Chez Aloysius

Peace Like A River

2026-06-14T21:06:21Z

Peace Like A River by Leif Enger is told by 11-year-old Reuben, whose older brother, Davy, shoots two young men and flees the authorities. Reuben, his father and his sister set out on a journey to look for Davy - but they find a lot more than they bargained for.

It's a difficult book to pin down in a lot of ways - but it really reminded me of To Kill A Mockingbird, in terms of the familial relationships, and the fact that the younger sister is called Swede. The relationships are definitely the book's biggest strength, along with the gorgeous writing and immersive settings.

I started it while in A&E, continued it throughout a three-day hospital stay, then took five days' break, picking it up again in another hospital waiting room, and finally finishing it ten days after starting it. That probably didn't give me the best reading experience, or do the book justice, since it felt like it lasted forever and that I was never going to finish it - and I read ten other books in the five-day gap.

Still, it made me laugh and it made me cry - though I'm not sure how I feel about the ending.

Very different to most other books I've read recently, and certainly extremely well-written, but a bit nebulous overall.

Mammoth Reviews Catch-up

2026-06-13T15:28:05Z

Making History by KJ Parker:

I picked this for our family book club and reread it to prep for the meeting.

I enjoyed it again the second time around - I like the meta nature of the narrative, the juxtaposition of humour and darkness, and the ambiguous ending. Overall, I think it's very clever.

The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook by Matt Dinniman:

This is book three of Dungeon Crawler Carl and I'm still really enjoying the series.

The ins and outs of how this level of the dungeon worked passed me by a bit and some of it was very grim and pretty icky. There definitely weren't as many really funny bits, either.

But it's still deepening the characters and their connections to each other, and there's still plenty of interesting developments that made me want to keep on with series.

Even dipping a bit below the first two instalments, it was still very entertaining.

DallerGut Dream Department Store by Miye Lee:

This is a cute, whimsical story about a young woman who goes to work in a shop that sells dreams.

I really enjoyed how much focus was put on the economics of the town (which people only visit in their sleep) and the management of the store.

I was expecting it to be more episodic, following different customers and how their dreams impacted their lives - and there was some of that - but it was mostly about the staff of the store and I liked the throughline of that.

Lightfall Books 1-4 by Tim Probert:

This is a middle grade comic book series, about a girl named Bea who meets a Galdurian (anthropomorphic amphibian) in the woods and they end up going on an epic adventure to save the world.

The art style was gorgeous, I loved the found family vibes, there was plenty of excitement and the stakes were high, but it was also heartwarming, funny and sweet.

I really enjoyed all four instalments - but was annoyed to discover the series isn't finished yet!

Ah well - it won't be a hardship to reread it when more volumes come out.

The Girl Who Reads on the Metro by Christine Feret-Fleury:

This has very mixed reviews, so I was a bit apprehensive going in - but I loved it!

It follows a young woman who stumbles across a mysterious bookshop and ends up with a job trying to match books to readers in a way that will impact their lives.

It was a bit all over the place, and I could see people being frustrated with that - as well as how blunt the themes were. But it really resonated with me and worked extremely well for me.

Project 17 by Eliza Victoria:

This follows a young woman who answers an ad for a carer job and gets embroiled in a government cover-up relating to violent deaths and dodgy pharmaceuticals.

It didn't really work for me because the characters' motivations weren't clear and we didn't see enough of their interactions for the relationship developments to seem credible. I didn't like the protagonist and it all got a bit over-the-top towards the end.

Cobalt Blue by Matthew Reilly:

This is about a Russian superhero coming to America to wipe out his rivals and take over the world.

It read like it was written by a bloodthirsty 12-year-old boy and none of the characters reacted in credible ways to what was happening. There were a lot of inconsistencies, it tried way to hard to manipulate reader emotion (without properly showing the emotions of the characters) and I didn't really connect to it at all.

