Maya Panika's Blog, page 12

Something for the weekend Sir…? Fancy a free e-book?

This Saturday, 6th October, you can pick up a FREE Kindle copy of Entanglement entirely FREE and gratis, cost to you, NOTHING WHATSOEVER!

Just amble over to Amazon between 8am Saturday morning, until the same time on Sunday and grab a bit of paranormal fantasy goodness for your reading pleasure.

At Amazon UK and Amazon.com

Emergency! Emergency! If you left a comment here (I know someone did because my email tells me so) it just got deleted with the original post and all the other comments in a mighty crash I just recovered from. I’m terribly sorry and – please do post again!

Something for the weekend, Sir…? How about a free e-book?

This Saturday, 6th October, you can pick up a FREE Kindle copy of Entanglement for FREE! Cost to you, NOTHING WHATSOEVER!

Available on Amazon from 8am Saturday morning UK time (midnight PST, 3am EST) till the same time Sunday morning.

On Amazon UK and Amazon.com

Review: News from Gardenia

by Robert Llewellyn

2*

An odd little book, strongly inspired by William Morris’s utopian-socialist News from Nowhere, News from Gardenia is the antidote to all those miserable dystopian novels that abound at the moment. It’s a great idea and – after having heard Robert Llewellyn talk about this book on Radio Four, I was really keen to get hold of a copy.

Unfortunately, News from Gardenia doesn’t do justice to the boldness of the idea. The style is too self-conscious in its attempts to amuse. The story is repetitive and so is the dialogue, by the end of the book, Gavin had told us his love was SO beautiful, how he wanted to grab her and hold her SO many times I wanted to set light to him. The plot just doesn’t go anywhere and the idea never convinced, I couldn’t believe in this vision of the future where everything seems to work but no one seems to know how. Most of the narrative is about ideas, geo-politics and views – presumably Robert Llewellyn’s – on the perfect society and the nature of utopia, there really isn’t much plot beyond this discourse. Robert Llewellyn’s voice comes across strongly as Gavin, the man thrown out of time, but – much as I like Robert Llewellyn, the writing is just not good.

News from Gardenia is a great idea. It starts out fairly readable but quickly becomes bogged down in a mire of muddy ideas. It ends up more manifesto than novel and soon becomes dreadfully tedious.

I love Robert Llewellyn, I loved the premise, I desperately wanted to love the book and was sad that I couldn’t.

Review: What in God’s Name

by Simon Rich

2.5*

What in God’s Name is funny, off and on; the humour feels forced for the most part, though I laughed long, hard, and out-loud at the bit with Regis Philbin. Other than that… I’m finding it hard to find anything to say about this book.

What in God’s Name is a very short novel that imagines God as CEO of Heaven inc. God doesn’t have much time for humanity, he doesn’t answer prayers, he’s lost what little interest he ever had in Earth. Humanity has become such a bore, God thinks he might just end the world soon so he can concentrate on his real love, an Asian-fusian restaurant he’s planning to open in Heaven soon. Two Angels set out to change God’s mind by taking a bet to make a seemingly easy-to-achieve miracle happen – a task that turns out to be the hardest thing they’ve ever done and… that’s pretty much it.

The premise is all. The characters are caricatures and the plot – two Angels race against time to push two social inepts into each other’s arms – was tired and predictable. Along the way, there are a few laughs. It’s very filmic; at times it reads more like a detailed treatment for a sitcom than a novel. It’s VERY American, there is nowhere on Earth or in Heaven that isn’t a mirror–copy of the USA.

In short, it’s a quick, sometimes funny read, nothing more. I still can’t decide if the appearance of Alexander the Great as an impregnator of many women was meant to be a joke.

 

Review: Caroline: A Mystery

by Cornelius Medvei

4*

The gently surreal story of a man and his obsessive passion for his best friend and one true love, Caroline, a chess-playing donkey.

Mr Shaw lives a dreary, tiresome existence of office, supper and bed that is familiar to most of us. He is approaching retirement; his wife is dreading having him at home all day. Then, on a family holiday, Mr Shaw meets Caroline, a donkey so apparently remarkable he decides to buy her, taking an extra week off work to walk her home, alone; growing a beard, living rough. He builds Caroline a stable in the back yard and spends every evening with her. One evening he takes his chessboard to the stable and discovers that Caroline is even more remarkable than he thought.

Written throughout as a true account, with just a dash of doubt sprinkled over the end – was Caroline a true prodigy, a chess genius who, for a while, took over Mr Shaw’s office job and did it so well that everyone apparently forgot that Shaw was ever there at all? Or was Shaw’s father perhaps just having a breakdown? This is magical realism gently told, in a voice that’s not quite English. There’s the whiff of middle Europe about this story that adds strongly to the sense of reading a folktale. Where is it set? We are never told, certainly not in the UK. Some Persian Poetry from Shaw’s diary gives a possible clue to the inspiration for this quirky little novel, which seemed to me to be a fable about the oddness of love and the true value of friends and family.

