Goodreads Monday is now hosted by Budget Tales Book Club. All you have to do is show off a book from your TBR that you’re looking forward to reading.
Hello!
I hope everyone has had a good start to the week so far. I have had a day of appointments so no teaching today.
My chosen book to feature this week is another new addition to the TBR. R. F. Kuang is definitely an auto buy author for me now.
Katabasis by R. F. Kuang
Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own.
Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality—her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world—that is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.
Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion.
Born into a world on fire, Godling Hekate has never known safety. After her parents are on the losing side of the war between the ruling Titans and new Olympian Gods, Hekate is taken by her mother Asteria to the Underworld, where Styx and Hades agree to raise her. Meanwhile, Asteria is pursued across the world by Zeus and Poseidon and, to escape their clutches, transforms herself into an island in a stormy sea.
Orphaned and alone, Hekate grows up amongst the horrors and beauties of the Underworld, desperate to find her divine purpose and a sense of belonging in the land of the dead.
When Hekate finally uncovers her powers and ascends to Goddess status, she realises that even the most powerful Olympians are terrified of her. But when immortal war breaks out again, threatening to destroy everything from Mount Olympus to the Underworld itself, the Goddess of witchcraft and necromancy is the only one who can bring the deadly conflict to an end. . .
Review
I was really intrigued about this book because I haven’t seen a retelling of Hekate’s story before so I bought the book hoping not to be disappointed. Thankfully I was not.
The first thing I loved about this book is that it is written in verse. There are full paragraphs occasionally but the bulk of the book is in verse and I loved it! I really thought it worked well and I think it really added to the atmosphere of the book.
So often with stories of the Greek Gods we get to learn about their most famous moments and rarely see them as children but with this story we see Hekate from birth and grow up into a young woman. I loved seeing her emotions unfold as she learned about her parents, her family and her abilities.
We also get to learn more about the Titans in this book and the war between the Titans and the Olympians which I enjoyed and would have loved to have had more of. The descriptions of the underworld were also excellent and I enjoyed seeing how Hades’ character developed through the story.
I have seen in some reviews that this book has been compared to Circe but I would disagree with that comparison. Both books have a unique tone and storytelling approach that makes that comparison unfair. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and could have easily read it in one sitting if I had had the time. I give this book 5 out of 5 Dragons and I look forward to the next book.
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About the author
Nikita Gill is a Kashmiri Sikh writer born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and brought up in Gurugram, Haryana in India. In her mid twenties, she immigrated to the South of England and worked as a carer for many years. She enjoys creating paintings, poems, stories, photos, illustrations and other soft, positive things. Her work has appeared in Literary Orphans, Agave Magazine, Gravel Literary Journal, Monkeybicycle, Foliate Oak, MusePiePress, Dying Dahlia Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Eunoia Review, Corvus Review, After The Pause and elsewhere.
Seven years ago, Isabel Warren’s life unraveled in a single afternoon. Now she’s back reliving the same nightmare again…
She left the past behind, changed her name, and started over in a quiet town with her husband and their young son, Noah. But when he vanishes from their backyard without a trace, Isabel is forced to confront a terrifying some shadows never stay buried.
As suspicion tightens around her once again and whispers of her past grow louder, Isabel knows this is no random disappearance. Someone out there knows who she is. Someone has been watching. Waiting.
Now, to save her child, Isabel must unravel a mystery that began long before Noah was born and before the world decided who she was.
Haunting and propulsive, Little One is a chilling psychological thriller about buried secrets, fractured identity, and the impossible choices that define a mother’s love.
Review
I discovered this book from an advert on Facebook and when I saw it was only 99p on Kindle I decided to buy it for a holiday read.
I really wanted to like this book and was excited by what I read in the blurb but the amount of errors in this book was off the scale. I have never read a book with so many errors in. The storyline was so promising and even though I could see what was happening with the plot I really got into it but then the errors began.
The first half of the book was excellent but once the half way mark was passed the story became rushed and full of errors. It was almost like another had taken over and hadn’t reviewed what had been written before.
One of the mistakes was that the children started off as 3 and 5 years of age and then later in the book they became twins. Another error was that Isabel described how she met her husband in two entirely different ways. She also described how long Isabel had known Claire in two different time lengths. There were other errors as well.
