Tag: throwbackthursday

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 Signal Flame by Andrew Krivak

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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 revisiting a book that I reviewed in the early days of my blog: the evocative and moving, The Signal Flame by Andrew Krivak, published in January 2017.  (This was in the days when my reviews were rather shorter than they are now.  Not sure if this is good or bad…)

signalAbout the Book

In a small town in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains, Hannah and her son Bo mourn the loss of the family patriarch, Jozef Vinich. They were three generations under one roof. Three generations, but only one branch of a scraggy tree; they are a war-haunted family in a war-torn century. Having survived the trenches of World War I as an Austro-Hungarian conscript, Vinich journeyed to America and built a life for his family. His daughter married the Hungarian-born Bexhet Konar, who enlisted to fight with the Americans in the Second World War but brought disgrace on the family when he was imprisoned for desertion. He returned home to Pennsylvania a hollow man, only to be killed in a hunting accident on the family’s land. Finally, in 1971, Hannah’s prodigal younger son, Sam, was reported MIA in Vietnam.

And so there is only Bo, a quiet man full of conviction, a proud work ethic, and a firstborn’s sense of duty. He is left to grieve but also to hope for reunion, to create a new life, to embrace the land and work its soil through the seasons. The Signal Flame is a stirring novel about generations of men and women and the events that define them, brothers who take different paths, the old European values yielding to new world ways, and the convalescence of memory and war.

Format: Hardcover, ebook, paperback (272 pp.)   Publisher: Scribner
Published: 24th January 2017              Genre: Literary Fiction

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

 

Find The Signal Flame on Goodreads

My Review

Covering a period of a few months, we learn, mainly from the point of view of Bo, something of the tragic history of the family and the impact of his brother’s absence on the family and others. There is some gorgeous writing: “The air smelled of the same candle smoke and slight perfume of frankincense and gardenia that she remembered, and it still sounded even in its silence like every voice uttered was a whisper and that whisper would echo forever if she just sat and listened long enough.”

The book is incredibly sad in parts as tragedies – natural and manmade – come one after another; the toll of grief on some of the characters is sympathetically conveyed: “No, she had come to believe that the only thing one could be certain of was loss. The loss of others as one lived on. Loss as the last thing one left behind.”

What prevents the book becoming too overwhelmingly depressing is the theme of reconciliation.   There are some particularly moving and touching scenes between characters in which longstanding differences are set aside which, I’m not ashamed to say, moved me to tears.   I loved the descriptions of the routine of daily domestic tasks which never become mundane but gave a sense of the rhythm of life in a small, isolated community. The author explores ideas of duty, obligation and continuity through Bo’s sense of connection to the land acquired by and handed down by his grandfather and there is a sense of a real regard for skill and craftsmanship.

The one slight negative is that the absence of speech marks sometimes made it difficult to distinguish conversation between characters from internal monologue.  I received an advance review copy courtesy of NetGalley and publishers, Scribner, in return for an honest review.

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In three words: Evocative, moving, haunting

Try something similar: The Fortunate Brother by Donna Morrissey (click here to read my review)

Andrew KrivakAbout the Author

Andrew Krivak is the author of The Sojourn, a novel set during WWI; A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life, a memoir about his eight years in the Jesuit Order; and the editor of The Letters of William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, 1902-1912. The grandson of Slovak immigrants, he grew up in Pennsylvania, has lived in London, and has taught at Harvard, Boston College, and the College of the Holy Cross. Krivak currently lives with his wife and three children in Massachusetts.

Connect with Andrew

Website ǀ  Goodreads