Author Archives: Siobhan

The Flip Side by James Bailey

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$R0Z7HUDIn The Flip Side by James Bailey, Josh experiences his own personal 2020 slightly ahead of the rest of us. Picture the scene, it’s New Year’s Eve and 135 meters above the ground in a pod on the London Eye, Josh proposes to his girlfriend, only to find out that she’s been having an affair.  In the twenty nine minutes it takes for the pod to come down to the ground, Josh loses his girlfriend, his job and his home.

With his faith in his own judgement shaken, Josh decides to outsource his judgement to a 50p coin – resolving that for a year he will flip the coin to make every decision, in the hope that the coin can help him find direction, and perhaps true love.

If I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a thousand times, big public proposals bring me out in hives. I think they’re manipulative, unless you’re with someone who is definitely into performing a relationship in public, they feel like a way of coercing someone into saying yes when they’re borderline. So I have to admit I really enjoyed the cringe factor of the opening scene of The Flip Side by James Bailey in which Josh’s proposal crashes and burns.

And this is a novel of cringe, and really good fun if you like awkward humour. It’s been compared to The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary, but I’d say that this is more sitcom than romcom, with the awkward situations Josh finds himself in with his friends and his family being some of the funniest parts of the novel, though I did quite like Josh’s search across Europe for his manic pixie dream girl.

I found reading this novel quite bittersweet at the moment. So much of the action takes place in pubs, at family parties etc. it was an odd sensation reading it in lockdown, especially with a looming Brexit which could make a plane hopping trip across Europe an impossibility for Britons before too very long.

Despite that, it’s a light and bright read which is a nice distraction from the state of the world at the moment.

Triple Chocolate Brownies with Marshmallow Ghosts

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triple chocolate ghost brownies easy halloween bake with kids

My friend’s recent virtual baby shower left me craving brownies after she received not one but two packs of Gower Kitchen Brownies. So obviously I had to make my own the next time I had the slightest excuse, cue these death by chocolate but very cute at the same time ghost brownies that the kids and I made for Halloween. They were a really easy Halloween bake with kids, but at the same time looked pretty cool on the table for a Halloween party.

Ingredients

185g butter

185g dark chocolate (I used 70% cocoa)

3 eggs

275g caster sugar

85g plain flour

40g cocoa powder

50g white chocolate

50g milk chocolate

White marshmallows

Edible pen/icing

Red food colouring

Method

  1. Preheat your oven to gas mark 4 and grease and line a brownie tin/rectangular baking tray
  2. Melt the dark chocolate and butter together over a very gentle heat (I used a double boiler method with a plastic mixing bowl and a saucepan of boiled water) you want it to melt but without getting it so hot that it burns, or retains it’s heat and knocks the air out of your egg mixture. Chop the white and milk chocolate while you wait.
  3. Cream together the eggs and sugar until they’ve fluffed up to double their original size, an electric whisk makes short work of this.
  4. When the eggs are fluffy and the chocolatey butter has cooled, fold these gently together until they have a uniform colour.
  5. Sieve and fold the plain flour and cocoa powder into the butter mixture, then stir through the chopped milk and white chocolate.
  6. Tip all of this in your cake tin and bake for 20-30 mins (depending on your tin size, keep checking until you’re happy that it’s cooked through) then allow to cool completely.
  7. When the brownies have cooked and cooled completely, remove them from the tin and cut into squares.
  8. Using the edible markers or icing pens, draw simple ghost faces on your marshmallows.
  9. Put two marshmallows and a quarter of a teaspoon of water in a microwavable bowl and cook on full power for twenty seconds, add a drop of red food colouring gel (or green, ectoplasm slime could be cool…)to this and whisk together to make a glue.
  10. Dip the marshmallow ghosts into the glue, then pop them on top of the brownies.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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Piranesi by Susanna Clarke“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi lives in the House. He supposes he always has. Only one other person lives in the House, Piranesi calls him The Other as he has never known anyone else in the house, though he has found evidence of other people in the forms of their skeletons and makes a point of tending the fourteen dead. But one day a stranger comes to the house, and the knowledge she brings will turn Piranesi’s world upside down.

Susanna Clarke writes wickedly clever books. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was wickedly clever in skewering the style of a 19th century novel, while creating an epic fantasy. Piranesi, by contrast feels far more restrained, a focused, almost academic novel that defies categorisation – part allegory, part travelogue, part personal philosophy.