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower:

This follows the titular princess, who teams up with a fairy to rescue herself from a tower, once it becomes clear that nobody is going to succeed in reaching her.

I liked the beginning and I liked the end, but it got a bit tedious and repetitive in the middle, as well as being pretty unpleasant in places.

But the ultimate conclusion did pull it all together, leaving a much better impression on me than I had expected partway through.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom:

This follows Eddie, an amusement park maintenance man, who dies in a terrible accident.

He then meets five people in heaven, who teach him important things about his life and how it affected various other.

It's got some unpleasant aspects but, overall, it was beautifully put together and absolutely made me cry.

It also raises some interesting themes about acknowledging the complexities of other people's lives, and how the same event might be experienced in completely different ways, depending on the person involved.

Really impactful.

Frieren and Skipshock

2026-06-05T19:23:22Z

Volume 4 of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End was fine.

Some cute moments.

Some deep moments.

Some heartwarming moments.

Some stupid moments.

Volume 5 was really great, with Frieren and Fern entering a competition-style exam to gain the highest magical qualification available. There were a lot of new characters to keep track of but also lots of really interesting character development, magic use and intrigue about where it was going next - which left me wanting more!

Skipshock by Caroline O'Donoghue follows Margo, a teenage girl, who slips into another dimension and finds herself in a strictly regimented set of worlds, where the days can be anything from 2 to 36 hours long. She meets Moon, a salesman who travels between the worlds, and they get mixed up with a rebellion against the regime that's restricting everyone's freedoms.

The switching between viewpoints was initially very annoying because Margo's POV was third person past tense and Moon's was first person present tense, even though they were almost always in the same place and the different chapters followed directly on from one another. But then I realised it was the author's way of getting the reader to experience the 'skipshock' of the title, which is a disorienting sickness people suffer when they move between worlds too much. After that, it was still annoying, but I could see it was also clever and deliberate.

The setup of how the different 'time zones' worked was absolute nonsense - the more I thought about it, the less sense it made, but once I acknowledged that and just went with it, things were a lot smoother. I also wasn't a fan of the romance, which felt quite 'instalove' and a bit too obsessive for my tastes.

All that said, though - I really enjoyed this book and was extremely irritated that it ended on a cliffhanger, with no release date yet for the sequel! I thought it was standalone, but I seem to have inadvertently launched myself into a YA dystopian romance - but it was really good!

Phoenix Extravagant and The Downstairs Girl

2026-05-31T09:21:36Z

Phoenix Extravagant by Joon Ha Lee follows Jebi, an artist working for the invaders of their occupied country in a fantasy world that's based on the Japanese occupation of Korea in the first half of the 20th century. Jebi works on the magic glyphs that bring the invaders' automata to life, but is prompted to join the rebellion when they discover how the magic pigment is made.

It's a fairly slow book, but I really enjoyed the pace and the world-building, and getting to know Jebi over time. The romance aspect of the book didn't work for me at all because it had no basis and very little development to make the relationship credible. But I liked the other inter-relationships and dynamics between different characters.

Jebi doesn't have much agency, apart from isolated instances of direct action, but the overall arc of the story is interesting, even if the ending is very strange and quite nebulous.

The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee follows Jo, a young Chinese woman living and working in Atlanta in 1890. It has very heavy themes of racism and persecution of minorities, which are hammered home perhaps a bit too much in places - and it's very interesting to see the Chinese experience of living in the American South at this time. Jo is an excellent protagonist and I really enjoyed seeing the story through her eyes. I also liked the romance aspect, because it felt well-earned and it was fun seeing it develop over a shared love of wordplay. The climax was a bit too over the top in some ways, and certain aspects of the story were (necessarily) left unresolved, but overall I really enjoyed this.

Stage Kiss

2026-05-28T07:33:36Z

Last night, I went to see Stage Kiss at the Hampstead Theatre, which ended up being pleasingly meta. It follows two actors who were in a relationship in their late teens to early twenties, but have been apart for twenty years and are reunited when they are both cast in the same play.

