Emma Types Stuff

I'm reviewing published Jane Austen fanfiction and I don't even care. Time to cash in on that Bridgeton period drama momentum.  I was incredibly wary of The Other Bennet Sister [Janice Hadlow] for several reasons. Firstly, because a title that derivative doesn't give one a great deal of hope for the originality of the premise (and let's face it, 'what happened to Mary Bennet?' is already the most cliché premise in Jane Austen fandom.) Secondly, the cover was a carbon copy of Longbourn [Jo Baker] which isn't just the worst Jane Austen themed book I've read, but one of the worst books I've read overall.  Still, an author can't help how their work is marketed, and when a BookTuber claimed this was one of their best reads of 2023, I was prepared to give it a chance.  And, dammit , it's really good.  The Other Bennet Sister is the story of Mary Bennet: the plain, annoyingly moral middle-child whose bad singing at the Netherfield Ball is one of...

Sometimes I don't want to write a review of a book, simply because I don't feel up to the intellectual task of doing so. I've written of my insecurities around reading and reviewing literary work before , and once again I stand nervously on edge of literary criticism, feeling as dumb as a box of rocks.  But I read Earthlings [Sayaka Murata] and need talk about it.    Convenience Store Woman  was one of the books that  helped me out of my reading slump and considering that it was one of my earliest reviews, and my whole reading outlook has changed since then, Earthlings offers a lot of opportunity for reflection. All I knew going in was that it was more divisive than Convenience Store Woman . I'd seen comments suggesting this book dials the strangeness up to eleven, but even I was caught off guard by the graphic horror hidden beneath the artfully cutesy cover.  [Please note that this review will discuss some of those events, which include sexual abuse and ex...

With the release of the movie upon us, it seemed like a good time to finally review The Watchers [A. M Shine]. Never say I'm not one for cashing in.  I had this on my TBR a while but didn't give it much thought. It was a cheap one, bought on sale and almost instantly forgotten. It wasn't until I saw the movie trailer that I recalled what it was about, and the fact it starred Amanda Siegfried caught my attention. I hadn't thought it was that famous. It actually doesn't star Amanda Siegfried, it stars Dakota Fanning (they look very similar in a dark shot, ok?) but by that point I was interested enough to pick it up. The Watchers is the story of a young woman who, on a drive through Ireland, breaks down near some remote woods. She stumbles across a small building in a clearing, where three others 'live'. They turn out to be prisoners of mysterious creatures who watch their every move through a large glass panel every night. If they fall asleep, the watchers a...

What could be a more perfect Spring read than The Secret Garden ? Frances Hodgeson Burnett's cosy gothic story has been one of my favourites since childhood - helped by a stunning  film adaptation and my grandmother's own early life in India making me feel somehow connected to it all. To this day, the book has a sensory impact on me. I can feel the smooth surface of the letter writing block, hear the whoosh of the skipping rope, shudder at the cries in the night, and feel the turn of what must be the most satisfying key in all of literature.  Surely, then, I must be outraged at a remix of the story? How dare an author move the action to Canada, and add themes of race, sexuality and gender? ' The wokists have made Mary Lennox GAY, and Dickon a NON-BINARY INDIGINOUS PERSON' , you can imagine the Daily Mail screaming (thank god they haven't actually discovered this series).  Well, of course I'm not outraged. Firstly, I'm not a boomer. Secondly, I was raised on...

One of the absolute joys in life is finding appreciation for something you didn't previously 'get'. For me, short story collections are that thing.  Whilst I have no issues reading short stories in general, collections and anthologies used to defeat me. I found them more exhausting than novels, much in the same way tapas can be more filling than a large meal. But after trialling a method of reading multiple collections and once, hopping between them as the mood struck, I have become an anthology devotee.  And so we come onto my Spring challenge. I actually intended to post this at the start of April, and keep it updated as I went, but life took a bit of a turn and so I chose to read the books and round them up later.  I had expected the books I chose to take the majority of the month, but a combination of three short page lengths and four very easy reads meant I was done in less than two weeks. See what I read below... The Collections The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by ...

