It's no secret that I'm a great admirer of anything that Kate Quinn writes – and this is certainly no exception. This book was everything I wanted The Midnight Library to be. A magical library set in another realm (an in-between sort of realm) where you can live in your favourite novel and escape reality.
This was genuinely awesome. I loved every minute and I really loved the full-blown Irish sass of the main character, Kinch.
This is a hard book to describe in detail – it's sat with me for some time since I finished it, and I thoroughly enjoyed the reading experience. But to put my finger on what exactly made this so good, is difficult. The book has a quiet, complex atmosphere – it's a sophisticated novel of family ties, the plight of women and the scandalousness of witchcraft.
I loved Lucy Adlington's writing in The Red Ribbon, and while this is non-fiction rather than historical fiction, I loved her writing in this just as much. This is a very poignant and well-researched novel on a group of women who survived Auschwitz in part thanks to their sewing abilities.
I really am a big fan of Brusatte at this point. Having read The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us before this one, I knew I would be in for a good time and it didn't disappoint.
This is clearly the book where everything gets real. Being part 2 of book 3, things went up a gear in terms of battles, character deaths and general plot progression. I lost count of the number of times I was shocked in this book!
A new favourite for my list, to be sure. What's not to love in this adorable cosy fantasy? This lived up to the hype and beyond for me.
This series has continued to impress and delight me, and things take a very serious turn in book 4. While there has always been good continuation between the books, particularly the character development, The Last Devil to Die really took this up a notch and manage to pull severely on our heartstrings in doing so.
This was an absolutely epic tale that had all the great vibes of an Arthurian legend retelling. I found the broad concept to be super unique - a land sustained on the belief of tales, but very specifically in that each tale is connected to a piece of land on the Isle, and if that tale was forgotten, so too would the land connected to it disappear.
There is something that has been so quietly enjoyable about this series. Book one, The Goblin Emperor, had really stuck with me – it was a narrative that I kept returning to again and again in my head. So I inevitably found myself reaching out for The Witness for the Dead to dive back into this world and soak up the atmosphere some more.
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