Lucy (lucyannunwin) - Worcester, The United Kingdom (243 books)

Lucy is currently reading Diary of a Somebody by Brian Bilston	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Jan 13, 2020 01:50AM · 1 like · like
Lucy rated a book really liked it The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This utterly readable and fun book follows two characters, who, because of financial pressure, find themselves sharing a flat without actually meeting. Leon gets to use the flat during the day, then goes to work nightshifts as a palliative care ...more
Jan 07, 2020 02:59AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Lucy rated a book really liked it The Deathless Girls by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The Deathless Girls tells the origin story for the ‘Brides of Dracula’ from a more feminist perspective. As always, Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s writing is breathtaking. She writes the most sumptuous, delicate, beautifully crafted children’s books right ...more
Jan 06, 2020 07:51AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Deathless Girls by Kiran Millwood Hargrave. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Deathless Girls by Kiran Millwood Hargrave <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Lucy rated a book really liked it Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Queenie should be a pretty ordinary book. It features a pretty ordinary girl, living a pretty ordinary life, with an ordinary circle of friends. Her challenges will be starkly familiar to many of us; from the feet-in-stirrups gynaecological ...more
Dec 11, 2019 04:27AM · like · see review
Lucy finished reading Knock Three Times by Cressida Cowell Read 2 times	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Sep 24, 2019 03:26AM · 4 likes · like · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Knock Three Times by Cressida Cowell. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Knock Three Times by Cressida Cowell <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Lucy rated a book it was amazing The Wizards of Once: Knock Three Times: Book 3 by Cressida Cowell Read 2 times	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
_Review by Alma, 8 It is so exciting to leap back into the magical Wizards of Once world, of snow cats, giants, druids, sprites, and werewolves. Knock Three Times is the third book. In the first two books, Xar, a wizard, makes friends with Wish, a ...more
Sep 22, 2019 04:02AM · like · see review
Lucy rated a book it was amazing The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Light vs Dark, Good vs Evil, Hope vs Despair. It’s rare to meet such absolutes in modern fiction, but The Nickel Boys deals in extremes. It opens with two contrasting images. A little boy gets the “best gift of his life on Christmas day 1962.” A ...more
Aug 02, 2019 04:40AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Lucy rated a book really liked it The Binding by Bridget Collins (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
There is a lot wrong with The Binding. For all the luscious language, not much happens in the first third. It’s mainly the painstaking building of a skillset that’s never used, which feels a tad wasteful. And it commits a book sin I normally find ...more
Jul 18, 2019 07:25AM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Binding by Bridget Collins. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Binding by Bridget Collins <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Lucy rated a book really liked it The Farm by Joanne Ramos (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The face of Desperate Housewives star Felicity Huffman was all over the internet in Spring 2019, mixed up in a college admissions bribery scandal. Huffman’s part was small - an SAT exam - but the wider case was a rabbit’s warren. It’s alleged bribes ...more
Jul 18, 2019 03:56AM · like · see review
Lucy rated a book it was amazing A Suitable Boy (A Suitable Boy, #1) by Vikram Seth	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Jul 18, 2019 03:56AM · like

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Diary of a Somebody
by Brian Bilston

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The Flatshare
by Beth O'Leary

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This utterly readable and fun book follows two characters, who, because of financial pressure, find themselves sharing a flat without actually meeting. Leon gets to use the flat during the day, then goes to work nightshifts as a palliative care ...more

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The Deathless Girls
by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (Goodreads Author)

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The Deathless Girls tells the origin story for the ‘Brides of Dracula’ from a more feminist perspective.
As always, Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s writing is breathtaking. She writes the most sumptuous, delicate, beautifully crafted children’s books right ...more

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Queenie
by Candice Carty-Williams

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Queenie should be a pretty ordinary book.

It features a pretty ordinary girl, living a pretty ordinary life, with an ordinary circle of friends. Her challenges will be starkly familiar to many of us; from the feet-in-stirrups gynaecological Queenie should be a pretty ordinary book.

It features a pretty ordinary girl, living a pretty ordinary life, with an ordinary circle of friends. Her challenges will be starkly familiar to many of us; from the feet-in-stirrups gynaecological examination opening, to the political frustrations, to the anxiety attacks. Many, too, will recognise the everyday realities of being a black British woman living an everyday London life. But familiar in life, is not the same as familiar in print. I can only imagine it might be a bittersweet shock the first time you see life reflected plainly in mainstream art. The joy of recognition undercut by the knowledge that that joy has been previously absent.