Their roles in the play require them to kiss a lot, and the lines between acting and real life get blurred, with obvious consequences.

The first half was really funny, with a lot of deliberately bad acting, and lots of interesting layers.

The second half was amusing, in that the same actors played the husband and daughter from the play of the first half, as well as the husband and daughter in the 'real life' of the second half. But it got a bit too ridiculous in places, lost its way a bit, and the ending felt both abrupt and nebulous.

Still, it was a good night out and I enjoyed it overall.

Sleeper's Castle

2026-05-26T12:42:07Z

I've picked up a few books by Barbara Erskine over the last year, but Sleeper's Castle is both the most recent acquisition and the first I've read.

It's a timeslip novel - we follow Catrin, trying to find her way as a poet and musician in her father's shadow in the 1400s, and Andy in the present day, caretaking a friend's house and cat for a year, after the death of her partner of ten years.

What links them together is the house - Sleeper's Castle - where they both live in their respective time periods. And the magic of the house allows them to move between times, see each other's lives and at certain points interact directly.

It's well written and engaging, at least at first. I got invested in both narratives, I liked both protagonists and also the peripheral characters in both time periods.

But it's too long. It gets very repetitive in the middle - I'm pretty sure you could cut about 200 pages out of the middle and still have a perfectly valid (and more compelling) story.

The antagonist of Andy's tale is also a caricature of motiveless evil, which jarred quite a bit. Plus, while there's a hint of potential romance, that aspect kind of fizzles out and doesn't get a particularly clear resolution. And I did gradually lose interest in Catrin's story, once the focus shifted mainly to battles.

I did want to find out what happened, though, so I persevered - and I'm glad I did because I mostly enjoyed the ending. It just lost me almost completely for quite a while along the way.

Carl's Doomsday Scenario

2026-05-20T11:00:06Z

Carl's Doomsday Scenario is the second book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman. I managed four whole days between finishing the first one and starting this one - but I think the highest peaks of my obsession with this series are (probably thankfully) over - at least for now...

This one has a bit of a slow start, with the whole of the first hour dedicated just to Carl and Doughnut choosing their race and class for the next dungeon level.

I wasn't wholly happy with some of the choices made about certain characters, I struggled a bit more with some of the stereotypes, especially regarding female characters, it definitely didn't make me laugh as much, and some of the humour and some of the violence tipped very close to my ick threshold.

So - diminishing returns already? Overly high expectations from the first book (which I likely enjoyed more because my expectations going into that one were low) not quite being met?

I also could have done without the evil clowns and the parasitic worms...

It was still largely fun, though - and still very clever, not just in the moment but also in terms of how many really complicated and fascinating things are set up for later books... Plus, we get more character and relationship developments, which are all good.

It definitely got me hooked again by the end, so I'm still keen to carry on, but I'm going to start taking longer breaks between volumes.

Birds and Unbecoming

2026-05-17T06:42:14Z

The Bird's Nest by Shirley Jackson is an in-depth exploration of a complex mental illness, largely from a female viewpoint. It was likely groundbreaking in the 1950s, but a modern lens shows the doctor to be wildly unprofessional, and the presentation of the illness to perhaps not be particularly accurate. It's also pretty circular in its narrative, with a lot of repetition and very little in the way of sympathetic behaviour from any of the characters.

The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer is the start of a YA paranormal series about a girl who may or may not have powers relating to predicting other people's deaths. It probably wasn't a sensible choice for me - it freaked me out pretty early on and I decided I wasn't interested enough in the story to want to carry on with it.

The Murderer's Ape

2026-05-16T11:01:49Z

I picked up The Murderer's Ape by Jakob Wegelius from the local station free book exchange - it's a middle grade historical adventure about a gorilla named Sally Jones, who has to try and help her best friend after he's falsely accused of murder.