For me, Piranesi felt a bit like a refraction of Plato’s Cave allegory through the lens of Robinson Crusoe. Instead of watching shadows on the wall, Piranesi sees the statues of the house which represent lost knowledge that have flowed from our real world. In his Crusoe-esque travelogue, he tries to make sense of his world, his lost past repressed by the amnesia inducing powers of the house, believing that he infers the existence of large numbers of people from the existence of the statues, and marvelling that he can makes sense of the idea of a university without the existence of one in his world, The House.

For all it’s relative brevity, Piranesi is one of those books that I could see would stay with you. It leaves you with so many questions, so many things to find an explanation for. What are we intended to take away from Piranesi’s reverence of the house? Are the birds truly augurs, and if so what is the significance of the presence of the albatrosses and their chick? Is there an environmental/ecological analogy in Piranesi’s rejection of the quest for the Great Knowledge and appreciation of the house itself? What is the house in Piranesi? While the other sees the house as Piranesi’s prison and a threat, Piranesi sees it as a sanctuary, a protective force; does the inhabitant project their own character onto the house? Is it in that sense a sort of crucible? And who is the skeleton of the little girl with the necklace?

Have you read it? What did you think?

Here is the Beehive by Sarah Crossan

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$R86Z4GI        “ She had discovered us.

This was her way of getting in touch,

     of punishing me”

Here is the Beehive by Sarah Crossan

Ana Kelly is in love with Connor Mooney. They met at her legal practice when Connor came in to draw up his will and started an affair. One day, shortly after the couple have argued, Ana receives a phone call from Connor’s wife, Rebecca. Unaware of their affair, Rebecca tells her that her husband has died and she needs to organise the legal affairs relating to his estate. Bereft without the man she loved, and unable to share her grief as a result of the affair, she transfers her obsession to the woman who stood between them.

Here is the Beehive is a short novel written in blank verse, narrated from the perspective of Ana Kelly as she struggles to come to terms with her lover’s death. Crossan makes the most of the narrow focus of her narrator, the story, despite its brevity, becoming increasingly complex as Ana’s focus shifts in increments and we learn more about her own circumstances, and the increasingly complex world of her affair. I did wonder if Connor’s wife was named Rebecca as a nod to the Daphne Du Maurier novel of the same name.

I thought the book was skillfully written, but I struggled to empathise with the main characters, at times feeling incredibly hostile towards them, a testament to the author’s skill but not a recipe for the most relaxing read! In terms of style, despite the blank verse, I’d say it’s a little bit Sally Rooney’s Normal People, twenty years after university and lacking (for me) the emotional hook and goodwill the characters in Normal People engendered.

Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith

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I had quite a lengthy debate with myself about whether I should buy Robert Galbraith aka JK Rowling’s Troubled Blood. Can you separate an artist from their art, especially in the case of JK Rowling whose art is words, and has written an insidious transphobic article as a dogwhistle to the likeminded as she attempts to justify her overtly transphobic tweets.

Working in publishing, I know that there are a lot more people dependent on the sales of a book than an author. The royalties from book purchases probably make minimal difference to the multimillionaire (some say billionaire) Rowling, but for the editors, designers, typesetters at publishers whose salaries are paid by the sales of such books, a major release tanking in the wake of cancel culture could mean redundancies for people who were not involved, who may have been among the Hachette staff who refused to work on her books because of her totally unacceptable views about transmen and transwomen.

Given the context of this furore around JK Rowling’s controversial statements, it didn’t take long for clickbait headlines seemingly flaunting spoilers to announce that Rowling had doubled down on her transphobic views by writing a “cross dressing villain”, Vanity Fair magazine online going so far as to lead with a headline suggesting that it proved Rowling’s commitment to transphobia.

So is Robert Galbraith’s 5th Strike novel Troubled Blood transphobic?

I realise of course that I’m speaking from a position of cis privilege and am not affected by the issues in the same way as someone who identifies as non-binary or trans, but I don’t think that the novel is transphobic in the way that the numerous clickbait headlines would like to imply. The cross-dressing killer they refer to, Dennis Creed, is a sub plot of the novel, an already incarcerated cis male suspect in a cold case, who rather than being transgender, or even actively cross dressing, is noted to have engaged in fetishist theft of clothing, and has posed as a camp gay man to ensure that he appears unthreatening to his victims, in order to win their trust. The novel seems to anticipate the criticisms of real world readers by providing real world comparisons for serial killers who have behaved in this way when Robin compares Creed to Jerry Brudos. Having said this, the novel did contain sections which betrayed a deep underlying fear of non-traditional gender identities assumptions with a passage that refers to a character being “hoodwinked by a careful performance of femininity” which did make me wince, but all in all, I don’t think that these aspects of the novel would have been unremarked upon had it not been for Rowling’s “series of unfortunate tweets”.

