left. Sitting with his back resting on an old oak watching the breeze ripple the bluebells is a perfect way to spend the evening.

Stories about these and the other places strongly underline the main argument of the book that all of these places are utterly Irreplaceable. With wholesale destruction of these places comes the loss of habitats. Even if you were to plant the same species of trees in a field a couple of miles up the road in Sheffield, you can’t replicate an ancient woodland. The myriad species and underground mycelia that live in it along with the complex interactions that have developed over the past 400 or 500 years cannot just be reproduced.  These unique ecosystems are disappearing under the machines of mankind and when they are gone, that is it, finito, no more.

Hoffman has written an eloquent series of essays taken from his first-hand experience of seeing places that are under threat from human activity. It is partly a celebration of our diverse world but is also a call to arms for those that care about this planet. He shows how local people are fighting back against the things that are happening to their area. Most importantly, it is a book that needs to be read and more importantly a stepping stone to inspire us to action and to pressurise our political leaders into doing something when the places we live are threatened.

4 out of 5 stars

Regardless of what happens in the world, the seasons come and go without fail. The seasons may be stretched a little, especially with the effects of climate change at the moment as they seem to blend into each other more and more. With spring the main moment for me is when we reach the equinox, that day when the night and day are exactly the same length; 12 hours. This year that day was the 20th March and that seemed to me to be the best time to start this book by Crumley.

Spring in Scotland often begins with snow on the ground and in his first chapter of the book he is watching a kestrel over a landscape that is scattered with small patches of snow. She drops from the twig into the wind and begins to hunt. They keep pace with each other at a distance and just as he reached some newly planted native trees, she turns and rushes away downwind. Soon after he hears a mistle thrush singing as the urge to find a mate becomes all-consuming. These are what he considers the first syllables of spring.

Following the traces of spring around Scotland will take him up in the Highlands, and to the islands of Mull, Iona, Lismore and he even ventures out of Scotland to visit Lindisfarne on the Northumbrian coast. If feels like you are alongside him as he is watching the antics of Sea Eagles or spotting an unusual encounter between a fox and a pine marten or being a handful of yards away from a grey coated roebuck.

As with his other books in the series, this is another brilliant book from Crumley. He is passionate about his subjects too; his eye for the details of the way that the creatures behave, coupled with the descriptions of the landscape make this such a good book. He is not afraid to use the book as a soapbox either, putting forward solid arguments on a variety of subjects that he cares about. This is the third in the series so far, and there is just the final book, The Nature of Summer, to look forward to.

Other books on Spring that I can recommend:

In Pursuit of Spring by Edward Thomas

Walking through Spring: An English Journey by Graham Hoyland

Spring: An Anthology for the Changing Seasons by Melissa Harrison (Editor)

The Long Spring: Tracking the Arrival of Spring Through Europe by Laurence Rose