As promised (if a little later than expected), here are a few super short reviews to get back up to date with my reading stack.
(My apologies for the length of these reviews – it’s increasingly difficult to find the time to write them. If anyone is interested in writing the odd review for CreativeThoughtBubble, I am looking for one or two extra writers….)
When God was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman:
“This is a book about a brother and a sister.
It’s a book about childhood and growing up, friendships and families, triumph and tragedy and everything in between.
More than anything, it’s a book about love in all its forms.”
After lending a neighbor my copy of my favourite book ‘A Monster Calls’ by Patrick Ness, she returned the favor and gave me this book to read.
It seems like such a long time ago now that I read this book, and yet I still remember how much I loved it. It was a novel to play with the emotions and tug on the heartstrings, pulling many moral questions to the forefront. As it says in the blurb, it was a book about love, and with love often comes sadness, but also many more emotions.
I’m glad this book was recommended to me, and certainly encourage others to delve in.
4.4/5 rating.
The Tea Planter’s Wife by Dinah Jefferies:
“Two newlyweds: practically strangers, deeply in love, and each hiding a secret from the other…
Ninteen-year old Gwendolyn Hooper steps off a steamship in Ceylon eager to begin her new life as a married woman. But the husband who greets her is distant, secretive and brooding. Laurence is forever away working away working, leaving his young English bride to explore the vast tea plantation alone. Wandering into forbidden places, a tiny overgrown grave – clues to a hidden, unspeakable past.
Gwen soon falls pregnant and her husband is overjoyed, but in the delivery room she is faced with a terrible choice – one she must hide from Laurence at all costs. When the time comes to reveal the truth, how will he ever forgive what she has done?”
This was a brilliant novel, I love reading books set in a different era, and this one captured the time perfectly. The writing style entranced me, and the plot was engaging and exciting. I think the book description gives a nice insight into the mystery that shrouds the book, so I won’t say much at all on this one. You can find out for yourself…
5/5 rating.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro:
“In one of the most acclaimed novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, ‘Never Let Me Go’ dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, ‘Never Let Me Go’ is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.”
I wasn’t entirely convinced about this book when I started reading it, I feel like the story took a little while to gather up it’s momentum, but after getting into it I found I couldn’t put it down and read the second half of the book very quickly indeed! It was an incredibly interesting idea for a story, definitely unique, and very thought provoking.
4/5 rating.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath:
“A Girl lives in an out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn’t steering anything. Not even myself.
Working in New York one Summer, Esther Greenwood is on the brink of her future. Yet she is also on the edge of a darkness that makes her world increasingly unreal. In this vivid and unforgettable novel, Esther’s vision of the world shimmers and shifts: day-to-day New York living, her crazed men-friends, and hot dinner dances…”
“The Bell Jar” is actually one of my set texts for English A-level; we are studying it in the context of ‘Women in Literature’. I really, really loved this novel, the language is amazingly exciting and very clever. The main character Esther is incredibly complex, a young lady in a changing world suffering with depression. I think the novel successfully questions certain elements of the modern lifestyle, as well as highlighting the role of women in modern literature.
An incredible read.
5/5 rating.
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