So many simple, frank realities are presented in Queenie. Much press coverage has been given to its portrayal of race. Blackness on the page in all its nuance and everyday detail, as it doesn’t feel like we’ve seen on the bestseller’s list before. There are smudges of dark foundation on cream cushions, and entitled white clubbers touching Queenie’s hair on a night out like she’s an “animal in a petting zoo.” There’s the sexual objectification, not just of her female body, but of the colour of the skin encasing in, complete with insulting and racist confectionary comparisons.

But Candice Carty-Williams isn’t just writing about race, she’s writing about a person; Queenie. So it also sings with refreshing truth about modern Britishness, about feminism, about anxiety and mental health breakdowns. It’s the most realistic book I’ve read about living in South London, about working in the media, about defiantly carrying a few suitcase-loads of baggage into any relationship. When it comes to representation, it’s not just people of colour Candice Carty-Williams is speaking out for. There is so much raw emotional honesty in this book, that I found I’d been crying in recognition through a whole chapter without even really noticing, and I’m a middle-aged white woman.

It’s no surprise the book has found a wide readership. From the outset, you meet a damaged woman navigating modern coupledom, and the world, who needs a person on her side, no questions. The relationship breakdown that sets her on a destructive path truly kicks off when the otherwise good guy, Tom, refuses to stand up for her against his family’s casual racism, uttering: “I can’t protect you when it’s my family you think you need protecting from.” In this instance, the racism was the bitter core of the argument, yes, but the need for someone to have your corner is universal.

For all the book’s sensitivity, though, the bittersweet truth is there shouldn’t be anything too massively groundbreaking here. Queenie itself doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be a work of literary genius. If the publishing world were as it should be, then would this book stand out? Yes, it’s light and clear and clever. Its characters are nuanced, and the relationship drama is insightful. But still…

Where critics and the reading public are still falling over themselves in praise of Sally Rooney’s Normal People (and rightly, it’s another great book) Queenie serves to nudge the definition sideways. To ask the question of those who so delight in celebrating the literary representation of ‘normal’ — have you even looked around to see what ‘normal’ really is? Or, to go one stage further, as Queenie’s therapist in the book does:
“You used a term that I don’t really like.”
So, Queenie’s ordinaryness is exactly what is necessary. It is a classic ‘everywoman’ tale to highlight the depressing lack of them.

I understand that was exactly what inspired Candice Carty-Williams to write in the first place, so job done. Now she’s done that, I’m intrigued to see what she writes next, as I’m sure it’ll be brilliant. In the meantime, she’s written exactly the shake up the industry needs, with exactly the character to inspire others to follow her. For sure, Queenie will be leading an army of literary lookalikes onto the shelves soon, and it will be wonderful. I just hope they’re all as thoughtful and genuine as she is. ...more

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Knock Three Times
by Cressida Cowell

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The Wizards of Once: Knock Three Times: Book 3
by Cressida Cowell

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_Review by Alma, 8

It is so exciting to leap back into the magical Wizards of Once world, of snow cats, giants, druids, sprites, and werewolves.

Knock Three Times is the third book. In the first two books, Xar, a wizard, makes friends with Wish, a ...more

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The Nickel Boys
by Colson Whitehead (Goodreads Author)

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Light vs Dark, Good vs Evil, Hope vs Despair. It’s rare to meet such absolutes in modern fiction, but The Nickel Boys deals in extremes. It opens with two contrasting images. A little boy gets the “best gift of his life on Christmas day 1962.” A Light vs Dark, Good vs Evil, Hope vs Despair. It’s rare to meet such absolutes in modern fiction, but The Nickel Boys deals in extremes. It opens with two contrasting images. A little boy gets the “best gift of his life on Christmas day 1962.” A record that never leaves the turntable, gaining scratches, pops and crackles as marks of devotion: Martin Luther King at Zion Hill. An innocent young Elwood Curtis listens with love, and he internalises the optimism and idealism, the grit and stoicism: “Throw us in jail and we will still love you… But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory.”

But just before we meet Elwood, there is a prologue, with a less than optimistic tone. Set in the present day, we learn of a secret graveyard at the site of a former ‘correctional’ school for boys: The Nickel Academy. Archaeology students are clearing the area for property developers, in exchange for field credits, and stumble upon the graves. Bones are fractured, “cratered skulls, the rib cages riddled with buckshot.” The scene is grim, cynical, depressing, bleak.

