Emma Types Stuff

How many stars you give a book can be big drama in the book community. Give it one and (according to some) you might as well be sledgehammering the author in the face, give it five and it feels like you are judging a werewolf romance you greatly enjoyed as on par with Austen and Harper Lee. I have a rating system that works well enough for me ( one for unfinished , two if it's meh, three if it was fine, four if I loved it, five if it resonated with my soul ) but I still catch myself out on occasion. A book I cheerfully rate four stars can, with a bit of distance, have a bitter aftertaste that makes me feel cheated. With some space and thought, a book I didn't appreciate can grow and mature. Gideon the Ninth [Tamsyn Muir] is the first book I've read that left me with no idea how I truly felt about it. In one light it's fascinating and unique, and in another it's all style and no substance. Is it cleverly plotted or just several shocking moments in a trench coat? Is t

I think most fantasy readers have a moment when they truly grasp how horrifying the end of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is.  As children, it's disappointing to see our heroes become kings and queens and then return to ordinary WW2 England, without a faun in sight. As adults... well.... who hasn't been horrified at the idea of them being thrust back into their pre-pubescent bodies? Not to mention losing all of their friends and having at least a decade of their life vanish?  I bet King Edmund was in the midst of some complex trade deal he was actually hoping to pull off before being dumped back to the land of rationed sweets.  He - the boy who betrayed his whole family - eventually gets to go on some more Aslanian adventures. Not so poor Susan, who fails the Narnia personality test off-screen, for the crime of, I dunno, being too girly . The land of Christian allegories is actually quite judgey...who'd have thunk it? So what has this rant got to do with Every Heart

There was a point about two thirds into this queer romance when I suddenly realised that I didn't want the main characters to get together.  This was a bit of a shock as I am generally easy to please when it comes to romantic pairings. If you tell me that two warm-blooded, consenting humans are meant for each other then I will happily go along with it. I ship mainstream ships. I even ship multiple heterosexual pairings, which as a queer woman in fandom is faintly hilarious, if not actually embarrassing. So for a romance book to set up a meet cute, and then get me to the point where I'm actively rooting against them... that takes skill. Of course, this is what the author [Alexis Hall] was intending all along. Because Paris Dalliencourt is About to Crumble is a baking show romance that is far from cookie-cutter. Paris is, to put it simply, an anxious mess. He worries about absolutely everything. He gets by in life via insane posh-boy privilege and the emotional support of his bes

Following on from my successful December Reading Challenge , I am attempting Fantasy February in which I will read ten fantasy novels throughout the (worringly short) month of Feb.  To see the challenge, or take part, you can check out the Storygraph challenge here .  The Prompts: 1. Urban Fantasy or Magical Realism Tuesday Mooney Wore Black Tuesday Mooney is a Millennial goth, raised on Buffy and The X-Files and - of course - The Addams Family . She's now a fairly everyday charity office worker and so when an eccentric millionaire leaves his money to anyone who can complete his scavenger hunt, she leaps at the opportunity. This was a lot lighter on fantasy than the description had me believe, but there was a tiny bit. Overall a fun read with fantastic, lifelike characters. 2. A Book Set at a Magic School that ISN'T Harry Potter  Every Heart a Doorway The Home for Wayward Children houses teenagers who visited magical lands - a whole generation of Alices, Lucys and Dorothys - an