the Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, V.E.Schwab
What do we want from a book?
There are things everyone needs; characters worth rooting for, and that pull you into the story. Plot and imagery to hold you there. Pace to keep you turning pages, enough structure you don’t lose your way but not so much you can see the bones.
Gideon the ninth, Tamsyn Muir
What’s in a tone?
This book is a whole mood. Dark and sweary. Raucous, romantic, and monstrous.
Priory of the Orange Tree, Samantha Shannon
Where are all the women?
Epic fantasy has always been a sausage fest. So thank the Writing Gods for Samantha Shannon. Women! Women everywhere. And all of them complicated, difficult, loving, ambitious, secretive, courageous; so much more than the sum of their physical parts.
Gilded, Marissa Meyer
Is it the old favourites?
This book started off at a disadvantage with me. Rumpelstiltskin is far from my favourite fairy tale. Re-tellings are a vice of mine, however, and there’s yet to be time I pass one by.
WILD MAGIC, TAMORA pIERCE
What is it about magic?
I am a huge, unrepentant sucker for a good magic system. And Daine’s in Wild Magic has to be one of my all time favourites. Her magic is simple, but it’s vast; it’s nature itself.
The Bone Houses, Emily Lloyd-Jones
What is it about your own reflection?
Is there a better feeling? Than opening a book to find a fragment of yourself waiting there. Another voice, another life, with the same shapes and feelings as you. And in that tiny moment, you are not alone.