Maya Panika's Blog, page 5
June 23, 2013
A delightful new review for Entanglement
Loved this book. The writing is crisp and engaging and often hilarious. The lead character is damaged but very loveable, and all the characters are deftly drawn. Fascinating supernatural, religious, and historical themes make this book a good candidate to be the thinking person’s DaVinci Code. The settings are so believable that when the characters are in Angel’s snowy secret world, it’s chilling and when they are in Angel’s cosy house, one can practically feel the warmth from the hearth or the sunlight pouring in through the library windows. All of which lulls one into entering the world of the book and make it much, much worse when the horror seeps in. There’s some beautiful and vivid imagery, and a gripping plot, but be warned, this is not, at its unsettling heart, a sugary story, and parts of it are spine-chilling.
A cracking read.
I note from the other reviews that this is the first in a series. Excellent news!
June 22, 2013
Re-blog: The digital truths traditional publishers don’t want to hear
The choices offered by digital publishing can only be good news for writers, says Barry Eisler. So why are traditional publishers so angry?
From The Guardian. Click on the pic to read the rest.
May 18, 2013
Review: The Memory of Lost Senses
by Judith Kinghorn
4 stars
The Memory of Lost Senses is a very inviting book, with its beautiful emerald cover and intriguing blurb. It’s rather slow in the beginning, the early chapters leap jarringly through time and space and point of view, but eventually the style settles down and a captivating story emerges – Cora’s story: an elderly countess, English by birth, she has spent most of her life in Paris and Rome. Cora swore she would never return to England, yet here she is, living in the quiet Hampshire village of Bramley, in a beautiful house, built for her by one of her many husbands – or so the gossip goes in the village, which has never seen anyone quite so exotic or mysterious, as Cora, the Countess de Chevalier de Saint Leger.
The Memory of Lost Senses is a novel all about memory, how memory informs us, how we are our memories: change the memory and you change the life, especially when there is no one left alive who knows the real truth, not even yourself.
Cora’s memories are as fluid as the life she’s led. Her life is a self-penned myth, one she wrote as she fled from her past to a new life in Italy, then France, then Italy again. Always on the move and constantly reinventing herself, hiding from a past that she has buried under layers of lies. The only person whose knowledge comes close to the truth is Cora’s friend Sylvia, and even she doesn’t know it all. Charged with writing Cora’s memoirs, Sylvia finds herself waging a constant battle with her friend’s refusal to be interviewed or even speak about the past except through well-worn stories of questionable veracity. Does Sylvia need to ask so many questions? She’s spent her life writing about Cora, she already knows everything Cora is willing to give up – and more. An elderly virgin authoress, in love with her subject, the writer of dozens of imaginary romances, all, without exception, based on her friend’s life… Or is that the wrong way round? So much of Cora’s life is an invention, so much of it informs the lives of Sylvia’s characters, is the Cora the world knows already little more than Sylvia’s invention?
It’s a question this novel repeatedly asks: who is the author, who is the subject? Ghosts real and imaginary haunt the living and history seems destined to continually repeat itself through the generations as stories twist back on themselves as we journey through time and memory – through the long, hot days of the scorching summer of 1911.Back then, through seventy years of Cora’s life. Finally forward to 1923, to an England slowly recovering from the horrors of The Great War.
The Memory of Lost Senses is a complex tale, attractively detailed and beautifully woven; a perfect summer read for warm days in the garden with a tall glass of Pimms.
May 16, 2013
Review: The Hired Man
by Aminatta Forna
4 stars
An English family take a house in Croatia, planning to spend the summer doing it up before selling it on, apparently oblivious to the horrors that had happened around them not so very long ago – or are they? The pre-teen daughter knows more than she lets on to her mother, or does her mother simply not want to know? Duro – the local man hired to renovate a house he knows too well – isn’t telling, and will never tell. He, like everyone around him, has wrapped himself in lies to protect him from nightmares. The family come to rely heavily on practical, capable Duro. A love story seems to be developing – or is that all in Duro’s head? What happens in Duro’s head is the story. The character development is wonderful, as a taciturn, damaged man reluctantly gives up his story.
