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Dickens masterpiece: a gem for Christmas past, present and future

18/12/2015

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A Christmas Carol: Charles Dickens
 
In a way it’s a good job that Charles Dickens is long dead otherwise I’d be lobbying him to grant Jacob 
Marley a reprieve.
 
Poor chap. He’s as mean and miserly as his mate Ebenezer Scrooge but, because he has the 
misfortune to die first, is condemned to hell-fire and damnation while Scrooge, thanks to the interventions of Christmas past, present and future, gets a second chance.

Normally, I don’t get so worked up about Dickens. His episodic cliff-hangers, OTT characterisation and the interminable length of many of his novels are a big put-off. But A Christmas Carol - shorter, fast-paced and minimal back-story - is a gem.

And it's easy to forget - because the story, first published in 1843, has been around so long - just how clever it is of Dickens to weave the fantastic - time travel and ghostly apparitions - into a world that is so real you can almost smell the dirt and poverty of Scrooge's London streets.

I love it.

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Poor Boy comes good in page-turning debut thriller set in American mid-west

18/12/2015

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Poor Boy Road: James L. Weaver

You know a book is good when your head is still in the story several days after it came to a very satisfying conclusion.
 
Jake Caldwell, chief protagonist of James L. Weaver's debut novel
Poor Boy Road is an endearingly attractive bad guy with a heart of gold.

He could have been too good to be true - the mob enforcer who fixes things by paying off the other man's debts instead of beating the hell out of him. But, without slowing down the plot with too much back story, Weaver sympathetically, shows how and why Jake ended up on the wrong side of Poor Boy Road.

And, now Jake wants out, but, first, he has one last job that can't be fixed with a fistful of dollars.

This is a wonderful character-driven thriller and, though I struggled at first with the bloody beginning, the violence is an integral part of the plot and, in fact, provides the impetus for Jake to try and mend bridges with the folks he left behind in America's rural mid-west.

They're an interesting bunch. Bear, the childhood friend, who becomes the town's sometimes unorthodox sheriff; Willie, the small-time drug runner who finds himself hopelessly out of his depth when and deal goes wrong; and Maggie, Jake's former girlfriend, now the mother of a feisty teenage daughter. 

One way and another, they all help Jake redeem himself both in his own eyes and, perhaps more importantly, in the eyes of those he loves.

It's a shame this book won't be published until the spring. I would have loved to put a copy in my husband's Christmas stocking. I think he'd enjoy it as much as I did.

NB I read this book as an eARC and, although James L. Weaver, is a fellow author at Lakewater Press, this is an honest review.










 




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Debut fantasy novel a magical mix marrying Northern Lights with Harry Potter

4/12/2015

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Do you remember the scene towards the end of The Empire Strikes Back, second episode in the original Star Wars trilogy, when the charismatic mercenary Han Solo is frozen in suspended animation in a block of carbonite?

And realisation dawns that you’ve got to wait for the sequel to find out whether he’s dead or alive?

Thanks to the magic of the DVD player I can watch the next episode anytime I want. Unfortunately, I’ve got at least 12 months, if not longer, before I can hope to read the follow-up to In the Blood, the debut novel of Robin L. Martinez, published by Lakewater Press, spring 2016.

It seems an impossibly long wait.  I want to know NOW what happens next to the Dominax twins, Ottilde and Oriabel.
Will they find...? But, no, I don’t want to spoil the multiple


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    Author

    Hello: I'm Sue Featherstone, a writer and journalist, currently teaching magazine and news reporting at Sheffield Hallam University. I love reading, writing and exploring the cycle paths near my Yorkshire home.

    Together with my friend Susan Pape, I have published two very successful books on news and feature writing: Newspaper Journalism: A Practical Introduction (Sage: 2005) and Feature Writing: A Practical Introduction (Sage: 2006).

    We’ve recently completed our first novel, A Falling Friend, which will be published   spring 2016 by Lakewater Press

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