Jenni from the book

I've seen a lot of people saying that they are trying to read more... And then stating that they're doing so by listening to audiobooks. Audiobooks are great, don't get me wrong, but consuming a book by listening to someone read it is not the same as reading. Just in the same way that if you read some song lyrics, it's not the sme as listening to the music. Completely different mediums, completely different experiences. And I happen to be a traditionalist when it comes to reading. No audiobooks, and no kindles. Ink on paper only! Since I've now finished reading 5 more ink-on-paper books, it's time to review them and share my thoughts. Watch out for spoilers...

How easy is it to believe in the unbelievable? Faye has always struggled a little bit with faith. Sure she lives a happy and fulfilling life; she has a wonderful kind husband, two beautiful daughters and important work at a charity for blind people. But when it comes to the bigger stuff (religion, God, etc) she struggles. Well when your mum (and best friend in the world) dies when you're only 8 years old, maybe it makes it a little harder to believe there's any magic in the world. Well, that is until she finds herself very literally transported back to the 1970s, back to her childhood home, and back to her very-much-alive mum. Faced with the opportunity to ask her mum the questions she wished she'd always had chance to, Faye finds herself unable to resist the pull of travelling back to the past. But time travel doesn't come easy. It's dangerous, it's bruising, it's potentially life-changing. How much is Faye willing to risk for a chance to put the past right?

It took me forever to get into this book so I was surprised how much I enjoyed it in the end. It was kind of a slog, as it was very slow moving and there were very few plots points so each one was fairly dragged out. I always enjoy books that explore time travel so I was expecting to like this from that angle, but the author didn't seem to have that much fun with it. The time revisited was very mundane and it didn't seem to have much impact on the present day stuff. I did like the time travel twist at the end though (even though I predicted it). It kind of played on the theory that time isn't linear and that everything that will happen has already happened. I'm a bit of a geek for that sort of stuff so I enjoyed it!

Mostly though, for a time travel book, it wasn't really about time travel at all. Actually, at its core, this book was about faith and religion. Which I surprisingly really enjoyed! Faye's husband is a deeply religious man and has decided he wants to join the clergy - a decision that Faye is struggling with thanks to her flagging belief in God. But her husband is a great character in the story. He serves a sound board for the big ideas that the author wanted to explore. Faye's faith is done in a metaphor style (belief in time travel, belief in the impossible), while her husband's is more literal. But the deep chats the two of them have are basically just really well written philosophical ideas. I don't believe in God myself, but I would still say I'm a person of faith (the universe, fate, etc). So I really liked how the author explored these ideas and there were some beautiful passages on the topic throughout the book.

Even though it was very slow and I definitely had to be in a certain kind of mood to pick this book up, I really liked it. I especially liked the ideas of motherhood that it explored and the way it depicted mother daughter relationships. Overall this was a very nice book. It just wasn't a great book.

Wow it's been a long time since I read a young adult book. This one has been on my shelf for literal years and so I decided it was time to give it a read. It was only a couple of hundred pages long so it was a nice quick one to burn through. I'll try and be fair in my assessment of it as I realise that young adult books are not really for me anymore, and the young subject matter made me cringe slightly. But since I'm not who it's written for, I'll give it a fair write-up as what it is.

Annie is very excited to start college. A fresh start, a chance to reinvent herself, and a shot at freedom. All things that Annie holds very dear, since she's always been treated a certain way due to her cerebral palsy. Getting the world to see her for who she truly is has always been a battle!

The same could be said for Fab, but for very different reasons. As a Polish immigrant and someone who habitually says whatever it is he's thinking, people are quick to make their assessments of him too. But he's actually a real romantic (and all-round good guy) and he quickly decides that Annie is the one he ones.

Meanwhile, Annie is horrified at the thought of being owned by anyone, or being trapped in one half of a couple. She's independent and wants to stay that way. But as she gets to know Fab, she wonders if she's got it right afterall. And once she almost messes everything up, she must make a grand romantic gesture to get her happily ever after.

Okay so the writing style for a young adult book was pretty good. It felt realistic in terms of dialogue and the characters were just the right amount of developed. I really liked the initial connection between Annie and Fab, but the plot points in there that were the supposed "conflict" felt very contrived and over the top.

Even though it's supposedly a love story, this book is mostly just a middle finger up to ableism. The main focus of the whole book is on Annie, her character, her disability, the challenges she faces, the way she's treated in society, and the things she wishes were different. Because of that it was pretty beautiful, even if it did feel a little one dimensional. I don't tend to love books which are essentially think pieces that could easily be turned into articles (not whole novels). 