During the course of The Nickel Boys we get to know both Elwood and The Nickel Academy better, but neither stray far from their initial introduction. Elwood is industrious, moral and, as his friend Turner describes him: “sturdy.” He clings to Martin Luther King Jnr’s teachings and wrestles with what they ask of him, but his idealism remains rooted deep; his integrity is not compromised. The Nickel Academy is as bleak and horrifying as the excavation suggests; a place of misery, deprivation and brutal violence. The supervisors there have no redeeming plot lines or characteristics. There are no slivers of forgiveness for their actions or decisions. It’s good vs bad, with no mud in the water.

A wrong-place-wrong-time decision means Elwood is sentenced to time in the Academy, and it’s the resulting friction between optimism and pessimism, hope and despair that powers the novel. Elwood striving to wear his oppressors down, as Martin Luther King suggested, with his ‘capacity to suffer’; the supervisors at Nickel simply wearing all their charges down, the better to exploit and control them. Elwood’s idealism is subject to a constant grinding pressure. Like the needle on the over-played record; the story we hear playing out is compelling enough by itself, but the added crackle, pop and hiss add a layer of tension that make the novel sing.

This is a quietly powerful book. Understated in the best possible way. After the fearsome brutality and steam punk virtuosity of Colson Whitehead’s last novel — the Pulitzer and National Book Award winning The Underground Railroad — this has a gentler, more philosophical tone. It could almost be described as light; its easy readability belying its political and emotional content. It gives the impression of telling things as they were, laying them bare in all their quiet, affecting sadness. That constant grinding friction between hope and despair is a long, quiet game, after all.

Elwood himself would not approve, perhaps. He likes to make his protests known, and rejects his Grandmother Harriet’s strict adherence to not “acting above your station,” keeping your head down with quiet sadness. She was desperate, instead, to keep him alive. Her father died in jail after an arrest for the Jim Crow offence of “bumptious contact,” her husband was killed breaking up a scuffle between a black dishwasher and three white men, her daughter disappeared with a husband who couldn’t re-adjust back to life in an unforgiving civilian world after the relative equality of the armed forces. As Elwood learns to survive in Nickel, he realises he’s become more like how he’d seen his Grandmother “in less kind moments… He was like one of those Negroes Dr. King spoke of in his letter from jail, so complacent and sleepy after years of oppression that they had adjusted to it and learned to sleep in it as their only bed.” And so his resistance, and the friction, step back up.

Towards the middle of The Nickel Boys the timeline splits, between the characters as children and then later as adults in a modern day narrative, after the students exhume the bones. It’s a relief to be taken out of the claustrophobia of the Florida detention centre and into modern New York. For a fleeting moment in this thread we get to look back on the silent battle of Elwood’s childhood through adult eyes. But he’s frustrated when a loved one can’t see the “big picture.” To him, the “big picture” is just his years at Nickel. For all the years he’s lived since, the only picture he can really see is whether idealism survived, or whether it was crushed, in that dreadful place. To her, it’s “the immense exertion white people put into grinding them down,” — she forgot how bad it used to be, then the story of Nickel reminded her: “It all returned in a rush, set off by tiny things, like standing on a corner trying to hail a cab … [and] by the big things, a drive through a blighted neighborhood snuffed out by that same immense exertion, or another boy shot dead by a cop.”

An adult Elwood can’t zoom out to see what she sees, that under the endless push and pull, the quiet, sad survival in the face of unendurable inequality and tragedy lives on. As to the coin flip of optimism vs pessimism, hope vs despair? After a heart-wrenching and thought-provoking finale, Colson Whitehead closes the final pages of the book with one very clear image, and he might not land the coin on the side you expect. ...more

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The Binding
by Bridget Collins (Goodreads Author)

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There is a lot wrong with The Binding. For all the luscious language, not much happens in the first third. It’s mainly the painstaking building of a skillset that’s never used, which feels a tad wasteful. And it commits a book sin I normally find ...more

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The Farm
by Joanne Ramos (Goodreads Author)

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The face of Desperate Housewives star Felicity Huffman was all over the internet in Spring 2019, mixed up in a college admissions bribery scandal. Huffman’s part was small - an SAT exam - but the wider case was a rabbit’s warren. It’s alleged bribes The face of Desperate Housewives star Felicity Huffman was all over the internet in Spring 2019, mixed up in a college admissions bribery scandal. Huffman’s part was small - an SAT exam - but the wider case was a rabbit’s warren. It’s alleged bribes were paid to entrance administrators. That psychologists intentionally misdiagnosed rich kids with learning disabilities, so they got longer to do exams. It’s even claimed the faces of hopeful students were photoshopped onto athletes’ bodies to get them the top college places reserved for sports stars.

