Blue Archipelago Reviews

My reading journal – book reviews with a splash of author interviews

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Fiction

Goodnight Beautiful by Dorothy Koomson

Goodnight, Beautiful

 

As Nova sits by her son’s bedside willing him to wake from a coma, we learn about the events that brought her to this place, events that started with her falling in love with her best friend Mal, and years later offering to be a surrogate for him and his wife Stephanie.

Dorothy takes us right back to the beginning of Nova and Mal’s friendship, and then through the voices of Nova and Stephanie she brings us back through the years to the present day. This is a story of friendship, and love, and misunderstandings, and lies.

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Saturday, April 7, 2012 | By: | Comment | 2012

Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

Anna and the French Kiss

 

Anna is our narrator and she’s been plucked out of her regular teenage life where she had planned to spend senior year hanging out with her best friend Bridget and getting to know Toph her work-place crush. Instead she finds herself on a whole other continent where not only does she have to find new friends but she has to learn how to live life in a foreign language.

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Wednesday, April 4, 2012 | By: | one comment | 2012

Before I Go To Sleep by S J Watson

Before I Go To Sleep

 

Have you ever imagined what it would be like to lose your memory? To wake up every morning expecting to be twenty something and find yourself in a strange room, in a strange bed next to a man you don’t recognise, and then to see yourself in a mirror and not recognise the forty something face looking back at you? That’s what Christine’s life is like. Every day she has to be told who she is and what has happened in her life, and every night she goes to sleep and forgets it all over again. The question is, can she trust the people in her life who are telling her the things she is supposed to remember but has absolutely no recollection of?

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Saturday, March 31, 2012 | By: | Comment | 2012

Candlemoth by Roger Jon Ellory

Candlemoth

 

Every once in a while you pick up a book that somehow makes you feel like you’ve come home. You know, one that wraps itself around you like a patchwork quilt and you want nothing more than to keep reading? Candlemoth is one of those books. It’s a bit surprising really, given the subject matter, for Daniel Ford – the narrator – is on Death Row and is days away from his execution.

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Monday, March 19, 2012 | By: | Comment | 2012

Lone Wolf by Jodi Picoult

Lone Wolf

 

I was really starting to worry for a while there that my reading mojo had completely deserted me and I was going to have to seek out a new hobby. In a last ditch attempt to prove I could actually finish a book I picked up Lone Wolf by Jodi Picoult, and true to form I couldn’t put it down.

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Sunday, March 11, 2012 | By: | Comment | 2012

The Legacy of Eden by Nelle Davy

The Legacy of Eden

 

The Legacy of Eden is Nelle’s first novel and if this is a hint of things to come she has definitely made my ‘must watch author list’. From the opening line I was hooked, I wanted to learn more about the mysterious Aurelia. It’s so much more than just a farm, it’s almost living and breathing and it holds the key to so many of the family’s darkest secrets. I wanted to learn more about Lavinia Hathaway, the matriarch of this once-great family, a woman whose influence was often un-noticed but shaped the lives of those around her. And of course Meredith. I wanted to know what had happened on that dark night so many years ago that had prompted her to leave her family home far behind, flee to another city, and spend her nights haunted by the ghosts of her past.

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Saturday, February 25, 2012 | By: | Comment | 2012

Dying to Know You by Aidan Chambers

Dying to Know You

 

Dying to Know You is a rather unusual book, so much so that when a friend asked me what it was about I really struggled to describe it. I told her that it was sort of like the film with Gerard Depardieu where the character played by Gerard writes love letters on behalf of a young man who can’t put his feelings into words.

On the surface that is sort of the story here; Karl, a teenage boy tasked by his girlfriend to write her letters revealing his true self, asks a famous writer to help him put his feelings into words.

But it’s so much more than that.

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Sunday, February 5, 2012 | By: | Comment | 2012

Breaking the Silence by Diane Chamberlain

Breaking the Silence

 

In the opening pages of the book Laura Brandon loses her father, and his dying wish is that she looks after a woman she has never heard of. Back home Laura tells her husband Ray about her father’s strange instructions, and he pleads with her not to pursue it any further. Torn between pleasing her father and her husband Laura leaves her five year old daughter in Ray’s care and goes to the Nursing Home to visit Sarah who is suffering from the early onset of Alzheimers and has never heard of Laura’s father. As Laura returns home more confused than ever she finds her husband dead from a gunshot wound, and her five year old daughter mute.

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Sunday, January 22, 2012 | By: | one comment | 2012