chrisbiss's reviews
527 reviews

I received a review copy of this book via NetGalley.

This is the fourth book I've read in the past 12 months based around the premise of a reality show gone wrong (the others being The Holy Terrors by Simon R. Green, The Escape Room by L.D. Smithson, and The Traitors by C.A. Lynch). It's a pitch that I'm really drawn to but thus far I can't say I've found an execution of it that I actually enjoyed. Isolation Island is my latest attempt to scratch this particular itch. Here's the blurb:

Reviews for this book quite frequently compare it to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, which was one of my favourite books I read last year, and the blurb promises a thriller in which a killer is on the loose and the isolated characters have to fight for their lives. That's not really what I got.

The murder in this murder mystery doesn't occur until nearly two thirds of the way through the book, and I spent much of the time leading up to it waiting for it to happen. Had this time been spent getting to know the characters, giving them all motives for the murder yet to come, and really rooting us in the world then I would have been fine with it, but weirdly it's not until after the killing takes place and Lauren (our investigative reporter main character) starts to dig into things that we really begin to get a sense of who these people are. Because of the comparisons to And Then There Were None I was also expecting that once the killing started nobody would be safe, but it seems that the people making that comparison either didn't read this book or haven't read Christie.

Murder mysteries - and especially those trying to work in the same space as Agatha Christie, the best to ever do it - require that the writer has a very firm grip of events. Christie's characterisation is often lacking but you always know that the plot is locked down as tight as it's possible to be. Every detail matters, and if you pay enough attention you can maybe hope to piece things together. That's unfortunately not the case here. At times Minchin seems to lose track of the situation she's set up. On the night of the first proper eviction from the reality show, for example, the contestants are instructed to pack their belongings and they line up with "their bags in their hands". The problem, of course, is that we saw a member of the production crew burn everyone's clothes and belongings on the beach before they arrived at the monastery, so nobody has a bag or any possessions to pack into it. The only things they own are the robes they're wearing and wooden toothbrushes that have been given to them, and I don't know why anybody would bother to pack them up to take them home.

This lack of attention to detail also extends to our sense of the timeline of events, and how little sense we get of time passing in any meaningful way. At one point Lauren worries about how she might be blamed for the death and how she has no alibi for the time it took place, telling herself that "she had been on her own most of the day, walking along the cliff path, replaying the events of the night before". But when we see this take place a few chapters earlier it's in a sequence that lasts for barely a paragraph and gives the impression that her walk lasts for a few minutes before she heads back due to poor weather, and as we move towards the climax Lauren tells us "she was walking for around an hour". This sort of thing happens regularly, where we jump from morning to evening with no real connective tissue, so that we start to lose track of how much time has actually been spent on the island and how far removed events are from one another or how long things take. And though this seems like a small quibble, it's on these sorts of details that murder mysteries live and die. The reader needs to be able to feel like they have all the clues needed to solve the mystery to hand, and that's impossible when the facts of the case keep changing in ways that feel like mistakes rather than intentional revelations.

I'm being fairly critical here but with all of that said, I still found myself gripped and wanting to keep reading. Once the murder actually happens and the plot starts to move the book is much more impressive, and the reveal at the ending is seeded in a way that allows you to predict it a page or too earlier and feel smart about solving the mystery, despite the lack of any meaningful clues in the rest of the narrative. The writing isn't flashy or particularly impressive - it's downright clunky in places - but it's got that page-turning thriller quality to it that kept me up past midnight wanting to know what was going to happen next and where this was all going, and the ending was satisfying enough that I came away feeling that I'd enjoyed it despite being critical in the first half. This is the sort of book I'd pick up in an airport and read on the plane at the beginning of a holiday and would think that I'd got my money's worth before leaving it at the hotel book swap. Of the handful of "reality TV gone wrong" murder mysteries I've read this year this was by far the best.

I received an ARC of this novel from Bloomsbury via NetGalley.

After reading a lot of SFF this year I wanted a change of pace, and an historical fiction novel about one of Vivaldi's protégés and her rise to become a maestra di violino. Anna Maria della Pietà has fascinated me for a long time, largely because we know so little about her life and her works, so the premise of *The Instrumentalist* attracted me immediately. 

Here's the blurb:

Initially I really enjoyed this. The writing is strong and Venice is painted in vibrant brush strokes that really bring the setting to life. Anna Maria's childhood at the orphanage and her discovery of the violin were compelling and her burgeoning relationship with Vivaldi (who is never actually named in the novel after an Introductory note explaining who her tutor is) gripped me.

