Tag: Historical Fiction
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Clockwork Princess Always Brings Tears To My Eyes
What a whirlwind. What a stunning, heartbreaking, emotive, brilliant novel. Cassandra Clare’s Clockwork Princess exceeds my expectations of a trilogy final and firmly establishes itself on my favourite books of all time shelf. Very few make it up there, but Clockwork Princess has been up there since the beginning, my first read, and every reread…
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My All Souls Trilogy Review
Possibly my favourite historical fiction fantasy series ever, the All Souls Trilogy had me hooked from A Discovery of Witches and refused to let me go until I closed the back cover of The Book of Life. Deborah Harkness has created a magnificent. richly detailed, layered story world with incredible characters and conflicts that feel…
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Hester Fox’s A Lullaby for Witches Has Everything You Want in a Witchy Novel
Hester Fox strikes again with A Lullaby for Witches, and what a deliciously dark and captivating novel it is! I wasn’t sure what to expect with this one as this is the first novel of hers to be semi-set in the present day, but what A Lullaby for Witches contains is more than incredible. Trigger…
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Familiar Patterns in Sherlock Holmes The Valley of Fear
Here we have the final novel in my Sherlock Sundays mini-series, The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I can’t lie – I was a little disappointed with this one. While I understand that the Sherlock Holmes story world is vast and covers a great many narrative structures and frameworks, not to mention…
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The Dark Academia Read of the 2020s is R.F. Kuang’s Babel
Dark academia is a popular genre among young readers, and it has made a resurgence over the last decade or so. Babel, R.F. Kuang’s powerhouse of a novel published in 2022, is the dark academia book of the 2020s, sitting next to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and M.L Rio’s If We Were Villains of…
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H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a Lush, Vivid Nightmare
I mentioned in a Spooktober 2023 post and in my Haunting Author Recommendations post earlier this month The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a renowned H.P. Lovecraft tale not to be missed. I abided by that sentiment and read The Shadow Over Innsmouth to get a feel for the truly horrific and disturbing during this month…
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Andrea Penrose Returns with Murder at King’s Crossing
An Andrea Penrose book has finally come across my bookshelf once again. Murder at King’s Crossing, the eighth instalment in the Wrexford and Sloane Mystery series, brings with it a mix of joy and heartbreak, love and betrayal, and political intrigue and family ties. Thankfully, I was able to pick this up before the end…
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Clockwork Prince – My Favourite Cassandra Clare Book
The title speaks for itself, but it wouldn’t be a good book review if I didn’t note a few things. Clockwork Prince by Cassandra Clare is the second in the Infernal Devices trilogy, following Clockwork Angel and leading up the the riveting finale Clockwork Princess. It has the action of a good ya fantasy novel…
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Spells, Murders and Poe in Hester Fox’s The Widow of Pale Harbour
The Widow of Pale Harbor by Hester Fox has been interesting with its inclusion of some iconic Edgar Allen Poe stories and references, but it falls short in delivering an atmospheric and thrilling gothic read. I wish it wasn’t so, but things didn’t pan out quite how I expected them to, and the story feels…