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The Changeling by Victor LaValle is very much a book of two halves.

The first half is about a couple having a baby. It's richly descriptive, very involving and a realistic, in-depth exploration of a relationship and how it changes over time. The level of detail about individual actions is perhaps a bit much sometimes, but overall it didn't bother me - and made the whole thing more unsettling when things started to go awry.

But it very much went off the rails by the end, unfortunately, and ultimately contravened one of its own main tenets. Some interesting ideas and largely well written, but very unpleasant in a few places and the end section really let it down in my view.

The Vela is a sci-fi audiobook co-written by Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, Rivers Solomon and SL Huang, which I was very excited to discover because I love Becky Chambers in particular, and the story sounded interesting.

It's about a space mercenary and the son of a planetary administrator going on a mission to find a missing spaceship full of refugees from a dying world.

It sets out its themes - immigration, environmental collapse, racism, AIs taking people's jobs, societal inequality, cultural insensitivity - very clearly right from the start in a way that's not exactly subtle. And those are all important things to consider and discuss.

But I couldn't get hold of the story somehow and kept finding my brain sliding off it. I didn't connect to any of the characters and I just wasn't interested in spending time with them. So I unfortunately decided to give up on it around the 25% mark.

Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi is an Omani novel about three sisters and their relationships - it sounded like it would be my kind of book, but the execution proved too off-putting for me to finish it, unfortunately. It cycles between various different viewpoints - for the female characters, it's written in third person but with no dialogue punctuation and no way to identify when people are speaking, other than context, which doesn't always make it clear. There's also a lot of summary, a lot of telling and a lot of long, rambling conversations that don't really go anywhere. Then, for the male perspective, it switches to first person and even a different font, with the narrative shifting to a stream of consciousness that goes back and forth in time in a very confusing way. I liked some of the characters and it had some interesting themes of tradition versus progress, but the narrative style was too annoying and difficult to follow for me to persevere.

This is the second instalment of the Tea & Tomes series by Rebecca Thorne - I really enjoyed the first one last year and finally got around to continuing - aaaand this one didn't really do it for me. I like the main characters, and especially their established relationship, but the story of this one just didn't really engage me and I missed the community feel of the town and them running the tea/bookshop. It was okay, but there are at least two more books in this series and I now don't feel invested enough to carry on, unfortunately.

I picked up None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell in a charity shop because its title helped fulfil a prompt from a complicated reading challenge I'm doing - and I'm really glad I did!
I struggle with thrillers sometimes - either overwhelmed by an ending that goes way too far or underwhelmed by and ending that doesn't go far enough. But this one was pretty satisfying overall.
It's hard to do a narrative viewpoint well when the character in question is hiding a lot of things from the reader, but this is a good example of that done very effectively.
I also liked that all the characters, including the victims, are flawed - it makes the whole thing a lot more real and a lot more ambiguous. It's all in the title...

The Sword Defiant by Gareth Hanrahan is the first in a fantasy trilogy with a difference. Instead of detailing the heroes' great quest, it takes place 20 years after the quest is over and the dark forces have been defeated. So, it charts the difficulties faced by the heroes when they're expected to manage the economics, politics and societal upheaval caused by the power vacuum and the necessity of re-establishing order in a conflict-ravaged world.

This is both amusing and fascinating - at least to begin with. And I enjoyed the book overall - though the humour of the opening sections did give way over time to a rather more depressing and dreary attitude in the main protagonist, which rather affected my reading experience. I liked his sister's narrative more, though I can't say I fully connected with the book emotionally. The ending was quite abrupt, too, and also weirdly skipped over the exciting bits, relating them afterwards in the form of a 'legend' that sprang up and was told in later years, which was a strange choice.

As this book told a complete story, and my interest definitely waned towards the end, I'm not planning to continue with the rest of the series. Though I would recommend this - especially the audiobook version as the narrator is excellent.


The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett is an early 20th century novel I'd never come across before - and turned out to be really good. It tells the story of two sisters, growing up in the Midlands in the second half of the 19th century, and how their lives diverge when one of them elopes to France with a travelling salesman. We then get several hundred pages of the one who is left behind, followed by several hundred pages of the one who goes away, before they come back together again towards the end of their lives.

I almost gave up in the first few pages, which are very dense and difficult to get through - but then it picked up considerably and turned into an involving, sharply observed, entertaining tale, though it was an effort to read in some ways because of the style of the prose and its considerable length. It also dipped a bit in the middle - the end of one sister's section and the beginning of the other's being rather dreary - but it got more interesting again in the second half.

Definitely recommended for fans of Anthony Trollope.