Unfortunately, it didn't really work for me - Sally Jones narrates the story in first person, but feels rather removed from events because she can't talk, so the other characters don't really interact with her much. There's also a surprising lack of emotional depth to the narration, considering the themes and the first-person perspective. It is middle grade, I suppose, but I've read plenty of middle grade fiction that is really emotive - and this also has come quite adult content (drunkenness, mentions of a brothel!).

I gave it a good go - I got nearly halfway through - but ended up DNF-ing because I just found myself not wanting to pick it back up.

The Paying Guests and The Incandescent

2026-05-14T20:56:41Z

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters is set in 1922 and follows Frances and her mother, who are forced to invite lodgers into their home because of financial difficulties after the war.

It gripped me entirely for the first half, took a rather unpleasant turn in Part 2 and then got quite dreary by the end, unfortunately.

Quite a lot of it was very awkward and painful, with a fair few very annoying characters, and I lost sympathy for the protagonists in the latter sections, which was a shame because the writing was excellent and I was initially quite invested.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh follows Dr Saffy Walden, the director of magic at an elite boarding school. It's a lot more about teaching and school management than it is about demon summoning, though there's enough demon summoning to provide quite a bit of excitement along the way.

There's great bisexual representation and I loved the approach to the romance - the only sex scene is wholly practical and amazing because of it, while the main relationship is adorable because of the awkwardness of the mid-to-late-30s participants.

What I thought was going to be the main climax actually happened only a third of the way through, the second climax was also rather a red herring and it took a very odd turn towards the end, with a style change that went on perhaps a bit too long.

But overall, I absolutely loved this - as a middle-aged, bisexual, ex-teacher, who loves process and form-filling more than actual inter-personal interactions, this was very definitely the book for me. The protagonist even went to the same Oxford college as me!

Dungeon Crawler Carl

2026-05-10T19:58:53Z

I've been resisting trying Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman for quite some time - even though, or perhaps because, everyone I follow on BookTube has been going on and on for months about how good it was. It really didn't appeal to me, particularly as I don't generally react well to comedy - but I was even more worried that I'd love it and then be stuck having to catch up on seven more books before then having to wait for the next ones to come out...

And I'm just gonna say it - everyone was right. Goddammit, Doughnut!

I wasn't initially keen on the narrator's 'normal' voice - though performance and production values on the audiobook are very high. All the character voices are awesome, the special effects are just enough to give extra layers of enjoyment without being over the top, and I got used to the narrator well before the end.

It had me snort-laughing out loud in the street, which is rare and always welcome. It also had me frowning at certain aspects of the humour and going, 'EWWWW!' quite a bit, but the pure enjoyment of the overall adventure far outweighed the aspects I wasn't so keen on.

And it does have levels - and not just the dungeon levels! It doesn't delve massively into the trauma of most of the human population being killed in the initial creation of the dungeon, but it does touch on it. And Carl does reflect on how distasteful it is to be forced to kill the monsters, as well as lamenting how many of the other crawlers keep dying as things go on. There's also the start of a really beautiful friendship between Carl and Princess Doughnut (the cat), which I can see deepening a lot as the series continues.

There's a lot of clever seeding of what's to come to make you want to read on, both in this book and drawing you into later instalments - plus lots of inventive variety which presumably keeps making it fresh and interesting, even though it's essentially just Carl working his way down the levels.

The grimace-inducing bro humour is in there - but it's almost entirely restricted to the achievement announcements, which are simulating video game text, so it's pretty authentic for this kind of game... It treads a clever line so it will retain people who might be offended by implying it's satirising these types of games, but also provide the humour itself for those who will enjoy it.

By the second half, I was wanting to keep listening to the exclusion of everything else and can see myself powering through the whole series without a break. This is not how I envisaged the next few months of my life going. Goddammit, Doughnut!