Unfortunately my initial love for the book was short-lived. Because this was a review copy I felt more of an obligation to continue reading to the end than I normally would, but had that not been the case I think I would have DNFd at around the halfway mark. There were a few things that irritated me early on that I was happy to ignore, but as the book progressed I found them more and more bothersome. Despite the blurb stating that "the odds are stacked against" Anna Maria, there's never really any sense that she struggles to achieve anything. The story is a fairly linear sequence of events in which Anna Maria wants something, gets it, is abrasive and horrible to the people around her, and is then forgiven because she's brilliant. This formula repeats fairly regularly, and the lack of any real dramatic tension makes it hard to want to keep turning the page.

One of the main challenges in writing historical fiction is balancing the history - the things we know to be true - with the fiction in order to craft a compelling narrative. That's especially difficult with a figure like Anna Maria della Pietà, about whom very little is known. In the author's note Constable acknowledges that she has moved some events around "for dramatic purposes", but I found that the manner in which this was done actually took away from what the book was trying to acheive.

There are a couple of instances in particular where I find the shuffling around of events and characters to stray away from artistic license and into the realm of historical revisionism. The first is in the character of Chiara. In real life Chiara della Pietà was a student of Anna Maria's born nearly 20 years after the maestra and taught by her. In the novel she becomes a peer and a rival, someone who Anna Maria contends with for a place in the orchestra and who later betrays Anna Maria's trust to Vivaldi. Given that the novel is explicitly concerned with the way women are erased from history, this felt like a betrayal of an historical figure who should be remembered alongside Anna Maria as a virtuoso in her own right, rather than rewritten as a villain.

This criticism also extends to the treatment of Vivaldi in the novel and, in particular, the way in which Anna Maria's contributions to his music are portrayed. It's almost certainly a fact that the women of the Ospedale della Pietà worked closely with Vivaldi and helped write his music, often without any credit, but Constable takes this a step further, giving full credit to Anna Maria for both La stravaganza and the Four Seasons. La stravaganza was written in 1712, when Anna Maria was around 16 years old. The provenance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons is not entirely clear but it's likely that they were composed during a period when Vivaldi was the court chapel master in Mantua in around 1718-1720, not when he was in Venice in roughly 1711 (which is when this section of the novel takes place).

It's this painting of Anna Maria as the driving force behind all of Vivaldi's success and fame that feels a little disingenuous. The novel is very much exploring the fact that women's lives and accomplishments are very often minimised, and Anna Maria della Pietà is a great example of this given that her works are not readily accessible in the present day. It's not outside the realms of possibility that she did co-write with Vivaldi and it's a matter of fact that Vivaldi wrote many of his works for the women of the Pietà to perform, and I suspect license has been taken to extend that to La Stravaganza and the Four Seasons purely because they're the most well-known of Vivaldi's works for most people, but personally I felt like the desire to insert Anna Maria into all of Vivaldi's work lessened the point. By the time the Four Seasons were published Anna Maria had already been dubbed "Maestra" (at the age of 24, rather than 17 as she is in the novel). For the narrative to want to so directly link her to Vivaldi's greatest work at the expense of highlighting own accomplishments seems to actually be diminishing her rather than achieving the author's aim.

This desire to paint Vivaldi out of his own life comes to a head in the final third of the book, which is less about celebrating the brilliance of Anna Maria and the other women of the orphanage that it is about demonising and tearing down the character of Vivaldi. He's painted as almost abusive, stealing Anna Maria's life's work and burning her compositions in front of a class of younger students. Perhaps the attempt here is to invert the idea of women being written out of history, to make us feel uncomfortable about the treatment of Vivaldi here in the hope that it will cause us to reflect on the way women are treated in historical records, but if that's the case I don't think it succeeds particularly well. Rather than providing an opportunity for reflection it instead feels mean-spirited, and it lends a sour note to what should be a celebration of the brilliance of Anna Maria.

The author's note opens with the statement that The Instrumentalist is "a work of fiction inspired by true events from the life of Anna Maria della Pietà". I think that I would have enjoyed this more had it not been marketed as historical fiction. If the real names had been stripped out and this was purely a work of fantasy then the muddling up of historical details and the anachronistic characterisation, with every character reading like they've stepped straight out of the 21st century, wouldn't be issues. There would still have been the problem of Anna Maria always seeming to get what she wants without issue, but I think I would have been more forgiving of that had I not expected that I was reading about the life of a real person who succeeded against very real odds.

