The Golden Compass ~ Philip Pullman

**** RECOMMEND****

JANUARY 2020

Bitter Wash Road ~ Garry Disher

Girl Woman Other ~ Bernadine Evaristo

Home Fire ~ Kamila Shamsie

**** RECOMMEND****

A wonderful modern-day take on Antigone.
Great use of point-of-view.
A timely topic, clearly written with cleverly intermeshed storylines, an unexpected ending

The Innocents ~ Michael Crummey

****LIKE***

Crummey is an expert writer at capturing bleak desolation and the perseverance of the human spirit and revealing it to us in a slow measured style.  The sense of place, the sense of time, the characterisations are all bleak, all harsh, yet create an inhospitable world you want to visualise.  Wonderfully appropriate language.

Silver ~ Chris Hammer

** OK **

No shine, A little bit tarnished

I didn't care for it.  Having loved Scrubland I was looking forward to a great Aussie pageturner set in my neck of the woods.  I found the sense of location very forced; the plotline was very muddy.  The relationship between the two main characters was tediously angsty.  In fact, all relationships seemed to be tediously angsty.  There were too many characters who all needed their own backstory but were superfluous to the plot.  Some seemed to be there so that there could be expositionary conversations to lead the plot along.

DECEMBER 2019

The Water Dancer ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

** OK **

Magical Realism lacking magic
Nebulous storytelling

The Ten Thousand Doors Of January ~ Alex Harrow

** OK **

Pick a door, any door, and get out while you can
Overhyped, oversold, overblown, over it