Crossroads

2026-05-07T19:43:00Z

Jonathan Franzen was recommended to me as the kind of writer who populates his books with almost wholly unlikeable characters, but it doesn't detract from the reading experience because they are layered and interesting, regardless.

So, when I spotted Crossroads at the local station free book exchange, I thought it was worth giving it a go.

Initially, I found the prose quite difficult to parse in places - he does love an overly long sentence with too many subordinate clauses! But either the prose settled down or I settled into it, as that became much less of a problem as it went along.

All the characters were, indeed, unlikeable - the story follows Russ and Marion, a married couple, and their four children, in the US in the early 70s. There are five viewpoint characters (the youngest son doesn't get a POV) and I read a chapter from each, which ended up being 190 pages of the 580-page book.

All of them were self-involved, self-loathing (to a greater or lesser extent) and self-aware only in the sense of being disgusted by their own behaviour but apparently unable to change it (which is relatable, but not particularly entertaining to read about).

I did like the chapter from the point of view of the second-youngest child, Perry - but I wasn't prepared to read all the others just to get back round to him, especially since the chapters were pretty long.

So, after very definitely giving it plenty of time to really grab me, I decided not to continue.

The Matchmaker's Gift

2026-05-05T17:14:54Z

I decided to read The Matchmaker's Gift by Lynda Cohen Loigman because of a reading challenge where I needed a book with 'make' or 'maker' in the title and I thought this one sounded as thought it might be fun.

And it really was.

It follows Sara in the first half of the 1900s, discovering she has a gift for spotting love matches and wanting to pursue a career as a matchmaker in a part of society that does not trust young unmarried women in that role.

It also follows her granddaughter, Abby, who is working as a divorce lawyer in the mid-1990s and discovers more about her family's past and her own abilities when she is given her grandmother's journals.

It was an easy listen, well read by the narrator and a fun story - while the first half felt rather slight and it looked like it would be very predictable, things definitely ramped up in the second half, there were some surprises, and I ended up absolutely loving it.

In the last half an hour or so, it had me laughing and crying at the same time - on the train.

Lovely book.

Frieren and Rusch

2026-05-04T10:00:55Z

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End follows an elven mage on a journey to try and get to know humans better, years after she was part of a band of heroes that defeated the demon king.

I was a bit apprehensive going in, since the style and humour of manga doesn't always work for me - but Volume 1 in particular was really lovely. Very contemplative, with great depth of emotion and only occasional bits of humour to lighten the tone.

There was also a very interesting exploration of how different lifespans affect attitudes to time, purpose and death.

Volume 2 was a lot darker and more violent, and Volume 3 felt very meandering and rather silly - but I still enjoyed them and plan to continue the series at least for a bit longer.

Search and Recovery by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is Book 11 in the Retrieval Artist univers, though Book 4 in the Anniversary Day subseries. I've mostly really enjoyed this whole set of books so far (with a couple of dips) but this one was disappointing. Rather than moving on from the end of Book 10, it went back in time to the start of the Anniversary Day section of the story and seemed to retread a lot of old ground without really revealing anything new. There were seven viewpoint characters in 225 pages, which felt like a lot, and the stories within this particular book didn't reach any sort of conclusion, so it felt weirdly transitional and also suggests we won't be going back to the 'present' of the story in the next book either. A real shame.

Vengeful

2026-05-02T20:28:24Z

I completed my recent reread of the first two Villains books with Vengeful by VE Schwab, which is much chunkier than the first book, but follows largely the same approach. The chapters count down to a particular time and place, which is set out from the start, so things gradually get more and more tense towards the end. Various factions of powered and non-powered people hunt each other, with some new and interesting characters introduced for this instalment. As with the first one, it's very well-written, but didn't really hit my emotions all that much. But I'm glad I reread both in anticipation for the third coming out later in the year - and I'll definitely be interested to see where the series goes next.

Vicious

2026-04-26T18:01:27Z

This weekend, I reread Vicious by VE Schwab and really enjoyed it. I read it in just over a day, and it was great to sink into a very well-written book for hours at a time, after multiple DNFs in a row.

