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Set in an alternate Elizabethan London (in 1601), this is the story of Shay, messenger girl, falconer and fortune teller, seeing the future in the patterns of birds. She gets involved with Nonsuch, star of Blackfriars Theatre, which relies on a cast of kidnapped boys who perform for the gentry. Falling in love with both Nonsuch and the theatre leads Shay into a new life, but when Nonsuch decides to form the Ghost Theatre - a kind of pop-up performance, chaos ensues in a London beset by plague and unrest. When Shay gives readings on stage, she sets herself in for a whole lot of trouble, drawing attention from the Queen, but also from more unsavoury characters. Expect, kidnapping, violence, disease and betrayal. This is innovative and original, but it's not a happy read.
Jul. 22nd, 2023
I always rush to get the new Jodi Taylor as soon as there’s one on the horizon. I love the St Mary’s books about a bunch of disaster-prone historians who research historical events in contemporary time. (Please don’t call it time travel.) Following on from the previous book, Max is currently not on staff at St Mary’s, she’s taken up bounty hunti—err, being a recovery agent, with Markham, Smallhope and Pennyroyal, but there’s the matter of Insight, a group from the future using time travel for its own shady ends, and also St Mary’s director has been shot and Max might be the number one suspect. (She didn’t do it, honest!). Max is trying to take down Insight but she’ll be betrayed. She knows this because it’s already happened in the future. Max and Markham are my favourite characters, and this book gives me a great double-helping.
The fourth Fallow sisters book sees Bee, Stella, Serena and Luna heading for Cornwall for the summer after the birth of Luna’s baby and a very strange conclusion to an open-air Shakespeare performance. The extended family includes Sam, Luna’s partner, and Ver, Sam’s gran, plus Serena’s actor boyfriend, Ward, Stella’s friends Ace and Davy, Somerset hunt-master Nick Wratchell-Haynes and Bee’s lovely boyfriend, Dark, an Elizabethan sailor-ghost. As usual the sisters’ mum is up to something, but no one knows what, and the Wild Hunt (land) and the Morlader (sea) are fratching for territory. Expect shapechanging, ghosts, phantom ships, kidnapping and a guest appearance by Elizabeth I, and Francis Drake. I love the Fallow Sisters’ books. This might be the end of the series, but there could be more. I live in hope.
Audiobook. This is a standalone which follows on from A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Lovelace, the ship-board AI in the first book has, due to circumstances, been lodged in a humanoid artificial body (which she calls the Kit) and is staying, planet-bound, with an engineer called Pepper, trying to fit in (on account of if the authorities discover what she is, she’ll be terminated. Much of this is Lovelace, now called Sidra, trying to make sense of her new world and the people (some human, some alien) in it. There’s a second story, set in the past about a girl called Jane 24 who (at the beginning) is a slave in a scrap reclamation factory with a load of other Janes, perhaps bred for the life. When Jane 24 escapes she finds herself in a hostile world of scrap-heaps, threatened by feral dogs, and only survives because she stumbles across a derelict abandoned shuttle which still has a functional AI, Owl. Owl educates and raises Jane 24 for years, all the time in the hope that Jane can find the right components in the scrap-dump to make the shuttle functional again. Of the two stories I much prefer that of Jane 24 to Sidra
I don't often do negative reviews, especially when it's an author I admire. I loved the first three Night Angel books, but it's been a long time since I read them and I didn't re-read to remind myself what happened. Unfortunately I couldn't get into this. I might come back to it later but for the moment Did Not Finish. Sorry.
Love the cover, though.
Oh dear. I thought this would be light and frothy and a quick read. Sadly there was little substance. Sorry. DNF