Tri-City Literary Reviews

Driving over lemons

I recently read ‘Driving Over Lemons'by author Chris Stewart. It is a pleasant read from start to finish; he gives an honest personal account of his experience living in Spain. He moves to Alpijarras, in the region of south Granada, where he buys a house which has little electricity, bad access and no running water. He revels in the thought of living a simpler life, and takes on new tasks optimistically. He used to work in an office in the UK, working with octopus hr software and he couldn’t be more grateful to get away from this way of life.

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Patrick Rothfuss Gets Critical Acclaim

Easily one of the most unique and intriguing writers of this generation is Patrick Rothfuss. Don’t expect to find any Twilight love stories in his portfolio. His unique style of writing coupled with his unmatched sense of humour has helped to give rise to arguably the most mind enslaving pieces of work we have seen over the last decade. His uniqueness in his sense of writing style coupled with the manner in which his story lines are captivating has bought his work critical acclaim.

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The Outcast by Sadie Jones

The Outcast, Sadie Jones’s debut novel, was published in 2008 to wide critical acclaim. Her second, Small Wars, was published last year to an equally good reception.

I’ve been meaning to read both for a while: their mid-century settings and post-war subject matter appealed as much as their attractively retro-styled book covers.

However, it wasn’t until gifted The Outcast by a friend last week that I finally got round to reading Ms Jones’s first novel.

Just after the end of the Second World War, the powerful bond between seven year old Lewis and his mother is disrupted by the return of his father from active service. Lewis is sent to boarding school, and his mother starts to lose her days in a haze of loneliness and furtive drinking as she waits for her husband to return from work.

Three years later tragic events in the local wood devastate the family. Lewis is the only witness and at barely ten years old struggles to articulate what he has seen, both to himself and to the rest of the community.

Nine years later and Lewis returns home after a two year spell in Brixton prison for a crime which has made him the titular outcast of the title. Waiting for him is fifteen year old Kit who has long been an outsider in both her own home and with the other local children.

Set in a stiflingly close home counties village, fraught with class distinctions and unspoken emotions, it’s a intense debut. Sadie Jones started her literary career writing screenplays and the novel carries a filmic, immediate punch. It’s very readable and evokes both the emotional and physical upheaval caused to families and individuals by the return of battle-scarred soldiers after VE day. The day to day strains of this period are touched upon without emphasising too strongly the nylons, chewing gum and metal tins of peaches cliche of rationing. It has an inherent dark romance that keeps the reader fixated from the first page.

The Outcast is an excellent first novel, with broad appeal, and I am eager to start her second. Long may Sadie Jones stand up for outcasts…

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Little Children by Tom Perrotta

When it comes to understanding the complex intricacies of family life and relationships, few writer’s are as skilled and at ease than Tom Perrotta. By the time Little Children – now a popular movie featuring Patrick Wilson and Kate Winslet – was written, Perrotta had already established himself as a writer with an ability that played as much on the fantastic as the explicitly mundane; canvassing both with the kind of wit and charm that is impossible not to be absorbed by.

In Little Children, the lives of people in a small community mingle with one another in spectacular fashion and we see the highs, the lows and the downright cheeky deviousness of people come to light. These are battles fought in every facet of suburban life, from the bored stay-at-home Dad to the man who is so obsessed with keeping a local sex offender at bay that he has made it his job to drive by his house every day and leave flaming bags of dog poo on his porch. Amongst all that, if you can believe it, is the kind of dry humour which we can all associate with. The result, many are saying, is Perrotta’s best novel yet. I certainly wouldn’t argue with that statement.

Little Children is also an ode to our lives, I think. They may be mundane sometimes, and revolve around our children and our jobs, but at the same time there is real beauty there

What I liked best of all about Little Children was how it managed to be a great mainstream book which conversely also had an edge which many mainstream books seem to lack. For example, while waiting for my local it support services london to hand me back my laptop, I got into a conversation with the guy who always man’s the desk – the guy who is unusually fussy about books (something we have talked about a few times, which is the only good thing about my computer being broken so much…). He spoke of how he had read the book and enjoyed the simple not-too-over-the-top language. Similarly, I’ve heard a few other people say that they breezed through it – the story being so compelling and so mundane that you just can’t fail to associate with the lives of the characters.

In truth, Little Children is also an ode to our lives, I think. They may be mundane sometimes, and revolve around our children and our jobs, but at the same time there is real beauty there which is completely extraordinary. I for once won’t look at a stroll through the park ever again, and I highly doubt you will after reading Little Children.

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Darkly Dreaming Dexter

No matter whether you look for entertainment or an Apple Mac repair, a book can always address your needs. However, there are books that are generally better than the others out there and that deliver the best of entertainment to the reader. Such a book is Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay - and probably many are familiar with it since it was recreated in a TV show called Dexter.

The book is about a police assistant who investigates More

A Review of the Book “The Poison Tree”

The book “The Poison Tree” is the first novel of the British writer, Erin Kelly. The story of the novel unfolds with Karen, a young woman, who drives out with her nine year old daughter, Alice to pick up her husband, Rex who has just been released from prison after serving ten years of imprisonment for murder. The story revolves around the relationship between Karen, Rex, and his sister, Biba, a woman who is outspoken and has a bohemian lifestyle.

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C.J. Sansom, Shardlake, and

So this week, in between reading adverts for primary teaching jobs, and actually beginning to apply for some, I’ve been able to take the time to read the latest in C.J.Sansom’s Shardlake series of novels, Heartstone. Now I have to confess to being a bit of a detective novel fan. And I’m also a big big fan of historical novels (in fact I need to post soon about Hilary Mantell’s absolutely freakin’awesome Wolf Hall, which I finished a couple of weeks back). More

Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene

This is a shameful admission: up until last week, I had never read any Graham Greene. Shameful because I call myself a “writer”. Let me say this to anybody who hasn’t read Graham Greene and calls themselves a writer: read him as fast as you can, because the man possesses mind boggling literary power, and that’s no exaggeration. More