Tag: Relationships

Louise Candlish – The Other Passenger | Review

Title: The Other Passenger

Author: Louise Candlish

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 411

Rating: 4/5

I was sent a signed copy of this book for free as part of a bookish subscription box that reached out to me, but I don’t think that will influence my review. Still, I guess that’s a disclaimer for you.

The theme of the box that I received was all about the commute and this was pretty much the perfect book for it because it was mostly set on the commuter boats that people take to get into the city. As for the genre, it’s basically as close to generic contemporary thriller as you can get, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

We have a lot of the classics tropes here, from an unreliable narrator to tons of twists and turns, complex interpersonal relationships and of course that little technique of jumping backwards and forwards through time to advance what’s happening in the present by bringing up something that happened in the past and which changes the way we look at things.

Other than that, I don’t really want to say too much about the plot, purely because as with most of these, half of the point is being taken by surprise. And I will say that while there were one or two things that I called pretty early on, there were also a couple of twists here and there that I didn’t spot.

It probably also helped that I received quite a nice edition of this, a hardback with the author’s signature in it, and so it was quite an aesthetically pleasing read, too. I can’t say that I’m the biggest fan of thrillers in general, as I tend to prefer either cosy mysteries, private detectives or gritty police procedural novels, but it certainly did the job and was a pleasant enough read, keeping me going until the end to find out the truth about what happened.

And that brings us on to the question of whether I’d recommend it or not, and that really depends upon the type of reader that you are. If you’re really into modern thrillers and you loved Gone Girl and Girl on the Train, you’re probably going to like this one. There are a ton of twists, more than I’ve seen in a novel of this size in quite a long time, and the characters are just warped enough to keep them interesting.

Learn more about The Other Passenger.


Rupi Kaur – The Sun and Her Flowers | Review

Title: The Sun and Her Flowers

Author: Rupi Kaur

Type: Poetry

Page Count/Review Word Count: 256

Rating 3.5/5

 

 

I honestly wasn’t expecting to enjoy this book anywhere near as much as I did. Kaur gets a bad rep for being an “Instagram poet” and because the content of basically all of her stuff is about relationships and feminism, but I don’t see how either of those are inherently bad things.

True, I didn’t much like the illustrations and I did start to flag with it towards the end, but I think that’s only natural when you’re reading so much poetry on the same theme. On the other hand, I really like it when poets build up a picture with just a few words, and I think Kaur is pretty good at that. In that respect, her work actually reminds me a little bit of a sort of feminist Charles Bukowski, which is almost ironic. I suspect they’d both take umbrage at that comparison.

All in all then, I was pleasantly surprised by this, and while it’s far from my favourite poetry collection, it was a lot better than I thought it was going to be and to be honest, above average when compared to pretty much all of the poetry I’ve ever been sent for review for my book blog. The difference is that I sought this one out, or at the very least I picked it up from a charity shop because I saw it. Yeah.

 

 

Click here to buy The Sun and Her Flowers.