Good reads – Page 3 – Cristina Sanders' blog

The Chthonic Cycle – book review

The Chthonic Cycle, by Una Cruickshank

First a huge congratulations for the presentation of this book and it’s glorious fold out covers, featuring Sasha Francis’s artistic impression of its themes. It sums them up, natural forces, re-birth, jewels, fossils, water, all strewn together across the page, interconnected and tantalising. Most of the stuff pictured I don’t recognise and nor would I if it were under my feet – how many of us have walked past a lump of ambergris in the sand or sat on a rock hiding a small fortune of ammonites? This book is full of things you may have missed.

The Demolition of the Century– book review

The Demolition of the Century, by Duncan Sarkies

Tom is in insurance. Things turn bad when he checks up on a highly insured horse that dies unexpectedly and is quickly buried. There are sock-fulls of cash involved. He’s also got a failing marriage and a young boy, Frank, who he is meant to be collecting from school, but he is late because the gangsters are after him. I feel no sympathy for this character. Yet.

The Royal Free – book review

The Royal Free, by Carl Shuker

OK, so don’t shoot me for asking the question, but is this book even a finished novel? What is Carl Shuker trying to do here and why doesn’t he just tell the story? I know why his editors let him do it – because it is clever and edgy and wildly confusing in a way that makes you think it’s your problem for not getting it, not the fact that the book is so disjointed you could have it served up for dinner with no idea what beast it was. It’s experimental, for sure. There are literary nods and references, clever but incidental. So why is it on my list of books I love?

Creation Lake – Book Review

Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner

Very nearly an excellent book, but…

I’m intrigued from the start with Sadie, our kick-ass narrator. She’s a singular character, I’ll risk a bit of woke chastisement and suggest she felt masculine: decisive, job-focused, practical. Her job has no ethical element to it, she abuses trust for financial gain. A drinking driver, but she tells us she knows how much she can take, and a slovenly eater – warm beer, fast-food, the rubbish piling up around her. She’s very low on empathy, callously uses men for advantage, talks about her body like it’s a weapon. Got a breast enlargement and knows how to use it. Fantastic mercenary women agents have been turning up for a while, from Tomb Raider to Black Doves (mostly male creations I think), but these usually have an compassionate flip-side, perhaps to feed the male fantasy. Sadie is just unbalanced. This makes her interesting. Her narration is straight-forward.

The Essex Serpent – book review

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

We haven’t changed so much since Victorian times. They chased after mysteries, fell in love inappropriately, refused to be pigeon-holed, got passionate about causes, died bright-eyed of lingering illnesses, and tried to make the world a better place for the less fortunate. The Essex Serpent is very much a character story with a perfect selection of characters: each distinct, with their own needs and foibles, each with their own way of engaging with the others. If that sounds a bit trite it absolutely is not: there is no feeling of a manufactured band here, this is not one of those dreadful ‘found families’ stories. They just meld together all over the place and it’s magic.

There are rivers in the sky–book review

There are rivers in the sky, by Elif Shafak

I bought this book because of the insanely pretty cover (the silver drops are embossed) and for the fact that there is a woman called Zaleekah in it. My sailboat is called Zuleika, a name from the same root. I thought I could find a bit more about the name, it’s not common. And yes, I did. I also learned heaps about the ancient city of Nineveh in Mesopotamia, the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, and lots about the world’s earliest poem, Gilgamesh, which was carved into stone tablets. The ruse for this story is that water falls from the sky and is recycled over and over again. We meet the first raindrop when it falls on a Mesopotamian king and it resurfaces again for our three storytellers: a slum boy in Victorian London; a Yazidi girl who travels to war torn Iraq in 2014 and a miserable woman in 2018 London who is ungrateful to her rich relatives. I don’t know why these three narrators. The drop of water seems a tenuous selection process.

Songbirds of Florence–book review

Songbirds of Florence by Olivia Spooner

Like a very many others, Songbirds of Florence is in my Christmas shopping basket. It’s a gift for a darling Italian friend, who is far too busy this week to read my posts. I think everyone is buying this book (and it was still at number one on 14th December, so they really are) for one simple reason. Because it will make the recipient feel good. Merry Christmas!

James – book review

James, by Percival Everett

Do you think you know the story of Huck Finn? Think again. In this marvelous book by Percival Everett, the adventure is turned on its head and you find yourself reading a totally different story that seems to come tumbling out from between the lines of Twain’s. It’s still an adventure story, in which a boy called Huck and a slave he calls Jim run away by floating down the Mississippi river and get into all sorts of trouble, but this time the point of view belongs to James. The pair become true friends, they look out for each other, care for each other, discuss ideas and try to see the other’s point of view, but the world is different when the one telling the story is a piece of property which needs to be returned to its owner.

The Writing Desk – Book Review

The Writing Desk, by Di Morris

I bought this hardcover book on sight at the launch. I want it on my bookshelves immediately to start showing to people. The book itself feels like a treasure, a brand new presentation of an old world, with heavy shiny paper, crisp print and a sharp layout, illustrating a family story from the 1850s to the current day. There are old photos and copies of telegrams, letters, tickets, and all sorts of ephemera, full-page background designs in a range of heightened sepia and all overlaid with panel-squares of exquisite drawings and minimal text, just enough to tie a story through all the pictures. And what a story.

Intermezzo – book review

Intermezzo, by Sally Rooney

Sally Rooney gives us here an almost perfect story. Five main characters, interlinked, each well rounded and complicated with their own goals and challenges, a set up which could go one of many ways, some deep subplots and an ending all tied up. Sounds a bit contrived, perhaps? There is nothing very experimental, no sweeping poetical passages, nothing clever. No ramping up the heartbeat with triggers and button pushing. It’s just a story of five people. And with that simplicity, it is exceptionally good.

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