With all this criticism it probably seems like I hated this book, which isn't the case. I liked it a lot more at the beginning than I did at the end, and the thought definitely crossed my mind about halfway through that perhaps I didn't want to finish it, but on reflection I enjoyed it more than I didn't. I wouldn't be in a rush to re-read it, and if the author continues to write in historical genres then I'm not sure I would continue to read her work since I like my historical fiction to be more grounded in the actual history, but if her next book were instead a work of pure fiction I would definitely pick it up. 

This review contains spoilers.

Given that my biggest success as a writer is The Wretched, I think it's safe to say that "we're on a space ship and everything has gone catastrophically wrong" is one of my favourite types of stories. So I went into this primed to like it, and I wasn't disappointed.

What's really interesting about Far From The Light Of Heaven is that it is, functionally, a locked room mystery. In his afterword Thompson says that it was at least partially inspired by *The Murders In The Rue Morgue*, and that definitely makes sense. It's science fiction, yes, but the SF elements very much take a back seat to the very human element of the investigation and the unfolding mystery. Although it's very clearly rooted in a clear understanding of the technicalities and concerns of long distance space travel, this doesn't read like hard SF. The technology is present and functions but Thompson doesn't dwell on it, and personally I'm thankful for that.

The mystery here is a good one. Shell, our main character, wakes up from a decade of induced sleep to find that 30 of the passengers in her care have been murdered, chopped into pieces and dumped into a chamber on the ship. As she investigates with the help of an investigator from a nearby colony planet, the plot thickens; some of the bodies are missing, the bots on the ship are trying to murder Shell and the investigator, and the ship's AI has gone rogue in ways that don't make any sense.

Each new revelation in the mystery feels like peeling back another layer. There are twists and turns that are impossible for the reader to predict, but Thompson delivers them in a way that never feels cheap or like a gotcha. There's certainly no way for readers to solve the mystery themselves, and that's often a feature of murder mysteries, but there's also never any real indication that the reader is *expected* to solve the mystery. We aren't really given any clues, because there aren't any clues - the solution is well hidden by design, and there's no real way for Shell and Fin to actually solve it themselves without being handed the answer in the same way that the reader isn't able to solve it themselves. This is a feature, not a bug.

What makes this work is that once the mystery is solved, we're still faced with having to deal with the reality of the solution. The enemy is known but is very present and is very much working against our protagonists, who are stranded inside the ship with no contact with the outside world and dwindling life support. The tension shifts from trying to solve the mystery to trying to liveong enough for the solution to be meaningful.

Parts of the middle section, but this is less to do with Thompson's writing that it is to do with the events of that act not really being to my tastes. An experimental section of the ship is breached, unleashing weird flora and fauna into the ship that turn it into a hellscape that's actively hostile to the characters. At the time I didn't particularly enjoy this section, finding it to be a little too chaotic and feeling like it was too disconnected from the mystery. Once the solution is revealed it all made more sense, though, and although this is still my least favourite part of the book the writing was strong enough and the mystery compelling enough that I was happy to keep reading (and II'm aggressively DNFing books this year). The chaotic nature of this middle section is my only real criticism of the book. The pace is so fast at times that it almost ricochets from one event to the next, and I would have liked to slow down a little and be given some time to breathe and take in what's going on. But ultimately the characters are in a race against time, and that breathless pace - while a little too much for me personally - certainly serves to highlight that.

What really seals the deal for me with *Far From The Light Of Heaven* is the fact that we don't get a nice, happy, neatly gift-wrapped ending. Things start bad and get worse and they don't ever stop getting worse, and the final notes are somber, subdued, and filled with regret and the need to keep trying to make things right again. Lots of people are dead, nobody fully understands what actually happened or why it happened (other than us, the readers), and the world the characters know may well have fundamentally changed as a result of the events of the book. I'm a sucker for a bleak, downer ending, and I honestly wasn't expecting it here, so I was delighted to see it.

Earlier in the year (or perhaps at the end of last year) I read Thompson's novella *The Murders Of Molly Southbourne*. Though I enjoyed it a lot, when I reached the end I found that I didn't really have the urge to read the sequel (mainly because it follows a different character. Sort of). That's not the case here. There isn't a sequel to *Far From The Light Of Heaven*, but if there was I'd read it tomorrow and I'll almost certainly be picking up Thompson's other novels.

