wordsofclover's reviews
2085 reviews

A truly charming novel perfect for anyone looking for some whimsy, academia and dark fairy folk. 

 

We follow Cambridge professor Emily Wilde as she arrives in Hrafnsvik, a Scandinavian island that contains its own special kind of faeries no-one has studied before. Emily is undergoing work on her Encyclopedia of Faeries and is one of the best academics in this area though she is often overlooked due to gender and serious personality. Emily is soon joined by her colleague Wendell Bambleby, who may be more than he first appeared. 

 

I loved this. Emily is a brilliant main character -studious and single-minded and most likely a touch neurodivergent too I think - she sometimes struggles with connecting with others (understanding what they want from her or not understanding some social cues) yet still manages to form a lovely type of found family by the end of the novel. We see in many ways how Emily fits into and understands the fairy world in a way she often doesn’t in the human one. 

 

The relationship between Emily and Wendell was brilliant from Emily’s exasperation and hate/love relationship with Wendell to how they just get one another and some of the soft yearning that verges on surprise from both of them. 

 

I really enjoyed the Scandi setting and customs in this book as well as the healthy respect/fear of the fae folk from the locals which I very much understand as an Irish person (never destroy or walk across a fairy fort! Or chop down a fairy tree!). 

 

Very much enjoyed my time reading this and looking forward to the next book. 

This is a fantastic and engaging book about America's Great Migration in the 1900s as Black Americans left the Jim Crow South for new lives and better opportunities in the North. We follow three people's real stories - Ida Mae, George and Robert from three different Southern locations as they move themselves and their families and how their lives turn out in the North but they never lose their connection to the South.

I listened to this on audiobook and while it was a long listen, I throughly enjoyed it. As a non-American reader, I enjoyed learning more about this time in American history and this isn't something I had known about before though obviously we learn about the American Civil War and the US Civil Rights Movement in Irish education, this is a topic that is connected to these but its own story entirely. I found it interesting to see how the North wasn't automatically better for the migrants - while they escaped the suffocating Jim Crow of the South, they still faced and dealt with a lot of racial discrimination and divide in different ways in the North - and Northern cities such as Chicago and New York were forever changed after his migration as well in socio-economic and city division ways as well which was fascinating. It was also amazing to hear of some of the famous people who would never have been able to reach the heights they did if their parents or family members hadn't chosen to migrant to the North where they had the opportunities the did.

The care and detail put into the research for this book must have been immense and really commend the author for doing a stellar job - from the sounds of it, this book took a long time to research and write as she sat and talked to Ida Mae, George and Robert in the later years of their lives to understand their story and experiences better.

Highly recommend this!

 When Eilish Stack opens up her door one evening, she doesn’t expect to see the GNSB on her doorstep looking for her husband. Within a few weeks, her union worker spouse has disappeared and Ireland falls further under a totalitarian rule. As Eilish grapples with the loss of her husband and no answers to her questions, balancing her own work in an increasin hostile workplace and keeping her children together, civil war creeps closer and everyone’s lives are in danger. 

 

This was a gripping read and is one of those books that’s so horrifying yet well-paced that as soon as you pick it up, you can’t put it down until you’re finished. 

 

It was honestly terrifying and horrifying reading this at times thinking about how easy in many ways it could be for Ireland to fall under this kind of rule and for such extremism to be unleashed on the public and by the public. In some ways, it seemed far-fetched and dystopian but then I thought again about how this dystopian version of Ireland was a real life reality for many people in countries today and it’s just a bit mind-blowing and really makes you think about your privilege. 

 

I thought this was excellently written. I felt for the characters and their situation while also feeling a lot of frustration towards Eilish for some of her decisions, for her kids and their reactions and how they often treated their mother and exasperation to the outside world for not helping anyone. 

 

Highly recommend this one and I can understand why it won all the prizes! 

Wendy Darling is turning eighteen and looking forward to moving on from her town where she is haunted by the disappearance of her brothers five years earlier - and her own memory loss from this time. But more children have started to disappear and the police are questioning Wendy again about what she might remember when Peter Pan appears in her life - someone she only knows through the bedtime stories she used to tell her brothers. With Peter's help, the two of them might be able to work together to bring back the lost children.

This was okay for me and it's one of those book where nothing was really wrong with the story, it just didn't hit for me the way I hoped it would. I'm a huge Peter Pan fan and I think Aiden Thomas did the original story and characters justice in this book while also being able to write a unique spin on it.

I did find Wendy's character a bit boring and vanilla for me, and I would have liked her to have a bit more fire in her. I also felt like Wendy and Peter took way too long to actually get anywhere with the mystery of the shadow and the children, there was a lot of Wendy dodging Peter and getting herself into annoying scrapes where she needed rescuing or would be shouted at by her dad so the pacing of the story wasn't great in my opinion.

I picked this up after watching the movie as I was interested to see how the two would compare and I found I felt about them both similar -I liked parts but found both lacking in two parts.

Solene brings her 12-year-old daughter to a meet and greet with her favourite boy band August Moon (cough One Direction), and strangely, 39-year-old Solene finds herself flirting with 20-year-old boy band member Hayes Campbell (cough Harry Styles). What she thinks might just be a physical intimacy soon becomes more as they fall in love but in doing so Solene ends up in the public eye far more than she thought and it begins affecting her work life and the relationship with her daughter.

I found this book a mixed bag. I couldn't quite get a grasp on Solene and Hayes - I found Solene beautiful and a bit too perfect truth be told, and I also disliked how the author shoved Solene's artistic world and her being 'French' in the reader's faces every couple of pages (if anyone knows what a 'French mouth' is supposed to look like, let me know). I thought Solene's job as a gallery owner was very interesting but there were some parts where the book focused so much on art, I didn;t care (though in saying this, I'm not into art so I'm not the target audience either). And then there were times that Hayes just acted and said things that were too perfect, he was just unrealistic and they never really had the conversation that hovered between them as to why exactly he was always attracted to older women.

I found the age gap in this book a bit too icky. I'm glad in the book they changed it to 24 and 39, which was still a bit gross for me but I couldn't believe it that book Hayes was only 20 - he's practically still a teenager. And I don't care what Solene said about him having the body of a man, his brain wasn't fully developed yet, he hadn't even lived life outside of boy bandom yet. It was gross. And she was just that little too comfortable in with all the splendour and money his fame brought even if she was very stupidly naive about what dating him actually meant when it came to his fans.

Similar to the movie as well, I found both meet-cute scenes extremely underwhelming and didn't feel the chemistry between the characters. This did change in the movie for me by the first kiss and it took maybe a bit longer in the book. The romance/sex scenes were fairly steaming at parts though again I found some of them uncomfortable when I reminded myself he was 20 years old. The book did feel very repetitive at times though as it went travel, art show, sex, Solene feeling guilty, repeat a lot and after a while it all became a bit tedious.

I was quite shocked by the ending, it was just so abrupt and I felt it was quite a let down considering everything we had gone through with Solene and Hayes. I wasn't expecting a happy ever after with a bow on top but I expected more than what we got. Thank god they changed the movie ending as that would have been an hour and a half I wanted back in my life!