The home of longer reviews on specific books – beware of spoilers!
-
The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn
There’s plenty to be said about a 500 something page family saga… beware spoilers abound!
-
Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain by Jeremy Paxman
I love a book that teaches me a lot of things I didn’t know.
-
One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World by Michael Frank
The real power of the book is how it is part memoir, part oral history.
-
Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies by Ben MacIntyre
I have a list of history writers ready whenever someone claims history books are too boring. Lindsey Fitzharris, Erik Larson, Annette Gordon-Reed, David McCullough, Greg Jenner… there are plenty of historians who know how to turn archival or oral history into a good story. Ben MacIntyre is my newest addition to the list thanks to…
-
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
… you don’t need to know about Poe to enjoy the novel. You just need to love a creepy story involving late night sleepwalking, deathbeds, reanimated corpses, a mysterious monster, and a thoroughly charming narrator.
-
The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
Tey covers a ton of ground in a short text: how our memory of history is tied to later governmental action and political movement, how new information can always emerge to change how we consider the past, how we should always consider motive (not just in case of these particular murders but also in the…
-
HAG: Forgotten Folktales Retold
HAG knows the importance of the folk tale and embraces it. This project gave a collection of female writers an original British folktale and had them reimagine and modernize them. They also created a podcast for the collection to keep the oral tradition of the stories alive.
-
No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy by Mark Hodkinson
Hodkinson’s book is a bit of a hodge-podge of his life as a reader, a writer, a student, and a member of his family but as I mentioned in the “The Book Journal May 2022” post, it makes for a more natural memoir as you follow his story through themes and thoughts rather than a…
-
Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi
I, like many, love a good fictional English murder mystery. It doesn’t usually have the deep cynicism of a modern crime drama or the weight of real tragedy linked to true crime. There will be a murder and the alarm and dismay that comes with it – but it will be set up, investigated, and…
lost in the dust jackets 