Tag: fantasy

Throwback Thursday: The Things We Learn When We’re Dead by Charlie Laidlaw

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ThrowbackThursday

Throwback Thursday is a weekly meme hosted by Renee at It’s Book Talk.  It’s designed as an opportunity to share old favourites as well as books that we’ve finally got around to reading that were published over a year ago.  If you decide to take part, please link back to It’s Book Talk.

Today I’m reviewing The Things We Learn When We’re Dead by Charlie Laidlaw, published in January 2017.

TheThingsWeLearnWhenWereDeadAbout the Book

With elements of The Wizard of Oz, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Lovely Bones, The Things We Learn When We’re Dead shows how small decisions can have profound and unintended consequences, and how sometimes we can get a second chance.

On the way home from a dinner party, Lorna Love steps into the path of an oncoming car. When she wakes up she is in what appears to be a hospital – but a hospital in which her nurse looks like a young Sean Connery, she is served wine for supper, and everyone avoids her questions. It soon transpires that she is in Heaven, or on HVN. Because HVN is a lost, dysfunctional spaceship, and God the aging hippy captain. She seems to be there by accident… Or does God have a higher purpose after all?

At first Lorna can remember nothing. As her memories return – some good, some bad – she realises that she has decision to make and that maybe she needs to find a way home.

Format: Paperback (501 pp.)       Publisher: Accent Press
Published: 26th January 2017      Genre: Fantasy, Science Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting local UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Things We Learn When We’re Dead on Goodreads

My Review

As Lorna adapts to her new surroundings on the spaceship, random objects she sees – M&S underwear, lamb cutlets, even a hamster – trigger memories from her past life.  At first these are fragmented, incomplete and often confusing.  Some are pleasant memories: childhood holidays, family picnics, games with friends, the first stirrings of interest in the opposite sex.  Others are reminders of loss and grief.

Many of Lorna’s memories revolve around exploits with her stylish friend, Suzie, and Lorna’s relationships with men that, it has to be said, have not been entirely successful.   I confess to feeling a pang of sympathy for poor sweet, stolid Austin (described at one point as ‘a rather dull dog with very few tricks’).  As the book progresses, the reader sees that actions do indeed have consequences, even if unintended, and may set in motion a chain of events that can end tragically.

The book blurb describes The Things We Learn When We’re Dead as having ‘elements of The Wizard of Oz, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Lovely Bones’. Personally, I couldn’t detect that much of a connection with The Lovely Bones and only slight allusions to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (I understand these comparisons were the publisher’s decision.) If looking for cultural references, I would say the depiction of the stranded HVN spaceship draws more from Star Trek than anything else with its transporters, holographs and replicators.  I enjoyed Lorna’s pleasure at the small, surprising miracles on the spaceship, like the ability of a chilled glass of wine to stay chilled even when drunk in the bath.

When it comes to The Wizard of Oz, certainly there are characters described as lacking courage and not having much of a brain that remind one of the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow.   However, I think a reader expecting this book to be a straight retelling of The Wizard of Oz may be disappointed.  What they won’t be disappointed in is the quality of the writing, the quirky humour and the authenticity with which Lorna’s memories of her childhood and young adult experiences are described.

I really enjoyed The Things We Learn When We’re Dead.  As someone who reads very little fantasy and science fiction only occasionally (and then more of the dystopian variety), I wasn’t really disappointed that the extra-terrestrial element takes more of a back seat as the book progresses.  The ending left me wishing Lorna well in the future choices she makes.

I received a personally inscribed review copy from the author in return for an honest and unbiased review.   I’d like to thank the author for his patience in waiting for his book to reach the top of my review pile.

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In three words: Quirky, engaging, imaginative

Try something similar…for more space-based fantasy, Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar (click here to read my review)

Charlie LaidlawAbout the Author

Charlie Laidlaw is the author of two novels, The Herbal Detective (Ringwood Publishing) and The Things We Learn When We’re Dead (Accent Press).

Charlie writes: ‘I was born in Paisley, central Scotland, which wasn’t my fault. That week, Eddie Calvert with Norrie Paramor and his Orchestra were Top of the Pops, with Oh, Mein Papa, as sung by a young German woman remembering her once-famous clown father. That gives a clue to my age, not my musical taste.  I was brought up in the west of Scotland (quite near Paisley, but thankfully not too close) and graduated from the University of Edinburgh. I still have the scroll, but it’s in Latin, so it could say anything.