It’s very short and a quick read. The story unfolds quietly, there are no whistles or bells, none are needed. The story is quietly calming, soothing,  like a warm bath or a cup of hot tea; like being home, on a weekday, reading a good book on a dark, rainy day. It’s not an exciting experience, there’s nothing here to upset or disturb, it’s just pleasantly calming, relaxing and deeply enjoyable.

How’s your weather?

Here in the north-west of England it is WET, very wet indeed.  We live on the side of a steep and thickly wooded valley and, though this is a decidedly damp bit of the country, we’re rarely threatened by heavy rain, it just rolls on down the hill or gets hoovered up by the trees. But with 2 months-worth of rain falling in the last 48 hours, the back garden has started to flood. The last time this happened, a spring rose in the kitchen, next to the fridge. I suppose we could have bottled it up in blue glass and called it Hotpoint Spring, or somesuch. I suppose it would have been more positive and productive than all the running about, shouting and panicking that we actually indulged in. Afterwards, we dug as big and deep a soakaway as we could for a house built on bedrock and so far, it’s served us through some frighteningly wet summers. But that water is getting deeper. Maybe I should get some nice coloured glass bottles in, just in case.

That big-bottom in a barbour is me, btw, trying to fill the bird-feeders in a deluge. We all need our oilskins in this weather, even little dogs (especially little dogs!)

Stay dry my fellow Brits, and keep a bucket handy.

Meet Poppy

Our new baby: 14 weeks old, her first day home, and it’s all been a bit much.

 

 

 

 

 

 

She’s grown up a little now, and well used to living here with us – fond of bed – hers and ours – and creature comforts; turning into quite a little princess.

Review: The Dog Stars

by Peter Heller

2*

What on earth has happened to the world? There’s mention of a flu, and climate change. Peter Heller doesn’t say if the two are connected. Whatever flu it was, was pretty peculiar: it’s killed most of humanity. It’s killed some fish – not all the fish, but most of the kind Hig likes to catch. It’s finished off the tigers and the elephants. It’s killed all the geese and most of the elk – but that doesn’t stop Hig killing them anyway; the shooting of the mother Elk is a peculiarly cold, cruel, unpleasant passage in a book over-flowing with such things. The flu seems to have left the deer, rabbits, bears, coyotes wolves and rats untouched. I’m not sure what sort of a disease or manner of climate change would have this effect, it feels kind of pat, a device to make Hig emote, which he does often, when he’s mourning the animals he used to enjoy hunting, that aren’t there for him to kill any more.

There’s a lot about hunting in The Dog Stars, a great deal of violence, a delighted obsession in weaponry of all kinds; the book is a hymn to hunting and killing – What’s with all the killing? A society decimated by some type of flu (this bizarre flu that kills certain specific mammal species but leaves biologically-related others entirely untouched) and – just like In every other end-of-the-world book – everyone is fighting and killing each other, and over what? If the population is a fraction of what it was, wouldn’t there be more of what’s left to go around? Wouldn’t the urge to survive bring people together? There are rarely any communities in these books, just addled loners intent on staying alive by making sure everything around them ends up dead. I just don’t get it.

There’s not as much violence here as in some other apocalyptic fiction – The Road is one example, but in The Road, the violence was understandable, it was hideous but it had a point; the violence in The Dog Stars really doesn’t, or isn’t explained in any way that makes sense. Cormac McCarthy also had the good sense not to detail what went wrong in his dystopia, there’s an attempt at an explanation of the nature of the disaster in The Dog Stars, but it’s illogical, it doesn’t work.

The writing is what saves it. The style is experimental, at times beautifully written, poetical and original, but the characters all left me cold, there was not one human I was able to connect to or care about in the slightest. The dog is the only character I wanted to survive. The plot is the same as every other post-apocalypse, dystopian, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it book you’ve ever read.

In short, the violence is sickening and relentless, the plot is unoriginal. There is some cringingly badly written sex. It was an interesting reading experience, but for me, not a very enjoyable one.

Did you miss me?

Did you even notice I’d been away (oh fickle, fickle followers!)?

I’ve not been online much at all for some little time. I shall not bore you all with reasons, suffice to say a weighty combo of family issues, getting Entanglement ready for publication (see the spanky new cover, see how she sparkles and shines!), and ministering to Poppy, our new puppy (There will be pictures. Lots of pictures) led to a lengthy soujourn in the dark and misted vales of the lands where no internets shine their webly light. Or something…

Anyway, I’m back and shall no doubt be posting like a mad eejit as soon as I’ve dealt with a mighty backlog (357 and growing by the hour) of un-read emails in my inbox. Bear with me. I may be some time.

Today, I will be mostly…

Catching up with my reading and reviews and working on the cover for the print version of Entanglement. I have a bit of a snuffle – nothing major, a bit of a headache, a bit of a sore throat, a slight slow drip from my nose. I was going to pick bilberries, but it’s windy and it’s raining and I find I lack the fortitude.

It’s just one of those sorts of days.

Scent of a kitten: the 20 irrefutable theories of book cover design. Do you judge a book by its cover?

 

 

 

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