Maya Panika's Blog, page 13

Entanglement re-launched…

Yesterday afternoon and the New! Improved! version, without all those pesky, annoying glitches that seemed to pepper the original, is now live. How so many errors got past the three proof-readers – not to mention my own exhaustive (well, it exhausted me) going-over (and over. And over . And… well, you probably get the picture) – I don’t know. I have chosen to be positive and believe that the story was just so darn exciting that no one noticed the mistakes. I am saying that over and over to myself with my fingers in my ears and whistling the theme to Mapp and Lucia and la la la I can’t hear you.

These things happen. I am sent a lot of proofs and my glitchy novel doesn’t come close to some of the volumes I’ve had to read and review. I’d like to thank Mari Mann for first pointing out what a mess it was.

If you have one of these ‘review proofs’ and it’s been bothering you, you should be able to re-download it for free, if not, I’m happy to replace it with a fresh, updated copy. Otherwise, I shall be offering a free giveaway day soon (when I’ve worked out how that works). I’m also putting it into print soon, too.

It is garnering some delightful reviews. Alas, they’re scattered to the winds. It seems it’s not possible to get my UK reviews on to the US site and vice-versa, and there’s a review from Switzerland that was there for a blink but now seems to have disappeared into a parallel universe. I’ll post them all on the site so you can all bathe in the wonder that is my mighty writery glory. Or something.

In other news, I am slowly catching up to all I missed when I was offline and when the computer broke down, but 427 emails take a while to work through. I am also reading all the books I promised to read. I know I’m being slow and I do apologise most sincerely, but there’s much to be done and it all has to be somehow fitted in and around my Real Life. I expect I’ll get there in the end.

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Review: A is for Angelica

by Iain Broome

4*

Oh dear lord, what a sad, tragic tale of loss and grief and the achingly slow descent into madness. And how funny it is.

Gordon Kingdom is fifty-two. He’s left his dreary job to look after Georgina, his wife, who is bed-ridden and incapacitated after a stroke. Gordon hasn’t told the doctor about his wife, making the choice to ignore reality even as it’s hitting him in the face with a spade, because he and Georgina have a pre-prepared plan, a system for her care, he knows he can look after her better himself. He spends his days observing his neighbours, keeping notes on the details of their lives, keeping watch through the day and night. Then Angelica moves in across the road and Gordon’s obsession with his neighbours becomes Angelica-centric – and begins to deepen.

At times I was reminded of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time in Gordon’s language and thoughts, his almost autistic attention to detail and the obsessive way he now deals with every tiny facet of his always-small and now fast-shrinking life. There are echoes of The Roundabout Man and Harold Fry, too, but A is for Angelica lacks the sweetness that lifted those stories out of depression and into melancholy. Iain Broome uses dark humour in place of sentiment to diffuse the tension and it works well, it feels real. His style is sparse and spare, he sticks to the point, the plot never wanders unnecessarily. There’s a wealth of beautiful detail but it never gets in the way of the story:

‘She sits and crochets in the light from her television. Its colours always changing.’

‘There’s a puddle on the floor and a hole in the roof. The wood is rotting and coated with moss. Along the wall is a line of nails. Some have tools hanging from them, other just shapes of tools drawn round with a felt tip pen. There’s a hammer where a spanner should be.’

A is for Angelica is a surprisingly compelling page-turner; a fast read and terrifically told but terribly depressing. I couldn’t decide if it was darkly, comically, tragically funny or comically dark and tragic. I feel the latter is most apposite, though I did laugh – sometimes out-loud – there are some wonderfully comic moments, but I cried more.

The end was inevitable but no less moving for all that and I suspect the tragedy doesn’t end with the final page. And was it just me, or was Angelica a terrifically annoying person? I used to know someone just like her. I know if I were Gordon, I’d have made sure my doors were always locked and kept my distance.

Review: What Dies in Summer

by Tom Wright

3*

The tale is narrated by Biscuit, a teenage boy from Oak Cliff, Texas, who tells us about the summer he and his cousin LA found the raped and mutilated body of a young girl. It soon it emerges that the girl is not her killer’s first victim, nor, it seems, will she be the last if Biscuit’s psychic visions are to be believed. The race is on to find the killer before he claims another life.

Biscuit and his cousin LA, live with their grandmother, both families broken by abuse and violence. You do begin to wonder if every family in Oak Cliff has an abusive father; a dark-vein of incest and violence runs through the narrative, binding the disparate themes together.

The language is rich and lush and heavily descriptive; perfectly pitched for this tale set across one long, hot, humid southern summer. The language is the best of it; the plot is decidedly thin, loosely knit around the killings and abuse. The story wanders all over the place and never seems to get to the point. I still don’t really understand about the trip to Minnesota, it doesn’t help develop the characters and it doesn’t advance the story at all, the revelations it supported could as easily have come over a cup of coffee in the kitchen. It had no apparent purpose other than to broaden the scope and pad out the plot and the plot didn’t really need padding, what the plot needed was more focus and direction. It’s why I couldn’t love this book.

The writing is undoubtedly gorgeous but it needs more to hang on. A good sub plot would have done the trick and there was a stab at one, in Biscuit’s psychic flashes and the sudden appearance of the shaman woman, but neither were developed or went anywhere. The thing as a whole felt a little like summer’s day at the pool; we jump right in at the deep end with Biscuit and his life – no real beginning as such. We swim and paddle and mess around for two hundred and eighty-odd pages, then jump right out again, having been nowhere and done little, but had a pleasant enough time in between.