If it wasn't for my recent Read What You Own challenge , I probably wouldn't have read True Crime Story [Joseph Knox]. It's been languishing on my TBR every since I bought it and immediately forgot it existed.  It was only when I felt the need for something true-crime related that I looked at it again - I figured the title was certainly a step in the right direction. Realising that it is faux true-crime, one of my favourite subgenres, I dived in right away.  The overall conceit is that the real author of the book is editing this on behalf of a fictional writer friend, who died before completing her investigation into a missing student. She has interviewed all the main players and those interviews are interspersed with her own email conversations with Knox.    The case is that of Zoe, who went missing during a fire evacuation at her student towerblock in Manchester. She is blonde and pretty but far from the ideal 'virginal' missing girl, with an increasingly complex...

Here I am reviewing a sports novel... who'd have thought it?  I have a soft spot for the extremely-hyped Taylor Jenkins Reid. I read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo because a colleague (clearly tuned in to my queerness) gave me the copy they'd just finished with a knowing ' this seems up your street '. And whilst I was dubious (novels about celebrity are not my thing) they were proven correct. I loved it.  Likewise I enjoyed Daisy Jones and the Six which, though not as good, was a fun evening's audiobook listen. I decided to put Taylor Jenkins Reid in the category of an author I wouldn't go out of my way for, but would probably read if a book came my way via the library, or a sale.  Which is how Carrie Soto is Back arrived in my lap. I snagged it for 99p and then ignored it for over a year, because... a tennis novel? Really?!  Believe it or not, I have form with tennis romances, with a friend of mine having written a particularly popular one. This was my j...

It's quite annoying to break up a really good reading run with something so very meh . I got an early vibe that I wasn't going to like this book, which morphed into increasing irritation. I should have just stopped, but it was so brutally fast paced that by the time I was really fed up I was already at 65% and it seemed silly not to hold on for one more hour of reading.  This received praise putting it alongside the The Handmaid's Tale , which adds weight to my theory that modern literary types should read some genre fiction as a palate cleanser more often. If this was a self-published book I'd never slag it off on here, but it was freakin' Booker Prize nominated.  So, what's it about? Calla grows up in a country in which girls are separated once they reach puberty. They are given a ticket that either marks them out for career or for motherhood and then the career girls have to run for their lives through wilderness to reach a city. Wherever they end up, they wi...

I don't recall the first time I watched Jurassic Park. It's been a part of my life so long that I couldn't tell you when I first saw it, or how it came to be one of my top ten movies, even if I was under oath.  Where other beloved franchises ( The Cornetto Trilogy, Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes ) have clear 'before and after' lines in my life, Jurassic Park's universe seems to have always been there, being awesome - or at least enjoyably awful.  I certainly didn't see it when it came out. Even if my parents were the sort to take me to see blockbusters regularly (they weren't) I was still only five in 1993. Yet its claws still reached me... we did a dinosaur project at school for which I received a Jurassic Park notebook that has stayed in my memory far longer than whatever I actually won the prize for. My guess is that I eventually saw the movie on TV, on a night when not much else was on, and regular repeats cemented my love for it.  I always vaguely mean...

I read it, ok? I read it! Can the whole Richard Osman publishing complex leave me alone now?  Yes I did used to watch Pointless, and yes I did like him on Taskmaster, and yes I do watch Midsomer Murders ... but sometimes you have to fight against being put in a box. So I decided I'd read The Thursday Murder Club, Osman's mammoth hit, when I was ready. Which, as it turns out, is four years after it was published. So, here was my theory going in: Richard Osman is a clever person, and a known wit, and wrote an above-average murder mystery. A clean-cut murder mystery is the exact sort of book his daytime audience laps up, and it was no doubt helped along by bookshops, keen to promote a celebrity book without the whiff of a ghostwriter. Once it got around that he'd actually written it and that it was pretty good, the snobbier end of the market read it, followed by the people who don't read much but will pick up a book everyone is talking about.  Did I begrudge him the suc...

Until very recently, I had no idea reading styles were a thing. I was aware that some people bought a book and read the book, but put that down to them having some sort of inner self-control that I lacked. Those other strong-willed people didn't have what my mother calls the family 'butterfly brain', putting down books that they are enjoying perfectly well and fluttering off, unable to finish for reasons even they don't understand. I still haven't finished The Binding which I started long before Covid and enjoyed every moment of until I suddenly put it down and never went back. What are you even meant to call that? A temporary DNF? A ODIF (one-day I'll finish?) For those of you who do know about reading styles, it must be painfully obvious that I'm a mood reader. I'm not flawed, I'm not especially weird, and I'm no less disciplined than anyone else. My mood controls what I want to read, and what I can process at any one time. Sometimes the thou...