Looking back on my review from 2019, I mostly thought the same things this time around - complex, layered characters; interesting worldbuilding if occasionally not fully making sense; compelling writing, though perhaps not as emotive as I would have preferred.

But well worth the reread, especially since a new one in the series is coming out later in the year.

More DNFs

2026-04-25T09:19:00Z

Third and fourth DNFs in a row - it's not been a good couple of weeks!

The Bone Maker by Sarah Beth Durst is an earlier work by this author - I loved The Spellshop and mostly enjoyed The Enchanted Greenhouse. This one definitely isn't in the same cozy fantasy romance vein - it's more action-focused and not particularly jolly. I unfortunately didn't connect to the characters and felt the plot wasn't very engaging. I made it just past the halfway point but then decided not to carry on because I wasn't interested enough.

To Walk in the Way of Lions by H Leighton Dickson is the second in the Upper Kingdom series, set in the far future, after humans have died out and been replaced by anthropomorphic cats. I really enjoyed the first book when I read it last year, and was mostly enjoying this one up until quite close to the end (barring the scattered typos and frequent confusion over which character was being referred to at different points). Then it took a really unpleasant turn in the last 100 pages, with incredibly horrible things happening to the characters and their animal companions and I just couldn't finish it. Which was a shame, because it's an interesting series and I would have liked to know where it went overall.

Cards and Pigeons

2026-04-19T19:57:47Z

We played two new games with some friends on Friday night!

Flip 7 is a push-your-luck card game, where each player gets dealt a new card each round, until they either decide to stop or get eliminated. The cards are numbered 0-12, with the higher numbers being more frequent. Your score in each round is the sum of the numbers on the cards you have - but you get eliminated if you get a card that matches one you already have. There are special cards that either benefit you or cause problems, to add extra layers and randomness to the proceedings. We played several times and it was a lot of fun, even though I came last or second to last in every game.

Oh My Pigeons, on the other hand, is a very annoying game, where you have a piece of cardboard that can seat a certain number of pigeons. You have a hand of cards, which give you actions to obtain additional pigeons or steal them from other players - or swap boards with people. There's also a mechanic by which you can flick a die towards another player's board to knock their pigeons off. It's almost impossible to keep you pigeons for more than a couple of rounds, which makes it very difficult to win - which is achieved by filling your board with pigeons. There were some amusing moments, but it was largely just irritating.

Whistledown Woman

2026-04-18T21:21:21Z

Whistledown Woman by Josephine Cox was another random selection from my local station free book exchange - the blurb on the back made it sound like it might be my kind of book (young woman discovers previously unknown secrets about her family history) but the tortured, overblown prose, egregious use of exclamation marks in the narrative, and uncomfortably problematic romance referenced in the first few pages had me giving up on it very early on.

The Last Kingdom

2026-04-18T20:50:57Z

The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell was randomly on my e-reader for some reason so I thought I'd give it a try, but it wasn't for me! Very spare writing, very action-focused ('this happened, then this happened, then this happened' - as well as battles and torture and women as spoils of war), very little emotional connection to the first-person protagonist. Not my thing so I didn't get very far with it.

The Essex Serpent

2026-04-18T19:27:16Z

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry was another book I randomly picked up at my local station free book exchange, having heard about it on reading retreats but never been interested enough to seek it out. I'm very glad I decided to give it a try, though, because it's excellent!

It's about a young widow who travels to Essex after the death of her husband, in search of fossils, but she finds a lot more than she bargained for in the deep connections she forges with the local pastor and his family, while the village is in the thrall of superstition and fear around rumours of a malevolent serpent frequenting the nearby waterways.

The writing is exquisite - generally lovely, but with frequent images and turns of phrase that cut deep. The character portraits are layered and extremely well observed, and the leisurely pace was a welcome requirement (I had to slow down to appreciate it properly).