I'm reading all of the Discworld novels in order.

One of the first Discworld books I ever owned was the 'Death Trilogy' hardback containing the first three Death books (Mort, Reaper Man, and Soul Music) and of the three, Reaper Man is the one that I had the least clear memory of. I remembered the basic plot - Death is made mortal due to having developed too much of a personality and too many feelings for humans and goes to work on a farm - but I didn't remember much of the rest of the events (though who can ever forget the Death Of Rats?).

This was a bit of a frustrating book, because it really feels like two novels that have been stapled together. The first, concerning Death and the consequences of people no longer properly dying in the Discworld, and everything Death learns about what it means to be human, is easily the best book in the series by this point. It's funny, it's touching, it's philosophical, and structurally it feels like a proper novel in a way that a lot of the books that precede it don't. 

The second, dealing with the wizards and their attempt to stop the weirdness in Ankh Morpork that starts with snowglobes and ends in a giant shopping centre via hundreds of runaway trolleys, feels really weird and like it doesn't fit with the rest of the book. It's never really made clear why the weird stuff is appearing in the city or what connection it has to the overabundance of life energy caused by a lack of dying. It just happens, and Windle and the other wizards deal with it while Death is off dealing with his business, and then it's done and everyone gets to die at the end.

I think I've firmly established in my reviews of these books that I don't really care for the sorts of stories that Pratchett uses his wizards for, so it was disappointing to find this very good Death novel being constantly interrupted by what felt like a second novel that I really didn't like. I think there was room here for some really interesting, fun stuff to happen with Windle and the wizards and the other undead denizens of Ankh Morpork - it just wasn't this.

I've noted a few times in these reviews that Pratchett often revisits ideas, usually in the form of taking a second run at a basic plot. In the case of Reaper Man we actually see some seeds of later books, which is fun. The first is that The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents are mentioned a couple of times here. I've never read that book, but based on the way that character is referred to I expect that it will be Pratchett's version of the pied piper of Hamelin. I'll be interested to see what that looks like.

The second is buried right at the end of the novel in a small chunk of description, and it immediately jumped out at me as being the seed from which Soul Music will be born:

"He was aware that tunes were turning up at the ends of his fingers that his brain had never known. The drummer and the piper felt it too. Music was pouring in from somewhere. They weren't playing it. It was playing them."

Soul Music is among my favourite Discworld novels, so it was very fun to see this pop up here.

I'm really struggling to figure out where Reaper Man sits in my informal, in-my-brain-only ranking of these books. It definitely contains the best book in the series thus far, but it's let down by the nonsense with the shopping mall that I really didn't care for at all. I find it hard to say it's better than Wyrd Sisters or Guards! Guards! - it *is* better than them, but it's also much more flawed than them because of that section. And that frustrates me.

It's definitely good though.

I enjoyed this but found myself wishing it had a little more meat on the bones. It's undeniably well written; the landscape comes alive on the page, and the juxtaposition of Rita's paintings as described by the gallery exhibiting them and the events surrounding their creation works brilliantly.

I'm a big fan of introspective horror, and Rita's time spent in solitude as she grapples with grief and strained relationships - with her dead father, with her dying romantic partnership, with the loss of her mother tongue, with her heritage, with the land itself - are great, and contain some really powerful writing. But the final act takes a hard turn into creature feature territory, and I wish that theme had been a little more prominent throughout.

The real horror here is in the afterword, as the author talks about the issues of climate grief and climate catastrophe that sparked the novella in the first place. Eco-horror is scary not because of what's on the page but because it reflects a reality we're living in, and no swamp-dwelling lichen monster can get close to that.

I received a free review copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

If you're familiar with my work in RPGs, and particularly the art direction of my my game A Dungeon Game, you'll be entirely unsurprised that the cover art of this book attracted me immediately. Over the past year I've also discovered that I really, really enjoy crime thrillers, so once I read the description I knew I had to read this.

Here's the blurb:

The book starts slowly, taking its time to build the mood and introduce us to Bronze and the way he sees the world. The writing treads a very delicate line in trying to establish a grimy, noir-ish voice. For the most part I enjoyed the prose, but there were times when it threatened to tip into being overwritten and feeling like a pastiche of the genre rather than a sincere attempt at hard-boiled pulp fiction.