In short, What Dies in Summer is full of lovely moments and promise, but as a novel, it never quite delivered.

Review: The Trinity Game

by Sean Chercover

4*

I rarely read mysteries or crime novels – I’m not really a fan. I picked up The Trinity Game because I enjoy most things that have a hint of the paranormal, and was glad I did, it was a truly terrific read, a fast moving thriller with an intriguing premise, a crime thriller with a supernatural twist that hooks you and doesn’t let go. My only complaint is that my favourite character, the best character, doesn’t make it to the end. Such a waste, but a demise that was always on the cards.

It’s hard to say much more without spoiling the plot; The Trinity Game is not especially unique or original – Religious investigators, supposed miracles, Vatican shenanigans and double dealings have been fashionable since the Da Vinci Code – but Sean Chercover twists the usual premise and sets it amongst the show-preachers of the American South, adding great atmosphere, and he’s a much better writer than Dan Brown.

It’s not great literature but it’s not meant to be. It’s a hell of a page-turner, with enough twists to keep you guessing. Thoroughly enjoyable nonsense which I highly recommend. I look forward to the sequel.

Review: The Saint Zita Society (BBC Audio)

by Ruth Rendell. Audio read by Carole Boyd

2*

There’s something terribly old fashioned about this book: the language, the situations, the characters, even the way the pub seems to be at the centre of everyone’s social life – it all has the feeling of something written in the eighties or earlier, it certainly doesn’t feel like it was written this century. Just one (of many) examples of this is the misuse and misunderstanding of the role of the mobile phone. Having placed a mobile right at the heart of the story, Ruth Rendell then has a 22 year old character desperately waiting for the paper to come out in order to catch the news. Never once does Montserrat check her phone for an update or even check her texts.

All the young people are wrong, VERY wrong, they don’t feel real at all. The older characters are more believable but the thing as a whole is not good. Too many loose ends are not tied up, too many things simply don’t add up, too many things aren’t explained because they can’t be explained. I hesitate to give specific details because I’m sure there are people who do want to hear this audio and I don’t want to spoil their fun, but there are far too many badly-thought out, unimaginative and lazy details in this story.

None of the characters were especially well-drawn, but there seemed to me something particularly off about the minorities, those who were ethnically or mentally ‘different’. I don’t really know quite what it was that bothered me, nothing concrete, just something in the tone, something dreadfully caricature that left me with a rather uncomfortable feeling. It was just one more thing to dislike in this generally lacklustre telling of a mundane tale.

The audiobook is read by Carole Boyd, aka Linda Snell, a voice instantly recognisable to anyone who follows The Archers; she does her best with the material she’s been given.

I didn’t hate The St. Vita Society, but I didn’t much like it either; it didn’t rouse any strong emotions in me. In short, it was predictable, unremarkable, bog-standard and disappointing.

Review: Communion Town

by Sam Thompson

4*

A highly, almost painfully literary series of stories; some I enjoyed very much, some not so much, some not at all. All are written in an absorbing, poetic style, with a literary brilliance that blankets rather than shines. Communion Town abounds with strange and original metaphor; it feels experimental, and a little too self-consciously clever.

What is it about? Is it about anything, really? I thought I was catching clues, like the clever use of grammar: `Time is strange in certain rooms.’ Then, `Time is strange. In certain rooms…’ But if these were pointers to an overall theme, I missed it.

I wish it had been better constructed, if the stories had been linked by even tenuous threads – just one character running through would have rounded it out and given more weight, more meat.

The writing is gorgeous but it’s a little like tinsel without the tree; it needs more flesh on its bones, but it’s still worth 4 stars.

Home…

At last! The garden is an impassable jungle, my artichokes are beset by blackfly and a fluffy white fungus that smells of mushrooms has sprung up under the kitchen tiles, but at least the internet is consistent and fully-functioning, unlike at my Dad’s, where the internet has been pretty much un-usable for weeks now, hence my absence from this blog and all things social and networky.

I expect you think that not having the interwebz for a couple of week would = lots of books read and lots of work done (you would, wouldn’t you? I know I would). Alas, life at Dad’s is not like that. I shall not bore you with the details, suffice to say, I am sadly behind with almost everything that makes up the fabric of what I laughingly call my life.

In short, I am back online (huzzah!) but there’s much catching up to do so please bear with me. Normal service and etc. etc. yadda yadda. You know the drill.

Finally back online

After a long, hot, dry journey through the wastelands of the internetless. What can I say? My Dad’s internet provider is a hound of Hell and his service is complete and utter unwashed, dirty pants. Even now, everything is slow and clunking like my thought processes before coffee.

I’m trying to catch up but there’s a lot to do. If you’ve contacted me recently about anything at all, please accept my apologies and bear with me while I work my way through the backlog.

In the meantime, here’s an interesting piece of news from The Bookseller:

   Kindle books ‘outselling print’ on Amazon.co.uk

New books

See what the postman brought this morning!

The Man Booker longlist is out

It seems a nicely eclectic choice, I can’t say I miss seeing Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis or Rose Tremain – whose exclusion seems to have twisted the knickers of some commentators, it’s good to see new names on the list. I’m currently reading* two of the contenders: Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies and Sam Thompson’s Communion Town.  I’ve already read, reviewed, and can thoroughly recommend Ned Beauman’s The Teleportation Accident and The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce.

The Telegraph have an introduction to the books and a poll…

And a look about what this year’s list says about the changing landscape of fiction.

*I say currently reading, I sort of am, but everything’s on hold while I finish Sean Chercover’s deliciously page-turny religious thriller The Trinity Game.