Enid Blyton’s books – my memories

We’ve just started reading The Faraway Tree stories again in our house and, nearly eighty years after The Enchanted Wood was first published, and fifty years since Blyton died, the idea of a massive tree with different worlds rotating around at the top is loved by a new reader. Saucepan Man is the favourite – …

Advertisement

The Way Past Winter by Kiran Millwood Hardgrave #review

‘It was a winter they would tell tales about. A winter that arrived so sudden and sharp it stuck birds to branches, and caught the rivers in such a frost their spray froze and scattered down like clouded crystals on the stilled water. A winter that came, and never left.’ When Mila’s snowy home is …

The Winters by Lisa Gabriele #BlogTour #Review

Updating a classic is a risky proposition and, in the wrong hands, the resulting novel could turn out to be little more than a pale imitation. Fortunately, Lisa Gabriele’s new take on Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca is a strong, dynamic thriller in its own right. Rebecca was published 80 years ago, but the idea of …

That Deplorable Boy by Jasper Barry #BlogTour #Review

I really enjoyed the first instalment of Jasper Barry’s Miremont trilogy; I loved the second. We first met Max Fabien as a footman in Belle Époque France in The Second Footman. During the course of the novel, he had caught the eye of the middle-aged Marquis de Miremont and the two had embarked on an …

House of Glass by Susan Fletcher #BlogTour #Review

I loved this novel, from its opening lines detailing the impact our narrator’s fragile bones have on her early years, through to its moving conclusion. Even if it wasn’t set in the area near my home, I would have been able to visualise this pre-war world so clearly because of Fletcher’s beautiful prose, ‘A small …

Wilfred Owen’s poetry – a personal response

I’ve written elsewhere on here about the role Owen’s poem Futility played in my decision to jettison study Geography, and to take up Eng Lit instead. Thanks to my wonderful A Level teacher, Mrs Jones, I was introduced to the idea that literature can reflect (and challenge) the concerns of its time. I knew the …