It was a great story, but the headlines expressed shock. How could these people use their wealth and privilege to cheat their way into a superior education? How could they so blithely skew the system without realising the effect their selfish actions had on the poorer people, the people of colour, the working class whites? Those with better SAT scores, with genuine athletic ability? Those kids who had earned their Ivy League places, but were now pushed out as these privileged brats were nudged to the top of the queue through brazen cheating?

Was it the brazen-ness that was shocking? Because surely the fact of it was not shocking at all? Surely everyone knew that was how the system worked? And in the days that followed the breaking news, inevitable editorials expanded to include the bigger picture, the wider context of how these privileged groups exploited the system in countless other ways; not just at the point of application, but all the way through the college years and beyond. Because of course they do.

Around the same time this scandal hit the headlines, Joanne Ramos’ The Farm was released. It describes a world where the wealthy, privileged few delegate the mess and risk of childbearing onto mainly immigrant women. This isn’t pitched as surrogacy for medical necessity, although that possibility is touched upon, and the line is pleasantly blurred; but more for convenience. It all happens at Golden Oaks, which is run like a luxury health spa. There, the carefully vetted “Hosts” see out their pregnancy in a closely monitored environment; with a controlled diet, exercise regime, health checks etc. Their personal freedom is exchanged for an easy life and the promise of a big pay check on safe delivery of the baby. While Filipinos, like the main character, Jane, are preferred for their “service-oriented” attitude, the most wealthy of clients can opt for “Premium Hosts” like Jane’s roommate Reagan — white, and Ivy League educated.

I was expecting The Farm to be a deeper, darker dystopia. It was pitched as a modern version of The Handmaid’s Tale, so I was braced for it to open a rift in my imagination where a horrific vision of what could be would flood in. Instead, The Farm felt comparatively light. Quite believable. As though it were something we might scroll past on Twitter next week and wonder why the headlines were quite so scandalised, because of course it exists. Of course there’s a baby farm where rich couples exploit desperate immigrant women’s bodies for their convenience. Horrendous, yes, but shocking?

In the college admissions scandal, some families are accused of paying “a really smart guy” to just sit the entrance exams for their kids completely, so they can carry on their charmed lives uninterrupted. It’s been suggested this pattern continues throughout the education system; that it’s widespread for students to pay others to write their essays for them. As they get those lucrative jobs there will be someone else to prepare their speeches, coach them in phone calls…all the inconvenience of accruing success outsourced. So the fictional characters in The Farm want a different kind of success - the perfect family - but they too want to outsource the inconvenience and continue their lives of luxury uninterrupted.

And that’s where Ramos’ skill lies with The Farm; not by presenting a drastic dystopia, but by sticking so close to our current reality. The world she portrays is uncannily believable, which is all the more unsettling.

She also succeeds in shining light into the many morally grey areas. The owners of Golden Oaks are not the clear-cut antagonists of Atwood’s Gilead. Many chapters are narrated from the centre manager, Mae’s, perspective, which shows her in a slightly sympathetic, if deluded, light. The seeds of the scheme come from the same place that modern surrogacy comes from; a place of medical or social need, and Ramos shows how the managers have let it evolve past that in a way they’ve convinced themselves is acceptable. It is utterly convincing that they almost believe they’re offering the hosts a great deal. And the good guys are not so clear-cut either, as becomes clear as the novel develops.

Even in minor details, Ramos offsets the multiple narrative perspectives to great effect. In one example, Filipino host Jane warns her roommate Reagan not to leave jewellery lying around when the cleaners come. Her try-hard liberal friend is confused, while fellow “Premium Host” Lisa instantly brands Jane a racist. Ramos then revisits the incident from Jane’s perspective: she knows that when rich people carelessly lose valuable things, the cleaners are accused of stealing them.

The downside to Ramos’ painstaking consideration of everyone’s perspective is that she seems unwilling to draw a conclusion, and the end of the book is a let down. On the one hand, lots of loose threads don’t seem to be tied up - promises and threats, both from the characters and the narrative, aren’t followed through. On the other hand, some threads are tied up too neatly. If the point was moral ambiguity, then an ending was inevitably going to be hard to pull off. But there are always multiple sides to every story. Parents who just want to see their kids have the best start in life they can. Teenagers who do as they’re told, are trying to enjoy the summer and are oblivious to the scheming around them. Maybe a man with a family to feed, or a sick dog, or…who knows. At some point though, good intentions aren’t enough: you’ve got to give the story a proper ending. ...more