There is nothing surprising or remarkable in the plot, the characters are what makes this tale: Duro especially, but also the members of English family, who are instantly recognisable and real. The story is slow and all too predictable – we all know what happened in the Balkans and how this tale of buried memories will end. The Hired Man is about the slow reveal: the parts the various protagonists played – like a striptease, a dance of the seven veils, like peeling a scab from an old wound. It’s about a cast of characters trapped in a life where someone hit pause button over two decades ago. Everyone lies: to his neighbours and to himself. No one dares speak out or tell what they know about each other. Everyone lives with a past like a loose thread no one dares pull.
April 25, 2013
Review: The Other Half of Me
by Morgan McCarthy
5 stars
It’s been a long time since I finished a book in 3 days, certainly not a book as literary as this, with the thinnest of plots, but I found The Other Half of Me absolutely enthralling: at times, almost impossible to put down. Not a great deal happens in The Other Half of Me, the plot is slight, but beautifully detailed and wonderfully told.
Brother and sister, Jonathan and Theo, grow up at Evendon, a lovely house by the sea, where money is abundant but love is absent. Their father is missing and presumed dead. Their mother is just a vague presence who floats through life with a drink in her hand. The locals and the household staff despise them. They have no friends, only each other.
Everything changes when their mother is hospitalised and their grandmother Eve arrives to take over the care of the house and the children. Eve Anthony is famous, glamorous, extremely rich. As the children grown up, the passage of their lives is made easy and smooth by their grandmother’s money and seemingly endless list of influential contacts. Jon and Theo’s future should be rosy, but of course, it isn’t. Too many secrets, too many lies: it soon gradually becomes clear to Jonathan why his mother and her brother hate Eve. Theo, unable to hate, is slowly tipped into madness. From the start, you sense that she is doomed.
Eve admires Jonathan as a chip off her block, but is constantly exasperated by Theo – as was I. I’m sure we were meant to adore her as Jonathan does; to be charmed by her kind naïveté and helpless absent-mindedness, but I’ve known too many Theos and I couldn’t love her; she is silly and childish and extremely annoying. I frequently wanted to slap her. Poor Jonathan constantly angsts – has he been unkind to Theo by asking her to grow up and take responsibility for her own life? I doubt if I could have been half so patient as Jonathan – or even Eve. Theo strikes me as someone who should be institutionalised for her own good and everyone else’s sanity.
My irritation with Theo didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the book – far from it, she was the spice of it, Jonathan and Eve alone would have been too solid a dish for my taste. And, as I seem to keep saying, not a great deal happens in TOH, but the tragic progress is deliciously compelling and the writing is gorgeous – poetic, but lightly done: only just short of perfect. I couldn’t put the book down but dreaded its end. It’s been a long, long time I was so absolutely absorbed in the world of a book as I was with Jonathan and Theo, Eve and Evendon.
April 9, 2013
My April reading
Arrived this morning.
Musing on mornings and writing.
I’m having a gingerbread latte for my breakfast because I’m a grown-up and I can do what I please and because I’ve been up since just 5am; been awake since four. I find the joys (and they are many) of lying in the dark, in a large, comfortable bed with my pup at my side (she always gets into the bed at night and we’ve given up trying to stop her. Why would we? She’s a delicious, if not always considerate, bed-companion) are soon outweighed by a chattering mind and the need to get up and do something, even if it’s only meandering through blogs and trying to get Twitter to work again on Firefox (a lost cause).
Soon I shall be wending my way upstairs to work on Chaos – which I’m still plotting, but doing a lot of writing as well, because characters keep chatting to me, and because I can’t seem to help it. There are a lot of new characters in this one, some of them living, most of them not. My favourite is Luke. In the film of the book he’ll be played by Benedict Cumberbatch or Patterson Joseph (yes, he’s that amorphous. It’s part of his charm).
