Emma Types Stuff

I want the opening of every book to be a sharp hook. I want it to snag my navel and then drag me through next three-hundred pages, depositing me at The End , wobbly-legged and light-headed. The Hierarchies [Ros Anderson] mostly achieves this. For the experience alone it deserves five stars, which I usually only hand out for those rare gut-hook books.  But, five stars or not, it wasn't perfect.  Ideal for a book review blog, really...  The Hierarchies is a near-future sci-fi novel. In it, 'pleasure doll' Sylv.ie is unboxed by her new 'husband' and adjusts to life in the attic of his family home. She's not the rubbery sex-doll you would imagine, but instead a human-passing, sexually athletic, trained mistress. She can talk current events, sports, politics, and can achieve every move in the Karma Sutra. She can cry (with the help of a reservior of water) and you can fill her scent module with any perfume you choose. She can dance. She can play chess. Her pussy even...

I actually wasn't planning to review Cocktails at Seven, Apocalypse at Eight [Don Bassingthwaite]. It's fairly niche (I got it in a Storybundle ) and a google search proves that it's tricky to track down... but oh boy is it worth it. My face hurt at the end, because I'd been grinning for hours. This collection of interconnected short stories takes place across the year, covering Christmas, Hannukah, Mardi Gras, Pride, and St Patrick's Day. I read it during my December Reading challenge but the largest story in the collection is based around St Patrick's Day. I think it works best then. Besides, how many St. Patrick's Day books are there?  Derby Cavendish is a just your average gay man, with a strong sense of queer community and a healthy desire to attend camp, themed events. Unfortunately he attracts magical mayhem wherever he goes. The poor guy can't even buy a Christmas tree without being pursued through the woods by an generously proportioned Mi...

The Handmaid's Tale is the book that made me scared to be a woman but The Power is the one that made me angry, physically, explosively angry. I spent much of the latter clenching my fists, willing the electrical power given to women in that novel to pour into them and free me of the enforced backfoot my own gender keeps me on. One in which men will always be physically stronger than me. When Women Were Dragons [Kelly Barnhill] is a book that takes the next logical step, and asks... what if women were given access to their potential? What if, instead of freeing women from oppression, their powers gave them the ability to explode out of their small bodies and learn, build, help others, and - yes - take revenge as they please? But unlike The Handmaid's Tale and The Power , this isn't a book that educates the reader on the female condition. It doesn't try to paint one view of womanhood or represent them as a universal whole (it's also more queer and trans friendly tha...

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 Hea...

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 Dorothy...

It seems to me that I type the words ' this isn't my usual thing at all, but I loved it ' on a regular basis. So regular, in fact, that you might secretly think that I'm in denial about what my usual thing actually is. But for me the story concept trumps all else. I'll happily try genres I traditionally hate if the summary makes a good case for it. And this one did.  Our Wives Under the Sea [Julia Armfield] is literary. It's also about the sea - the clue being in the title - which isn't a subject I find particularly interesting. But the summary did its job, offering a queer love story filled with subtle horror and a Lovecraftian undercurrent. I sat up and took notice.  It's about a lesbian couple, Miri and Leah. They are British millennials - cosmopolitan, married, and relatively settled in life. Miri writes grant proposals and Leah is a marine scientist, who vanishes on submarine missions for weeks at a time. But then Leah vanishes for a long, long time...

There are very few authors that I dip into pretty much every year, and even fewer who publish enough to allow me to do so. Terry Pratchett was one, and Alexander McCall Smith's genteel No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books are like a yearly visit to old friends.  Gail Carriger's extensive Parasol Protectorate universe is the other.  For those of you who recognise the books, I can sense the surprise. Vampire/Werewolf Steampunk novels are the very essence of that Devil Wears Prada ' groundbreaking ' meme. I probably wouldn't have picked up the first (Soulless) had I not been seeking salvation in a second-hand bookshop while on a very tedious day trip.  The cover has a woman in Victorian garb, ripped straight from a DeviantArt Steampunk page, and a title in hot pink. Luckily I was being dragged round charity shops, at the seaside, in March and therefore up for literally anything that sounded more fun than that rainy experience.  So here is my guide to the series,...

On paper, Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata) isn't my thing at all. My dislike of contemporary literary novels is well-documented and while I appreciate the Japanese love of mystery novels , I'm not unusually obsessed with Japanese culture.   Yet, it's a contender for the best book I read last year.  Convenience Store Woman is a love story between a woman and a convenience store. Sounds crazy, right? Not in a totally ick way (like women who marry bridges) but with a hint of ick. Just enough to leave you unsettled, while also kind've rooting for it. You can't help but ship this woman with a place that sells sushi and toiletries, when that place makes her so very happy.    Keiko is a thirty-something woman in Japan. A couple of telling stories from her childhood show how she struggles to understand others. She's too literal, to the point of accidental assault, and doesn't feel things in the same way as other children. The book never diagnoses her with a...