Today I’m sharing some mini book reviews of another handful of books that I’ve enjoyed recently!

 

Ordinary People by Diana Evans

I had an ebook of this from NetGalley and I’ll be honest that I was struggling to get in to it so I bought the audio book, and once I started listening to this I just didn’t want to stop. It’s about two couples, although there is more focus on one of them, and it’s bookended by the election of Barack Obama and the death of Michael Jackson. I thought this was such a brilliant examination of relationships, of how things can go so wrong for one person and their partner doesn’t see it happening. At its core it’s a novel about the things a person loses when they commit to someone, when they become a parent, when life is pulling them in all kinds of directions but they have no time for who they are anymore. I thought this book was stunning, and it’s one that is really staying with me. I may even re-read it at some point. I recommend it!

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

This is the first book I’ve read by Jesmyn Ward and I can say for sure that it won’t be the last. This novel grabbed me from the first page and held me in its spell until after I’d finished reading. It’s a book about a family who are attempting to prepare for Hurricane Katrina, but in the preparations you get to see the dynamics of this family and how they work as a group. They are poverty-stricken, they have lost their mother and they’re trying to survive. The writing in this novel is breath-taking at times. Ward captures the darkest of moments but the beauty in her words kept me reading, when the storyline made me want to look away. I can’t recommend this book highly enough!

 

The Furies by Katie Lowe

This book wasn’t exactly what I was expecting it to be but I did very much enjoy it. It follows Violet, a teenage girl who is trying to come to terms with the loss of her dad and younger sister in an accident. She moves to a new school and there she meets Alex, Grace and Robin. She’s soon a part of their clique, and yet someone always on the periphery because she doesn’t know all of the secrets. The school has a dark history, the site the school stands on is the scene of where a witch was supposedly burnt in the 17th century. The witchcraft forms a part of the girls’ obsessions and things get dark. Once I got into this novel I found it hard to put down. On the surface it’s another novel about girls gone bad but actually it has so much more depth to it than that; it’s a real exploration of what makes people tick and how others can get drawn into things that they know they shouldn’t be doing. I recommend this one!

 

Entanglement by Katy Mahood

This is a beautiful novel that manages to weave quantum physics into a stunning story. It’s a novel about two people whose lives keep interlinking and overlapping but they’re not fully aware of each other. It’s such a clever book as we follow both Stella and Charlie through their lives as they sometimes vaguely recognise the other but no where from, and yet we the reader know they were present at some really important moments in each other’s lives. These two characters have their own lives, their own relationships and their own heartaches to bear. It was wonderful to see them grow and to see how closely they got to each other before being moved further away again. It’s such an unusual way of telling a story but I was completely engrossed in it. Before starting the book I assumed this was going to be a love story, and while it is a story about love and relationships and how important a random connection can be, it’s more a story about love. I highly recommend this one!