The book in itself was an improvement on Lethal White, but still suffers from Galbraith (or Rowling) being too big to be reined in by her editor. The story itself was well executed, but indulged too many diversions in the name of characterisation which diverted from the plot and added little to the story. Robin’s quest for a new perfume, the dinner party Robin’s flatmate holds for Strike, Ilsa’s miscarriage, and the entire bloody Charlotte Ross subplot would have benefitted from a liberal application of red pen to tighten the novel up.

What really gets me with Rowling’s writing, and I suppose there’s an argument that this is an aspect of most genre fiction, but I think Rowling is particularly guilty of this, is that I find that she devotes an excessive amount of time expanding upon the background and psyche of her favoured main characters (honestly, the word count wasted throughout the novel musing on Robin’s bloody perfume choices…) while writing many of the characters as lazy archetypes- the Bengali doctor, the strong black woman, the bitter spinster, the airheaded mockney receptionist… and that brings me to another of my issues with Rowling’s writing- the insistence upon writing in dialect. I’m sure that this is intended to give colour to her writing, but it seems to me that it implies a level of class judgement, at one point Strike tells a working class character that they do a good middle class accent… what the flip is a middle class accent??? Why does Rowling write a Scots accent, or a cockney accent phonetically, when she writes an RP accent, or Robin’s Yorkshire accent in standard English after describing them as such? It seems to me to come back to this idea of the archetype, the Scottish ex-squaddie is written in some kind of mock Scots to flesh out his archetype, and so is the cockney secretary, whereas the characters who are worthy of her attention are worthy of standard English dialect… Maybe you can get away with it in children’s books, but I think it needs to be better executed in an adult’s book.

My feeling is that the books are becoming too invested in drawing out a relationship between Robin and Strike, and less on solving crimes. As such, I’d say there can only really be one book left in the Strike series, two at most before it becomes a parody of the earlier books in the series.

The Five by Hallie Rubenhold

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$R0T9BM0A lot has been written recently about the way in which serial killers are treated like macabre geniuses, while the victims of their crimes are forgotten.

The most famous of these is undoubtedly Jack the Ripper, who having evaded capture has become something of a modern myth, and the Jack the Ripper folklore has spawned a micro-economy which trades on the death of his victims for profit; tours of the Whitechapel scenes of the murders, numerous films and television adaptations, even souvenirs with t-shirts and mugs displaying his victims corpses as if they were artworks created by a master craftsmen, not women who lived and breathed.

Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly

In The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, Hallie Rubenhold seeks to go some way towards reclaiming the names of his victims, exploring their histories to restore their identities and humanity. It makes it clear that it doesn’t matter who Jack the Ripper was now, what matters were the complex and varied lives that he snatched. One by one she goes explores the lives of the canonical five victims; Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly, from their births to their deaths, revealing far more complex lives than any film or documentary purporting to explore the history of Jack the Ripper has ever revealed.

Rubenhold’s The Five is as fascinating as it is heart-breaking, showing the various factors that brought the women to be living such precarious existences in Whitechapel, and reminding the reader just how precarious life could be in the Victorian era, where an extra mouth to feed could tip a family into poverty, or the loss of a male relative could leave a family of women incredibly vulnerable. Where if you were born into poverty, you had little to no hope of escaping, and even if you were born into the middle classes, one mistake or one small upset would be enough to derail your life.

The Five not only returns a sense of the victims as real people but gives a clear picture of what life was like for women and the poor in the era. I found it a really moving read, and although I enjoy a crime novel as much as anyone else, thought it was an important counter voice to the sensationalism of violence against women for entertainment.

The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary

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$R1XQGT8I, like most people, read books partly for the escapism they provide. You suspend your disbelief, and enter the world of the book, outside concerns irrelevant for as long as you can focus.

I’ll be honest, when I bought The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary, I was expecting to have some problems suspending my disbelief. I know that these arrangements – where two unrelated parties end up sharing a bed, sleeping shifts, because life is so bloody unaffordable – exist, but getting my head around how that would work (how is that working, for so many people post-covid??) in lockdown, I didn’t think I’d be able to go with the flow. But I could, and I did, and I found myself genuinely smiling with enjoyment as I read.

The plot of The Flatshare is pure chick lit, and I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. The author knows what her readers want – a love story in which you know that the characters will get together, but it’s more about the journey than the destination, and wow, what a journey.