I then worked briefly as a street actor, baby photographer, puppeteer and restaurant dogsbody before becoming a journalist. I started in Glasgow and ended up in London, covering news, features and politics. I interviewed motorbike ace Barry Sheene, Noel Edmonds threatened me with legal action and, because of a bureaucratic muddle, I was ordered out of Greece.  I then took a year to travel round the world, visiting 19 countries. Highlights included being threatened by a man with a gun in Dubai, being given an armed bodyguard by the PLO in Beirut (not the same person with a gun), and visiting Robert Louis Stevenson’s grave in Samoa. What I did for the rest of the year I can’t quite remember.

Surprisingly, I was approached by a government agency to work in intelligence, which just shows how shoddy government recruitment was back then. However, it turned out to be very boring and I don’t like vodka martini.  Craving excitement and adventure, I ended up as a PR consultant, which is the fate of all journalists who haven’t won a Pulitzer Prize, and I’ve still to listen to Oh, Mein Papa.

I am married with two grown-up children and live in East Lothian.’

Connect with Charlie

Website  ǀ  Twitter  ǀ  Goodreads

 

 

Throwback Thursday: The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

whatcathyreadnext4 Comments

ThrowbackThursday

Throwback Thursday is a weekly meme hosted by Renee at It’s Book Talk. It’s designed as an opportunity to share old favourites as well as books that we’ve finally got around to reading that were published over a year ago. If you decide to take part, please link back to It’s Book Talk.

Today I’m reviewing a book that I only recently acquired but that was published back in 2012. It’s one of those books where you feel you must be the last person in the world to get around to reading it. It’s The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey.

The Snow ChildAbout the Book

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart – he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm, she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season’s first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning, the snow child is gone – but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

Format: ebook (423 pp.)                   Publisher: Headline/Tinder Press
Published: 1st February 2012          Genre: Literary Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

 

Find The Snow Child on Goodreads

My Review

Followers of my blog (hello, you 500 or so lovely people) will know that I’m not a real fan of books with a fantasy or supernatural element. I do realise that statement will be anathema to an awful lot of people!   However, if the story is well-told, has wonderful characters and a superb sense of place then I too can fall in love with a story which also has a mystical or supernatural component. As The Snow Child had those first three things (in abundance), I’m happy to say the aspect of the story which is in essence a retelling of a Russian folktale didn’t mar my enjoyment of the book overall.

Whether the child that appears following the construction of the snow girl by Mabel and Jack is a real girl or the snow girl come to life didn’t really become the focus of the book for me. What I really fell in love with was Mabel and Jack, their life together and the author’s depiction of the harsh but beautiful Alaskan landscape. I really loved that we get to see a relationship between two older people and that, despite the pressures of trying to eke out a living in the wilds of Alaska and their shared grief at not being blessed with a child of their own, there are still moments of tenderness between them. I grew fond of their idiosyncrasies such as Mabel’s habit of waiting until dinner was served before broaching a difficult subject (so Jack’s beans got cold again).  And I loved their moments of playfulness – snowball fights, making snow angels, ice-skating, dancing.

The descriptions of the landscape of Alaska were really wonderful, conveying both its beauty, isolation and its dangers.

‘The sun was setting down the river, casting a cold pink hue along the white-capped mountains that framed both sides of the valley. Upriver, the willow shrubs and gravel bars, the spruce forests and low-lying poplar stands, swelled to the mountains in a steely blue. No fields or fences, homes or roads; not a single living soul as far as she could see in any direction. Only wilderness. It was beautiful, Mabel knew, but it was a beauty that ripped you open and scoured you clean so that you were left helpless and exposed, if you lived at all.’

There many other things I enjoyed about The Snow Child:

  • The picture of daily life
  • Esther and George – larger than life characters and true friends to Mabel and Jack
  • The sense of community and the willingness of neighbours to come together when help is needed
  • The sheer courage, resilience and determination of pioneers like Mabel and Jack, and Esther and George in attempting to carve out a living in such an unforgiving environment
  • The celebration of ‘indoor’ skills like preserving, baking and sewing and ‘outdoor’ skills like trapping, tracking, foraging
  • The wisdom of Mabel’s sister, Ada, in her letters:

‘We are allowed to do that, are we not…? To invent our own endings and choose joy over sorrow?’

‘In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.’

I’m grateful to Zuky, who runs the wonderful Book Bum Book Club on Goodreads, for coming up with the theme for December of Baby, It’s Cold Outside that motivated me to read The Snow Child.   It’s a lovely book, full of magical moments and deserving of the praise it has received.

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In three words: Magical, atmospheric, emotional

Try something similar…The Good People by Hannah Kent (click here to read my review)

Eowyn IveyAbout the Author

Eowyn Ivey’s first novel, The Snow Child, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and an international bestseller. Her newest novel To the Bright Edge of the World was released in August 2016. Eowyn was raised in Alaska and continues to live there with her husband and two daughters.

Connect with Eowyn

Website ǀ Facebook ǀ Twitter ǀ Goodreads

 

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