Not (exactly) a book review! The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet

Title- The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
Author- Becky Chambers
Published-  2015
Genre- sci-fi
Length- 519 pages
Rating- DNF
Synopsis (Amazon)- When Rosemary Harper joins the crew of the Wayfarer, she isn’t expecting much. The Wayfarer, a patched-up ship that’s seen better days, offers her everything she could possibly want: a small, quiet spot to call home for a while, adventure in far-off corners of the galaxy, and distance from her troubled past.

But Rosemary gets more than she bargained for with the Wayfarer. The crew is a mishmash of species and personalities, from Sissix, the friendly reptillian pilot, to Kizzy and Jenks, the constantly sparring engineers who keep the ship running. Life on board is chaotic, but more or less peaceful – exactly what Rosemary wants.

Until the crew are offered the job of a lifetime: the chance to build a hyperspace tunnel to a distant planet. They’ll earn enough money to live comfortably for years… if they survive the long trip through war-torn interstellar space without endangering any of the fragile alliances that keep the galaxy peaceful.

But Rosemary isn’t the only person on board with secrets to hide, and the crew will soon discover that space may be vast, but spaceships are very small indeed.

Not (exactly) a review- So, I am giving up and DNF-ing this book! It gets a lot of hype on BookTube and I am struggling to see why? I got about 100 pages in and it was just boring, so I kept putting off reading it. If I have lots of things I want to do then a bad book is not going to win, so not only do I not read that book, I don’t read at all which I don’t like. I even tried reading another book and going back to this but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

As I didn’t finish it I’m not going to do a full review, but I will give a few comments….

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Book Review- Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Title- Breakfast as Tiffany’s
Author- Truman Capote
Published-  1958
Genre- classics, literary fiction
Length- 100 pages
Rating- 4/5
Synopsis (Goodreads)- It’s New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail hour till breakfast at Tiffany’s. And nice girls don’t, except, of course, Holly Golightly. Pursued by Mafia gangsters and playboy millionaires, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrepressibly ‘top banana in the shock department’, and one of the shining flowers of American fiction.

Review- Despite it being a classic I had no idea what this book was about going into it.

This book is really short and you could easily get through it in one sitting. The writing is good, my only complaint on that front is that sometimes with the dialogue it was difficult to know which character was speaking.

A lot happens for such a short book, the action isn’t all saved for the end either, it is fast paced throughout, which is unusual for a classic. The story is interesting, unrealistic maybe but it’s fiction so who cares.

Book Review- He said, she said

Title- He said, she said
Author- Erin Kelly
Published-  April 20th 2017
Genre- Thriller, crime, mystery, psychological
Length- 416 pages
Rating- 3.25/5
Synopsis (Goodreads)- In the hushed aftermath of a total eclipse, Laura witnesses a brutal attack.

She and her boyfriend Kit call the police, and in that moment, it is not only the victim’s life that is changed forever.

Fifteen years on, Laura and Kit live in fear.

And while Laura knows she was right to speak out, the events that follow have taught her that you can never see the whole picture: something – and someone – is always in the dark…

Review- I received an ARC of this from the publisher so thank you to them.

Overall this book was a disappointment. I read a lot of thrillers and this was just average, at least for me. This is very much a “slow burn”, some people love that, I don’t, I prefer more action, so that is part of why I didn’t love it the way some people seem to.

Reading Book Reviews

Lately  I have been reading a lot more book reviews and I have found a lot of them really frustrating! I wrote a post recently about writing reviews but that concentrated on what other people like rather than what I like, so that is the purpose of this post!

In my other post I said I wasn’t sure if people want all opinion in the actual review or some more recap of the story as well. However, it seems quite a lot of people don’t give an opinion at all in their reviews, they just go over the plot. Yes that can be helpful but is it really right to call that a review? Sometimes there is a bit more of a discussion of the themes of the book rather than just the story but often the reviewer still doesn’t really give an opinion. Saying a book “explores an important topic” isn’t the same as saying “it was well written, I particularly liked…” I don’t need the entire plot from reviewers, that’s what the book is for, I read book reviews because I want to know the opinion of the reviewer, so why aren’t reviewers actually giving opinions? I want to know what they think!