The story took some unexpected and satisfying turns - though the ending was a bit nebulous.

First Time Caller

2026-04-18T10:05:41Z

First Time Caller by BK Borison has been on my radar for a while - I'm not generally a massive fan of contemporary romance books, but this was recommended by a fair few BookTubers I like, saying it might appeal to people who don't read a lot of romance - and it did!

I liked the radio show setup, the unconventional family dynamics, and both protagonists were engaging. It had two great audiobook narrators, which definitely helped, and also largely avoided the worst of the romance tropes that usually really annoy me.

So, overall, a fun and satisfying read.

Blue Monday

2026-04-13T19:42:20Z

Blue Monday by Nicci French is the first in their Frieda Klein series, about a psychotherapist who gets embroiled in a child abduction case when she gets weird vibes from one of her patients.

I really enjoyed another Nicci French book I read last year but unfortunately this one didn't live up to expectations.

The writing wasn't bad, and I quite liked some of the characters - and I was intrigued enough to keep reading to find out where it was all going. But I came up with a theory relatively early on that would have involved one pretty terrible cliche - and then the main twist ended up involved an even worse terrible cliche, so that was a bit disappointing. Some of the sections were really very unpleasant as well.

It also felt more like a mid-series book than an introduction to Frieda because it felt like we were dropped right into the middle of her life with very few explanations of anything.

But - the biggest issue I had with the book is as follows... It's called Blue Monday. The blurb on the back starts with the words: "Monday: five-year-old Matthew Faraday is abducted." But, in the book itself, it's mentioned categorically on several occasions that the little boy is abducted on a Friday...

I'm guessing the idea behind the title (the next in the series is called Tuesday's Gone and the rest of the series continues in kind) was potentially devised quite late in the day, or at least after the book's contents had been finalised. But still, somewhere along the way, I would have expected someone in the editorial team to have spotted that error, especially since the book was published by Penguin!

So, not really a success for me, I'm afraid.

Sweep of the Heart

2026-04-12T11:26:47Z

Sweep of the Heart by Ilona Andrews is the fifth book in her Innkeeper Chronicles series - which I've come back to more than two years after listening to book four.

It follows the story of Dina, who runs a magical inn that caters to various alien races from across the far reaches of space.

The series is an interesting mix between urban fantasy and space opera sci-fi - and I've thoroughly enjoyed it all the way through.

In this book, the inn hosts an inter-galactic spousal selection competition, which requires Dina to accommodate people from 12 different alien cultures, all of whom have different needs and desires, and some of whom are dangerous or in feuds with some of the others.

It's a whirlwind of a plot, with far too many characters, factions, layers and shenanigans to keep track of, but I just let the audiobook happen and loved every minute of it.

The only downside is that it turns out this isn't the last in the series, and there are major arc-plot threads still to be resolved! I guess I'm glad I have more of this world and characters to look forward to - but it's been four years since this one was published and the author is apparently focusing on a different series for now, so there's no indication as to when the final instalment of the Innkeeper Chronicles might arrive...

The Summer That Changed Us

2026-04-09T21:18:48Z

The Summer That Changed Us by Cathy Bramley was a book I grabbed either in a charity shop or from my free station book exchange, thinking it might be a light, frothy read I'd pick up one day - but definitely wasn't on my priority list.

And it is fairly light and frothy - for all that it deals with some quite heavy topics - and I absolutely loved it.

It tells the story of Katie, Robyn and Grace, three women of three different decades, who meet by chance on a beach one day and form the kind of deep, abiding female friendship I thought you only found in books - but that reminded me vividly of some of the wonderful women I now have in my own life.

I could say it's rather lacking in diversity and it's a bit reductive in some ways - but I devoured it in a couple of days, forgoing almost everything else to read it for long stretches at a time. It made me laugh, it made me cry, and it made me very happy.

Definitely a five-star reading experience for me.