February has been and gone…

I know February is the shortest month of the year, but those two or three missing days make a crazy amount of difference. I feel like we’ve barely started with January, so I find the appearance of March somewhat confusing! It doesn’t help that Spring is refusing to show her face around here. As I write this it is snowing fairly heavily outside and I’m glad to be curled up with a hot cup of tea and relaxing music.

I do love to watch the snow fall. The way it defies gravity and seems to dance in the wind never fails to make me smile. Last month I was in an almost empty supermarket car park as the snow fell heavily all around me. The ground was rapidly turning white and as I looked up to the sky it felt like I was in a giant snow globe. It was magical. Practically speaking it was also freezing cold, really windy and I was happy to be out of it, but just for a moment I stood there and let it fill me with joy.

February has been an unusually slow book month for me. I’ve only read four books, which is a very low count for me. It’s been a bit of a mixed bag too.

I started the month with The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. It is a science fiction book that seems to have made its way onto the shelves of people who don’t normally consider this type of book and I’ve heard a lot about it from all kinds of places I wouldn’t have expected. This might be partly because it was included on the Radio 2 book club which is sure to generate interest outside the usual circles, but the fact that it’s also a really good book probably has something to do with it! In basic terms it’s a time travel book, but instead of travelling back and forth in time in a time machine or through wormholes etc. it features Harry August and a group of people who are reborn into the same lives over and over again. Their ability to affect things outside their lifespan is limited, but through networks of these special people they are able to hear news from the future (or the past), passed back from young to old (or vice versa) through the decades.

The story really makes you think about things like how much responsibility we should take for actions that won’t have negative consequences until generations after we’re dead, how small moments can change the future and how a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. However, while the science and thought-provoking material may provide plenty of discussion points for the Radio 2 book club, it’s the human part of things that makes it a great story. Following Harry as he tries to make sense of his relationship with his father, as he loves a woman in one life only to have her not recognise him in the next, these are the moments that make this book such a joy to read. It is heartbreaking in one chapter, heart-warming in the next and all mixed in with a complex and satisfying plot. It’s a jolly good read and if you haven’t tried it yet then I heartily recommend it.

I followed this one up with another book that seems to have been mentioned by everyone I know, The Girl with all the Gifts by M. R. Carey. I’m not much of a zombie fan but I’d heard all about how this challenges the idea of the zombie genre and really turned it into something new, so I thought I’d give it a go. I liked it, but didn’t love it. The essence of it was a horror survival, with the (quite quickly revealed) twist that the little girl featuring as the almost-heroine is infected with the zombie plague, even though she remains cognitively much more functional than the usual staggering, brain-eating zombies that first spring to mind. It was easy enough to like her and to be interested in what was going on in this post-apocalyptic vision of the UK, but it was a little heavy on stereotypes in the other characters. Having said that, the ending was unexpected and strangely satisfying, which gets it some serious bonus points. Also, the cover is a delightful burst of colour to add to your bookshelf.

Next up was another vision of the zombie apocalypse, this time caused by tapeworms in Symbiont by Mira Grant. This is book two in Mira Grant’s Parasitology series. The first book was really interesting scientifically speaking as the idea of genetically modified tapeworms used to deliver health products to their human hosts is pretty plausible and it covered the science in enough detail that it felt realistic. Unfortunately, the second book fell quite a way short of the first book, suffering from second book filler syndrome. It was intended to be a duology but has been extended to trilogy length and I’m wondering whether that was the best idea. Yes, I still want to find out what happens to society when two sentient species are competing for survival; yes, I want to know who gets away with things; yes, I want to see how the characters learn to live in this new world. However, we could have reached that point sooner, and I think this book might be off-putting to a fair few people.

I’ve got a full review of this one up at SFCrowsnest which you can read here.

Finally, and perhaps most disappointingly this month, was the third Memoir of Lady Trent – Voyage of the Basilisk by Marie Brennan. I wanted to love this series and after the first book I did. It features a pseudo-Victorian era where an unconventional woman follows her scientific dreams to study dragons, and hang the consequences. There’s adventure, dragons, science and a strong female lead. Sadly, through books two and three it’s become so matter of fact in the way that it is told that I’m finding it hard to get enthusiastic about the next one, even though I still *want* to love this series. It lacks tension, has a few pacing problems and suffers from two dimensional characters so it’s very hard to become emotionally attached to any of them. If you can connect with the characters in this you’ll probably find it more satisfying than I did, so do give it a go if it sounds like your kind of thing.

There’ll be a full review of this up on SFCrowsnest but I think it will be held back until the book has been published in the UK, which is at the end of this month.

I like to finish on a high note so I’ve kept this month’s acquisitions until the end.

Transworld ran a neat competition for Valentine’s Day where you tweeted them the genres you usually read and they set you up with a #BookBlindDate from a totally different genre. I received this beautiful parcel in the post a couple of weeks later:

Pretty exciting huh? And you know what, I’m going to leave you in suspense with this one and not reveal the contents until I review it in a special #BookBlindDate post later in the year. I’ll just say that it is definitely something I wouldn’t have picked out on my own!

In contrast, I was very excited to pick up a copy of V. E. Schwab‘s new book, A Darker Shade of Magic. Can you tell how pleased I was?

I’ll let you know what I think of the book in a later post, I’m saving it up as a reward for slogging through The Casual Vacancy for book group….

Happy reading everyone,

Vinx