I honestly don’t think the author had read her work back after reaching the end of writing and don’t think anyone looked over it for her before going to publish. This book had such promise but was severely let down by the errors and the errors really detracted from the story. I give this book 2 out of 5 Dragons.
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About the author
Fiona Holloway has written one standalone novel so far. This novel is called Little One and it was released in 2025.
The rules are answer the questions below and share a link to your blog in the comments section of Sam’s blog.
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you will read next?
Hello!
I hope everyone is having a good week so far. I have been having a massive book purge recently and now have quite a few books to box up to send to World of Books. I’m trying to be really strict with myself as we really need more room in the house.
What I am Currently Reading
I am thoroughly enjoying this book so far and I love how it is written. It has made a very welcome change after finishing Villette.
What I have Recently Finished Reading
I was so happy to finish this book as it took way longer than it should have to read.
What I Think I will Read Next
I’m really not sure what I will read next. I feel like I want to read more classics at the moment but I’m not sure.
Left by harrowing circumstances to fend for herself in the great capital of a foreign country, Lucy Snowe, the narrator and heroine of Villette, achieves by degrees an authentic independence from both outer necessity and inward grief. Charlotte Brontë’s last novel, published in 1853, has a dramatic force comparable to that of her other masterpiece, Jane Eyre, as well as strikingly modern psychological insight and a revolutionary understanding of human loneliness.
Review
I tried to read Villette a few years ago and gave up just before I got to the half way point. I had clearly forgotten why I had given up and decided to try and finish the book this time. Thankfully I did manage to finish it this time but it seemed a very hard slog. I also really struggled with all the French in the book and found it broke up the dialogue when it kept switching between French and English.
I love Jane Eyre and have read it many times but I just did not gel with Lucy Snowe in this book. She’s writing her story for the reader to read and so many times I was almost screaming at the book to get to the point. I understand that Lucy had a difficult childhood and had to fend for herself as an adolescent but she seemed to make some very random and risky decisions. I still can’t understand how she made the decision to spend most of her money and go to Villette when she had no friends there or even contacts there and didn’t even know the language. I never had a problem liking Jane as a character but I just could not bring myself to like Lucy.
Lucy gets walked all over by the people around her. Even her own godmother drops her when someone more interesting arrives and then remembers her again after weeks and weeks of no contact. She gets put upon by her employer and she just takes it. However, the most frustrating part is that she lets a certain professor treat her like absolute dirt. He criticises her dress when she dares to wear a pink dress, he criticises her lack of intellect, her religion, in fact he pretty much criticises everything and then she spends the last few hundred pages of the novel crying about him when she is told he will be disappearing on a voyage.
Villette is Charlotte Bronte’s last work and I will be honest it surprised me. I really expected a stronger main character with an overall maturity to the storyline but I just found it lacked the finesse that Jane Eyre had and also Jane Eyre was a much stronger character who didn’t take everything lying down. I found this book such a hard slog to read but I am glad I managed to read it. I give this book 3 out of 5 Dragons.
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About the author
Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) was an English novelist and poet, and was the elder sister of Emily, Anne and Branwell Bronte.
Goodreads Monday is now hosted by Budget Tales Book Club. All you have to do is show off a book from your TBR that you’re looking forward to reading.
Hello!
I hope everyone has had a good start to the week. I had a super busy day yesterday and with teaching today I am super tired and looking forward to an early night.
I bought this book when I was last in Bath and I am quite excited to read it but I will be honest the size of the book is rather daunting.
Great Eastern Hotel by Ruchir Joshi
A rich, teeming, involving epic of war, famine, love and culture-clash in imperial Calcutta during World War Two Joshi is The brand new experience after a megashow, Russian in size, Indian in soul’ (India Today)This is the second novel from Ruchir Joshi, author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh which many stubbornly continue to believe is a twisted, flawed masterpiece of a debut novel. In India that book was greeted as the most significant Indian debut since Rushdie’s Midnights Children.Joshi is the real thing, and here to stay and thrive as a writer. This new book is a brilliant prospect, promising a rich, teeming, involving tale with an unusual, fascinating setting the fading imperial city of Calcutta in the 1940s, with world war, famine, culture-clash, colonial retreat, exile, rebellion, idealism and religious strife all in the mix.It will be less formally daring than his first (i.e. less jump-cutting time-wise), which, commercially speaking, is probably good news. And it will have all the epic sweep, resilience of the human spirit and war-torn romance that make for blockbuster success!
Lady Book Dragon 