But if I imagine a young teenager who doesn't know much about disability reading this, I think it could only serve as a good thing. So I gave it 3 stars overall.

I absolutely loved this book. Until I absolutely didn't. Once upon a time on the rugged Cornish coastline, boy meets girl, and girl falls instantly in love. Fromt he second Liv first lays eyes on Finn, she knows she's in trouble. Especially since he's only over from America for the summer, and so he's destined to break her heart when he eventually leaves. After deciding they can't resist each other, they have one night of passion. Which turns horribly wrong when Liv gets some tragic news that sends her world crashing down around her.

Grief and tragedy will do a lot to tie two people together. And because of what happened that summer, Liv and Finn find themselves inextricably linked to each other from then on, despite the thousands of miles that separate them. Liv doesn't want to try and maintain a long distance relationship, so instead her and Finn make a promise. If they're both single when he returns to Cornwall the following summer then they'll see what happens. And so becomes their pattern for the next 5 summers.

But this summer, the seventh summer, is different. Finn isn't coming back, and Liv finds herself drawn to a handsome, mysterious new arrival called Tom. Could she find herself happy with someone new, or are the ties of the past bound to draw her back again?

Okay so. Loved the writing style. Loved the setting and the descriptions of the Cornish coast (even if they were a bit overdone). Loved all the characters. Loved the style of the book with the flitting between each previous summer, and the current one. Hated the ending. And I mean HATED it.

I don't want to completely ruin it, but this book essentially pulled a How I Met Your Mother. It spent the whole time explaining that while Liv and Finn had had a beautiful love, it wasn't the right one. It wasn't enough. And it was meant to be left in the past. All the time building up to the fact that Tom was perfect for Liv, that he was willing to put her first in ways Finn had never been able to, and that he was her happily ever after. Then the epilogue came in and shat all over all of that. After the first seven summers, we get an epilogue of the seven summers after that, and in there the author quickly undoes literally everything she spent 400 pages doing.

I thought it was a really beautiful story, and I was really bought into the ideas it explored. I loved Liv with Finn. But I didn't want her to end up with him. I bought into the way the book explored that love wasn't enough, that you have to make compromises and sacrifices to make a relationship work, that if he wanted to he would, that it takes a great deal of strength to emotionally move forward with your life. Liv struck the right balance of being someone in emotional turmoil without being too whiny or insufferable with it. You felt like you wanted to give her a tough love speech, rather than a full-on shake. And seeing the journey she went on to heal from the past and find a new happiness was beautiful.

I choose to accept that the epilogue didn't happen. The book ended with the happy ever after for me, and I refuse to acknowledge anything after that.

Wow this book was a drag. Not because it was completely atrocious (I've certainly read worse). But I just couldn't for the life of me get gripped by it. So much so that it took me literal months to get through it because I just found myself completely disinterested in finding out what happened next. I think it's because it was too predictable. Now don't get me wrong. As a lover of chick lit (with caveats), I like predictability. I like knowing that the hot new neighbour that the main girl meets via explosive-yet-sexually-coded argument is going to end up being the love of her life. But the journey towards the predictable fate has to be enjoyable, and it HAS to make sense as to why they go on a journey in the first place, instead of just getting together in chapter one. So This spells love fails on two counts. 

Firstly, the journey doesn't make much sense. Gemma is broken-hearted after being dumped, and so she follows an ancient witchy ritual with her spiritual aunt in order to cleanse herself of her unlucky-in-love gene. But it works a little too well and she finds herself waking up in an alternative reality where she had never met or got together with Stuart at all. Her apartment is different, her job is different, and unfortunately, her friendship with her best friend Dax is completely non-existent. Having accidentally erased him from her life in the process of getting over her breakup, she must work her way back into his life before the next full moon so she can undo the spell and put things back to normal. But in the process of working her way back into his life, she finds him working his way into her heart, and begins to wonder if the one has been right under her nose all along. Should she stay in this alternative reality? Or will the butterfly effect of her meddling cause things to go wrong?

So in terms of an enjoyable journey towards predictability, I'd say this book scored a 5/10. It wasn't terrible. I liked the general gist, but Gemma but was a bit of an annoying character, and a lot of the dialogue was very obvious and over explanatory. Almost as if the author assumed a baseline intelligence of 0 when writing it. Nothing can be assumed, everything must be explicitly spelt out. Anyone that's read this book blog series before will know I have a particular hatred for books that make every element too perfect. It can't just be a story of falling in love. It must also be a story of getting your dream job, and your best friend getting the baby she's always wanted, and your sister finding true love with your new boyfriend's brother, and you winning the lottery despite not even buying a ticket. You know the sort of thing. This book fell victim to that HARD. I did quite like the way it did it via alternative timeline (I love alternative life stuff) but it all wrapped up a bit too neatly for my liking.