Tiffy has broken up with her boyfriend Justin, who she is very much in love with, but she only realises that this isn’t one of their temporary splits when he brings another woman home. Nice. Being an associate editor at a craft publisher (hello less than London living wage publishers, we see you) she can’t afford anywhere to rent on her own, so is forced into taking a flat share with a palliative care nurse who works nights and spends his weekends at his girlfriend’s place. Leon, said palliative care nurse, needs the extra money because his brother has been sentenced to eight years in prison for armed robbery, a robbery that Leon believes that he didn’t commit, though his girlfriend Kay is less than convinced. She is taking care of the subletting of the flat share so that he and Tiffy never meet. Instead, they communicate through post-it notes, and it isn’t too long until a written friendship springs up between the flatmates….

Looping back to the issue of chick lit being considered a derogatory term, I guess I am using it here as a reference to women’s issues fiction, though I acknowledge that’s very reductive too. This novel, while hugely entertaining is more than a romance, and tackles some pretty serious issues, like emotional abuse, wrongful conviction based on racial profiling, and post-traumatic stress disorder. On the surface it’s less will they, won’t they, more when will they, how will they, marriage plot stuff, but as a novel it has heart and depth, and I thought it was well done.

It would make a fun sitcom/drama, and in the hope that they will adapt it for the big screen, you could have hours of fun fantasy casting The Flat Share.

I will be checking with friends and family as to whether they’ve read it and, if not, will be gifting this as the escapist read lots of us need in 2020.

But if Chick Lit isn’t your genre, I challenge you to write the dark psychological thriller that this book could undoubtedly have been if more sinister characters and lockdown had been thrown into the plot. There’s a writing prompt for you.

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

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Humankind by Rutger BregmanMost people, deep down, are pretty decent.

Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History

People are fundamentally good. It’s a difficult idea to sell at the best of times, let alone in the middle of a global pandemic with the planet teetering on the brink of climate crisis. All the evidence suggests the contrary doesn’t? Humans are the possessors of the selfish gene, acting only out of self-interest, aren’t they? You don’t have to look far to find multiple examples of people being awful. Five minutes on Twitter should do the trick.

Despite this, Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists, has published a book arguing the contrary, claiming in Human Kind: A Hopeful History that not only are humans fundamentally good, but that our success as a species is a result of our willingness to trust one another and work together to achieve the common good.

Has this description given you an overwhelming attack of Whataboutism yet? Hang back on that, because Bregman has done his research, and the book is a whistlestop tour of history, psychology and philosophy examining cases such as the London Blitz, the Stanford Prisoner Experiment, and the mysterious fate of Easter Island to debunk the myth of man as a purely selfish creature and to reframe them as case studies in his new philosophy of hope. As much as I’d like to believe that all people are fundamentally good at heart, I’m not entirely sold on this, but I don’t think that Bregman is either. Rather, he makes a powerful argument that the relentless negativity of the news that reaches us every day gives us a skewed perception of how bad the majority of humanity are, and this has the opposite of a placebo effect, making us feel worse and expect the worst of out fellow humans, trapping us in a cycle of negativity and cynicism which will make us behave in the spirit of mistrust.

To Bregman, cynicism is just another word for laziness, and a cynical world view is just a self-deceptive trick which gives the cynic an excuse to opt out of working to make the world a better place, and the book is compelling in challenging our cynicism about the average person’s intentions.

It ends with ten rules to live by to readdress the balance and go someway to thinking the best of others to create a positive feedback loop, in which people connect, understand and treat one another better. And maybe it will. What’s to lose in trying?

The Lace Maiden by Evie Grace

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the lace maiden by evie grace the smugglers daughters trilogyIt’s the time of year where I start to think about summer holidays and beach reads, so enter The Lace Maiden, by Evie Grace, something of a Jamaica Inn for the Kent coastline, a story of smugglers, gobblers and hovellers; dancing around the revenue men to make a living in the small seaside town of Deal.

Set in 1811, it follows the Lennicker sisters as they struggle for survival following the murder of their father, a fisherman and smuggler, by a rival gang. Following his death, they discover that instead of an estate, they’ve inherited an overwhelming amount of debt with little to no means to pay it off. And that the debt was the least of his secrets. Walking a tightrope for survival, the oldest sister Louisa finds herself entering into the smuggling game and making a deal with an unscrupulous lawyer, risking everything to keep a roof over her sisters’ heads.

I really enjoyed the historicity of Evie Grace’s The Lace Maiden. While the events of the novel were fictional, the backdrop against the Napoleonic Wars and the American war of independence gave the novel a claustrophobic feel which amplified the sense of entrapment that Louisa feels. The idea that press gangers could just come house to house, effectively abducting men to press into military service, with the full weight of the law behind them is horrific. You could imagine the terror of hearing that they were coming to your town.

