Review: Bridget Jones Diary by Helen Fielding

★★★

I don't really think chick lit is my thing but this was alright. It's showing it's age a bit now, I kept reading 1471 as one thousand four hundred and seventy one! Still laugh out loud funny in parts though, the film was better.

Review: House of Shadows by The Medieval Murderers

★★★

I enjoyed these short stories, some more than others. I liked the overarching story of the monastery and thought all the mysteries were unique so it wasn't too repetitive. Looking forward to trying the rest of the series.

Review: A Lovely Way To Burn by Louise Welsh

★★★

This is one of those books that starts really well and I'm really invested in and then I just gradually loose all interest in it. A plague called the sweats has hit London and civilisation is collapsing, this I was very interested in as I have a strange fascination with end of the world fiction. Where it lost me was it's focus on the murder of one man and the heroine's strange obsession with solving a mystery that no one (myself included) cares about. Looking at the blurb for the second book it is told from a different perspective and focuses more on the virus itself so I'm hoping I will enjoy that one more.

Review: The Maze Runner by James Dashner

★★★

I really wanted to like this book, I persevered in the hope it would improve and there would be some reward or revelation for me that would make me desperate to read the next book (because I have the whole trilogy in my possession). Alas it would appear I waited in vain as I am no more knowledgeable now than I was going in.

The key thing that really annoyed me about this book was the total lack of explanation throughout. The characters seemed to spend all their time withholding information from each other for no apparent reason. Just to be clear these boys are supposed to be smart and the best they can come up with is to continuously run around the maze making maps and keeping it a total secret from the majority of the group. They kept saying "we have tried everything", I just got so tired of hearing it, if you're trapped in an apparently exitless maze why are you literally running in circles achieving precisely nothing?!

On the up side it was a light read for a young adult dystopia, don't expect any The Hunger Games emotional weight as the characters here are more two dimensional than a piece of paper. I know that sounds harsh but I actually like a bit of substance to my characters and just because this is young adult I see no need to dumb down their plight.

On the whole this was a bit of a miss for me, I'll read the rest of the series but if I didn't already have them on my bookshelf I don't think I'd care enough to hunt them down.

Review: The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera

★★★

"Man might carve his mark on the earth but unless he's vigilant, Nature will take it all back"

A slightly surreal story about a young Maori girl, some whales and the battle between the modern and ancient traditions of her culture all in just over 150 pages. I feel like I should have enjoyed this more than I did, it was written well and there were quite a few quotes I picked out as I read that I thought were beautiful, it just didn't grab me.

I'll start with the positive, I really enjoyed reading about the culture and mythology in this book, I know nothing about Maori culture so that was nice. That being said I think the inclusion of so much of the language might by why I struggled a bit, my European brain couldn't wrap itself around the pronunciation and I did spend a lot of time rereading sections with no idea if I was correct or murdering the language horribly. In the end I just skipped those parts.

I liked the narrator Rawiri, he was a nice bridge between the elders and Kahu herself, always understanding of both sides. I did find it a bit strange that a significant section was given over to his travels abroad, it felt a bit like that should have been in a separate book and could have been cut without affecting the story at all.

Overall I think that this is perhaps too short a story for me to grasp the context properly and this did affect my enjoyment. It wouldn't put me off reading more by Witi Ihimaera but I won't be rushing back.