The main way this book failed for me though is on count 2: it HAS to make sense as to why they go on a journey towards true love. This made no sense at all. So Gemma and Dax fall in love almost immediately in this alternative timeline. Which begs the question, why didn't they just get together in regular life? The whole 'not wanting to ruin their friendship' or 'never looked at them that way' would make sense if they were supposed to have been friends since childhood or something. But they only met 4 years ago, and they happen to have met the same night that Gemma meets her ex boyfriend. So why not just get together with Dax then, when they were both free and single and clearly attracted to each other? The author attempts to explain that away but it's mostly watery excuses. I feel like she went with the narrative that they met the same night Gemma met her ex so that the spell erasing her friendship with Dax made more sense, but I feel it would've been easier to have them as old friends from university or something (maybe they were both in relationships at different times so the timing for them never aligned?), and then come up with a different excuse for why they weren't friends in the alternative timeline. Because manufacturing a world where two single people meet on a night out and then decide to become such best friends that they're practically as close as family in only 4 years seemed extremely unnatural. So minus points for the barrier for them getting together. They may as well have just got together in chapter 1 when Gemma has split from her ex. No need for spells, no need for the rest of the story.

I'd heard of The Stepford Wives before but I hadn't read the book and didn't really know the story. Well, if it's half as good as this gender-flipped version then I need to add it to my read list immediately! The Husbands is the story of an exclusive neighbourhood where everything is a little different. Instead of the women bearing the brunt of all household and child-rearing duties while also working, it seems like equality has really been achieved. The men are the first ones to run to the sounds of calling children and the men are the ones sharing cleaning tips with each other. Meanwhile all of the women are super successful high-flyers; psychologists and neurosurgeons and tech CEOs. It's what first draws in Nora when she views a house at Dynasty Ranch. While the house is beautiful, it's the lives of the people in the community that really grabs her. Nora is no stranger to being a successful woman as a lawyer on the partner track. But despite having a wonderful, kind, caring husband who she loves very much, she's completely drowning in the mental load of being the chief parent, being the chief household manager, and being the chief organiser of their lives. With another baby on the way, she loves the thought of living at Dynasty Ranch. But it's an exclusive place and you have to get passed a board to live there. When the residents approach her about taking on the wrongful death law suit on behalf of one of the wives whose husband died in a house fire, Nora thinks it might be just what she needs on all fronts. Win the case, earn brownie points with the residents, get the house, and make partner. All before baby number 2 arrives. But once she takes on the case and starts digging into how Richard died, she starts to wonder if everything is as it seems. Or if taking the case and bidding to live in Dynasty Ranch might be the biggest mistake she could've made.

One of the comments on the back of this book describes this as a delightful feminist rage book, and I couldn't have put it better myself. We talk about Big Stuff feminism a lot, but sometimes it's the mundane things that need addressing the most. The mental load that so many women drown in, especially once they have children. The fact there never seems to be enough time in the day and yet men still find time for hobbies and chill time and doing things just for themselves. Nora's husband, Hayden is the perfect example of most husbands. A great partner in general, but not an equal partner in life. And when Nora tries to address it, she's met with 'if you tell me what to do, I'll help more'. Help. Help the woman run your own house. I loved the way this book got into the nitty gritty of it all and showcased what so many women are up against. Not terrible husbands; but not equal ones either.

I thought the storyline as a whole was really engaging from the beginning and I was absolutely gripped by the last 50 pages or so as the secrets started to unfurl. I did think there were maybe one or two characters too many, especially when it came to remembering storylines, names and couplings. But as a whole it was a really great book.

I loved that the author clearly had so much to say on the topic but she didn't allow the story to get muddied with too many side anecdotes or tangents. Instead she did something clever. In between each chapter, she added in news clippings with article titles and comments sections where she added some more opinions and thoughts about women becoming mothers and what society demands of them. I thought it was a really clever way of adding in a couple more viewpoints without it seeming unnatural by trying to jam it into the main story or the dialogue between the main characters.

Overall this book aims to make us question what we've normalised, how far we'd go to protect the life we love, and how easily we could be swayed to the dark side.