Progress is Good, if slow – which has more to do with a paucity of time than lack of ideas, ideas are flowing nicely. My notes are getting confusing, of course – par for the course on the first draft. An idea arises, I can’t see where on earth it will go, so I open a new doc and stick it in my ‘Chaos’ file, and soon I have hundreds of unconnected, collected thoughts on separate pages, some of them just a sentence or two, others many pages in length. I wish I could work out a better way to organise my ideas – I’ve tried many things, but it always ends up the same way. I’d be grateful for any advice (unless your advice is to use a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets depress me.
I should take Poppy out, get some air. The weather here has turned windy and grey. It might even rain. It seems an age since it last rained…
April 8, 2013
Review of 'Entanglement' by Maya Panika
Entanglement is a paranormal murder mystery that delightfully wanders from the well-trodden romance driven norm for the genre. Grounding her paranormal setting in quantum physics as well as spirituality adds to the reality of Ms. Panika's world. Her lead character, Angel Copperwheat, is not a hulking heart-throb. Rather, he's a self-doubting somewhat cowardly academic, who struggles to step into the role of hero.
A lovely review of Entanglement from Armen Pogharian, author of Misaligned: The Celtic Connection.
Can you tell what it is yet?
This is the current state of the plums. Always the first trees to flower, in a normal year they’d be a mass of snowy blossom by now. But this is not a normal year. Two weeks and three days since Spring officially sprung. The clocks have gone forward, the snow is finally melting, but there are no leaves on the trees and precious little underneath them – a few primroses and snowdrops; even the crocuses are only just struggling into flower.
The sun is out today. It feels as if spring might finally be on the way. I’ve been out planting fruit trees: a greengage, a cherry and a William’s Pear. I had to scrape snow off the ground to do it, but they’ve been standing in the shed, in buckets of water for weeks. They’re looking awfully fed up with it, their buds are trying their best to burst. I simply couldn’t bear to make them wait any longer.
I haven’t planted a single seed yet – unless you count sprouting some marrowfats for pea shoots. It would be pointless to attempt to plant anything outside while the ground is still so cold.
I suppose I could be – should be – planting into pots and trays but there’s only so much window space to spare and honestly…? It’s been such a dire year so far, I simply can’t raise the will to get on with it.
My seed potatoes are well chatted, positively raring to go. I have no idea when I’ll be able to get them into the ground.
It’s the coldest spring since 1963, apparently and I can well believe it. And after all that miserably cold and muddy work in the garden, it’s definitely time for some comfort food.
Beany Sausage Tomato Mess.
You’ll need (all quantities are guesstimates. This is a dish composed mostly of leftovers – use whatever you have lying around. I play it very fast and loose):
Beans of your choice. Depends on what I have that day. This time, I used chickpeas, adzuki and Red Kidney.
Sausages of your choice. We like Linda McCartney’s. They’re Vegan and extremely tasty.
One large carrot, one stick of celery, one onion, red or white – all quite finely chopped.
As many cloves of garlic as you like (we like lots), crushed.
One tin of chopped tomatoes.
2 tablespoons of tomato puree.
Passata.
Oregano to taste
3 teaspoons of ground Cumin
1 teaspoon of brown sugar
As much chilli powder as you care to use – leave it out altogether if you don’t like it hot- howsoever it pleaseth thee.
Salt – to taste.
Oil for cooking.
Get the sausages browning in a frying pan – no need to add oil, unless you really want to. Keep an eye on them, don’t let them burn while you crush your garlic, and finely dice the onion, carrot and celery. Throw the chopped veggies into a pan with a little oil. Put the lid on and let them and sweat over a gentle heat until soft. When the sausages are cooked to your liking, take them off the heat and cut them into largeish pieces of about an inch or so, and set them aside.
Turn up the heat a little, till the veggies start to sizzle. Throw in the beans and all the seasonings and let it all cook together for a minute or two, before chucking in the sausages. Stir in a tin of chopped tomatoes, the tomato puree and enough passata to give a nicely sloppy texture. Let the whole thing simmer for another 5 to 10 minutes. Serve over pasta, over rice, with some good, crusty bread, on its own, with some cheese on top – however you like it best.
It looks a bit of a mess, but trust me, it is very, very good.