Thankfully this propensity towards over-writing mostly rears its head when Bronze is alone and contemplative, which most often occurs at the begininng of the novel. Once he starts to interact with other characters and take action the prose becomes a little more subdued and workman-like, and in the process it becomes much more assured and less self conscious. That's very much to the book's benefit.

What lets everything down a little is Krainin's approach to developing the mystery, which relies largely on simply not telling the reader the things the characters already know. Our cast talk in cryptic riddles, referring to events and information that they all know about but we haven't been told about yet, always talking around the point and never addressing things directly so that the reader is left feeling like we're constantly struggling to keep up. The information we're lacking is usually revealed sooner rather than later, which is one consolation, but this occlusion of context happens so regularly that I began to grow frustrated with it very quickly. Thankfully this is a problem reserved largely for the opening chapters of the book, and it begins to fall away once the pace picks up.

Another minor frustration is that the most compelling character in the book is one who's given the least page time. Iris is out protagonist's landlady, a successful romance writer who's trying to reinvent her career by writing in other genres and having a hard time of it. From the first page of her first chapter I wanted to spend more time with her, and as I got further into the book I longed for her chapters more and more. I would have happily read a novel entirely about Iris. The prose in Iris' chapters is much more relaxed, much less stylised than the rest of the novel, and as a result her voice is much clearer. The rest of the novel is well written but wants to be sure you're paying attention to how well written it is; with Iris, the words on the page melt away and it becomes a joy to spend time with her.

It's in these chapters, too, where the book seems to have the most fun with genre. Where the rest of the book is a fairly standard noiry mystery, Iris' chapters peel back the layers of fiction to talk directly about the sort of story we're telling. I'm reminded in these sections of books like Auster's New York Trilogy, Bradbury's Death Is A Lonely Business, and even sections of Calvino's ...if on a winter's night a traveler, and I wondered partway through whether the narrative was going to take a metatextual turn. It never does, and while "the book didn't go in the direction that I wanted it to go in" is not a valid criticism, Iris' chapters definitely pointed in that direction and I was disappointed not to see any pay-off from them.

All in all I enjoyed this. Blood and Mascara is Krainin's first adult novel, and it's a promising if uneven debut. It's certainly not perfect, but I enjoyed it and will likely keep an eye out for the author's next work.

 *Call Me By Your Name* is my partner's favourite book, and she's been asking me to read it for a while now. I finally did, and I'm very glad I made time for it. 

 

I knew this was a romance, and I knew it was erotic. Even though I've heard people talk about the famous peach scene, I was still surprised by how explicit this is. It's raw and vulgar and primal and unflinching but it's still also tender, slow, and incredibly beautiful. This is a real achievement. 

 

Aciman's prose is magic. Reading the early chapters (or more accurately, the first half of the book) feels like a dream, like a long hot afternoon drinking wine in the sun with no cares and no responsibilities. Part of this is down to the way Aciman presents his locations, with no names other than an initial (most of the novel occurs in a place known only as "B."). This lack of specificity adds an air of unreality to the languid prose that really sells the atmosphere of a long nostalgic summer. 

 

Once we move to part 3 and Elio and Oliver's trip to Rome things change. We're suddenly faced with the hard reality of the city, its warren of named streets and its crowds of anonymous revellers. The dream shatters, never to be repaired as we make our slow way toward the end of the book and the rest of Elio and Oliver's lives. 

 

Despite the fact that in terms of pure plot not a lot really happens in the book, it's as gripping and compelling as a thriller. Aciman pulls us into this world and makes us long to stay here forever. I wanted to drop everything so I could go and smoke in the Italian sunlight for six weeks, and turning the final pages left me with the same sense of loss and longing as Elio recounts in his last moments with Oliver. 

 

This is really something special, and I'm delighted I finally got around to reading it.

Last year I started reading *Sundial* and, for some reason, I never finished it. It wasn't that I thought it was bad, it was just that I was still coming out of my reading slump and I guess simply wasn't in the mood for that book at that time. After reading *Looking Glass Sound* I fully intend to fix that.

This was fantastic. It's a very well-executed metafiction that kept my guessing - and hooked - right up until the last moments. Even the slight silliness of characters being trapped inside the book that we're currently reading that shows up at the end didn't feel silly in context, and it's very hard to get me to buy in to that kind of thing. In a lot of ways this reminded me of Ian McEwan's *Atonement* (though the two books are obviously not at all similar), and I felt a very real connection to the characters.

Easily one of my favourite reads of the year so far.