Some historical novels have a tendency to romanticis the past, but I appreciated that Grace didn’t shy away from the day to day realities of life in the early nineteenth century. Bed bugs, unwashed clothes, the romantic hero having lice combed out of his hair by the heroine… I thought they were nice touches. I even learned about cheese mites. Google at your own risk.

I’d definitely recommend this as a holiday read, it’s the perfect for getting beneath the touristy veneer of many UK seaside towns and appreciating how thin the line between survival and ruin must have been for so many families.

I reviewed The Lace Maiden as part of a blog tour by Penguin Random House in exchange for a review copy for my honest opinions. Check out other reviews as part of the tour below:

Penguin House Arrow Publishing The Lace Maiden Blog Tour

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

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The Starless Sea Erin Morgenstern Bookstagram origami doll house

“Zachary takes out the book. He turns it over in his hands and then puts it down on his desk. It doesn’t look like anything special, like it contains and entire world, though the same could be said of any book.”

The Starless Sea, Erin Morgenstern

There’s nothing hugely new about a novel in which a boy finds a book and it leads to a world of adventure. A story in which a boy finds a book which leads to an unknown enemy hunting them to retrieve the book isn’t hugely new either, Carlos Ruiz Zafon did this with The Shadow of the Wind. But believe me when I say The Starless Sea is far from basic. It’s so extra it’s meta.

A moibus strip of stories, The Starless Sea reads like a love letter to storytelling, video games and fan culture. An adventurous storytelling adventure which spans from myth to modern day and back again, watching entire empires rise and fall in the liminal spaces occupied by our book hangovers. This is the heartsong of the readers.

 “A boy at the beginning of a story has no way of knowing that the story has begun.”

It’s rare that I want to start a book straight away after finishing but I could so easily have done that with The Starless Sea, and I would have enjoyed it just as much, appreciating how the puzzle fits together, catching the references that I glossed over chasing the plot, becoming an acolyte to Morgestern’s storytelling.

There must be a more elegant word than book hangover (and my guess would be it exists in German or Japanese because they have the best words for these intangible concepts) to describe the feeling of a book that stays with you, that you want to revisit from scratch and occupy all over again. What Erin Morgenstern has done in this novel is effectively distill that essence and used it to paint a cast of characters who are both slaves to the story and causes of book hangovers in their own right.

Given the book’s fondness for cocktails, I’d love to try a starless sea if anyone mixes one up. Otherwise, I’ll take the bees knees.

Spoilers for The Starless Sea Below

“And there are always those who would watch Alexandria burn.

There always have been. There always will be.”

Yeah, okay, she’s technically the villain of the piece but you can’t really blame Allegra for wanting to protect the harbour and the starless sea can you? She chose the wrong path but I bet many a booklover would have done.

Who else thought Mirabel had gone rogue there? I have to admit that I did and the ice sculpture briefly seemed apt. As an act of penance, I’m going to have to dye my hair pink and dress like Max from Where the Wild Things Are. It’s happening and I’m not sure I can wait until World Book Day.

Eleanor and Simon do find each other at the end! That’s nice, the poor kids had a rough deal. Loose ends have to be tied up but the book doesn’t labour the point and I like that.

But who killed the Owl King this time? Or did he not have to die this time? Was that not the point of the sword after all?

I love Madam Love Rawlins, love, trust and acceptance. Those are mothering goals.

How horrific is the idea of drowning in honey? What kind of mind comes up with that?! It reminded me of one of the Plantagenets asking to be executed by drowning in a barrel of wine. It probably sounded like a good way to go until he actually had to go through with it.

I need a Kat Hawkins in my life and on my WhatsApp. But not as much as I need a kitchen.

What are the cats about?

Is anyone else tempted to make the room with the dolls house and the paper world? It can’t just be me.

Again, I love you Kitchen.

This is morbid perhaps, but I loved the idea of people being mummified shrouded in the stories of who they were. It was a really poignant moment for me.

The bees say that “she” always sends them a key to end the story. And Zachary is the key this time. Is she the Sculptor? How many stories have there been? Is this story, and this puzzle, just one of many? But if the sculptor is a godlike figure telling the story of Zachary, Mirabel, Dorian, The Keeper… what universe is she existing in? And who did she begin sculpting the stories out of raindrops for.

Come to that, how does time work? Who wrote the story of Zachary finding the door down in a book that was published before Mirabel was born so that Eleanor was able to read it?

Is Kat now the sculptor of a new story? She’s the world builder of the piece with avant garde theatre and virtual reality fusions. Is she there to build the new harbour? I get the feeling there will always be a new harbour, the egg cracks and a new story emerges.

Have you read it? I’m desperate to hear what other people think of it all.