Emma Types Stuff

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...

I tell myself that I don't fall for BookTube hype, but I totally do. Case-in-point, the fact that I immediately loaned Penance [Eliza Clark] after watching one glowing review for it.  A 'true-crime' novel set on the night of Brexit, with an unreliable narrator? Sign me up.  Fortunately, it more-or-less lives up to several positive reviews I've since seen, though I think claims that it's got something truly deep to say about true-crime are wildly overstated. Is it a gripping, thought-provoking novel? Yes. Deep?  . ..Meh.    Penance is written in the style of a non-fiction true-crime novel. On the night of the Brexit referendum in 2016, three teenage girls kidnap and torture another girl, and then set a beach hut on fire to try and destroy the body. A journalist shamed in the infamous phone-hacking scandal then sees his opportunity to write a book about a crime largely overlooked by media. We are told at the beginning that book is controversial, featuring inaccura...

Please accept my apologies for the pun in the title. It had to be done.  The Appeal [Janice Hallet] is a proper bestseller. You see it propped up appealingly (sorry again) in bookshops and newspapers breathlessly review the latest work by the author. As recent mystery novels go, The Appeal is second only to Richard Osman's books in success, and the similarity of the cover designs can only be intentional. Despite being a mystery lover, I'd avoided this book for childish reasons. I increasingly find myself irritated by Osman's whole schtick and therefore the similarity of the covers was enough excuse for me to assume The Appeal was a knock-off of a series I was already inclined to avoid.  Then someone told me what it was actually about. So here's the thing to know about me... I LOVE meta and epistolary novels. I've talked before about e , a novel told via office emails in an advertising agency, which I mentioned in a glowing review for Several People are Typing , whic...

If you have been anywhere near a book app recently, you've probably seen the cover for Hide [Kiersten White]. It's on sale regularly, with the publisher no doubt keen to push it's TikTok influence and turn the author into a bonafide horror brand.  The release of Mister Magic, a similar nostalgia-tinged, media-inspired horror novel, seems to have cemented that burgeoning reputation. Hide was well received and even I - who normally wait for a sale - bought the new release at full price.  Grady Hendrix kickstarted a trend for retro horror, tempting non-Horror readers in with retro covers and playful trope-dismantling. But Hendrix's work appeals to the nostalgia of the 80s, whereas White aims to tempt a solidly Millennial audience.  The books are comfortable in their queerness (a queer romance in both books, and both non-binary and bisexual main characters). The author - a former Mormon with historic roots in the church - clearly uses the books to work through her issues ar...

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 Hea...

Last year Amazon released the criminally underrated Kevin Can F*** Himself . It's the story of a perfect sitcom housewife. In one moment she is standing in the brightly-lit living-room, performing to the fourth wall and setting up her manchild husband's punchlines, the next she is in her dingy, cockroach infested kitchen, shaking with anger while she fetches him a sandwich. The show moves between the two worlds, as Alison realises how trapped she is and fights to escape her husband's control. It's a beautiful metaphor for an abusive marriage, with a fantastic queer love story and it deserves more attention, but I digress.  Redshirts by John Scalzi is Kevin Can F*** Himself meets Star Trek: Lower Decks . Five new Ensigns arrive on a suspiciously Starship Enterprise-y ship. They all have interesting and trope-filled backgrounds - a former monk, a sexy but tough medic, a billionaire's son trying to make it alone, and a rogueish minor drug dealer. They are ready to lea...

If you are my age (which is Millennial, to be clear) you had Enid Blyton forced upon you from the start. Childhood was basically an exercise in levelling-up on Enid Blyton books. You started with Noddy, then moved on to The Wishing Chair and The Faraway Tree , before you entered your 'boarding school era' with Malory Towers and The Naughtiest Girl in School. Then came either The Famous Five or The Secret Seven , at which point you had to choose whether you were a Five Fan or a Seven Stan. For some reason no one was ever both. (Side note, Enid Blyton was a terrible person in many ways so I'm not going to over-romanticise her. She was a person with prejudiced opinions who wrote decent-but-twee books that aged really badly. The End.) I was a Famous Five girl, mainly because the BBC made a series for children's television at around the same time. Even if you haven't read them, you know the trope - two boys, a useless girl, a tomboy, and a dog. They solve mysteries an...