And so we return to my very occasional series , 'books with the same vibe', in which I compare and contrast two books that for one reason or another, have a great deal in common in subject matter, theme, and marketing style. In this case it's The Lighthouse Witches [CJ Cooke] and The Lamplighters [Emma Stonex] which I read back in 2022. Both are female-focused stories about a group of people who vanish from a lighthouse, and both books switch between the current day and the past to tell their stories, and between multiple POVs.  People going missing from lighthouses is a common trope, following the real life Flannan Isle mystery , with The Lamplighters being a retelling of that story in a new era, and The Lighthouse Witches certainly taking some inspiration from it.  Naturally the covers both prominently feature lighthouses, with my preference being the night-sky reds of The Lamplighters over The Lighthouse Witches lovely but rather misleading design. I was under the impres...

In preparation for my trip to Italy, I read a whole bunch of Ancient Rome themed books designed to educate and entertain me ahead of my holiday. Of course, after two weeks taking in the sights (and eating my bodyweight in pizza and pasta) you can understand that I was done with the theme for a while. 'A while' turned out to be... three months.  The bite of winter has sent me scurrying back to books featuring sunshine and olives. No wonder all these men are constantly thinking about Ancient Rome when faced with the bitter reality of Londinium as of Jan/Feb 2024.  So here is my second list of books to read when you can't stop thinking about Ancient Rome... The Books Falco: Shadows in Bronze by Lindsey Davis  The Falco series looks set to be my new obsession. It's set in Rome, about eight years before Vesuvius erupted. Falco is an informer (a private investigator) and the series delightfully inverts every 'hardboiled PI' trope imaginable. Falco may live in a scumm...

If you have read this novel already and are now worrying about my personal character and how dangerous I may or may not be... never fear. It was only sometimes like looking inside my own head. Definitely not the bit at the end where things got freaky.  But even then I sort of got it.  If you haven't read it and are now confused... well... that's sort of the Motherthing experience. It's literary (not my favourite) but also somewhat campy, suburban horror (one of my faves). It's about grief and mother issues, and... hoo boy can I relate there.  Motherthing is the story of Abby, who prides herself on being one of the children from broken homes who made it. She has a good life and is wildly, desperately in love with her husband. Their conversation in the opening scene, as they await bad news at the hospital, shows two people who are exactly on each other's wavelength. They are supportive and playful, and even in their darkest moments they can ' yes and ' each...

Sometimes you just have to admit that you've been played. You fell for an obvious scam that was specifically designed to suck in punters like you and all you can do at the end is carry on with as much dignity as possible. I talk not of NFTs, or MLM schemes, but of Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy.  In actuality, calling it a scam is unfair. There's plenty of things about Scorched Grace that might excite a publisher, plenty of cool ways to market it, and far worse books have received far more attention.  But as a punter, I felt decidedly ripped off.  Scorched Grace follows Sister Holiday, a nun who has given up her hard-rocking, hard-partying queer life in New York for a New Orleans convent school where she teaches music, aids prison mothers, and is firmly of the belief that she is the world's greatest sleuth. When a fire kills the school janitor, and then another kills one of the nuns, she starts investigating. Slap a cool stained-glass cover on that book and you might as...

When revealing my terrifying list of my TBR Books , it was with the caveat that it did not include a few old bags of books that are kept in my bedroom in my mother's house.  Technically I own these books, and bought them with an intent to read them, but honestly, I doubted there was much there to hold my interest in 2024. Many of them were 50p classics picked up in charity shops ten-to-fifteen years ago, and I'd much rather grab a digital copy than poke through a yellowed, cobweb-covered reminder of my years of trying to better myself in poverty. But I was home for Christmas and I thought I'd take an opportunity to go through and see if there was anything worth rescuing. Alongside the brick-sized Dickens and Tolstoy paperbacks, I discovered there were three short story collections just sitting there, waiting to be read.  Since my recent Short Story Advent really opened me up to a new way of consuming short stories, this seemed an ideal opportunity to find something meanin...