Book Review: Lies We Tell Ourselves (Robin Talley)

Goodreads Link | Author Website

“A stunning novel about love, race and finding the truth..”

TL;DR – A book about integration and the struggles POC faced in the late 1950’s. A very good read although I’m not so sure about the romantic angle.

RAGDOLL RATING: 4/5 BUTTONS

Why I read it…

I read this book because it was recommended to me by a very good friend. Her judgement in books is (usually) on point, so I agreed to read it.

The Story…

This book is set in Virginia 1959 at the peak of the fight for civil rights. Sarah Dunbar has been picked to be part of a group of ten black students to be sent to Jefferson High School, a previously all-white institution. She is such a strong character and through it all, her, her sister Ruth and their friends stick together. Her and her peers are subjected to days of constant abuse from the white students and teachers (except the music teacher Mr. Lewis).

One of these white students is Linda Hairston, daughter of one of the town’s biggest segregationists. All her life she has been taught that the races should be kept separate and, until she meets Sarah, she almost believes this. When Linda and her best friend Judy are forced to work on a French project with Sarah, the reader begins to see the cracks and doubts Linda has about her and her father’s views. Over the course of the book, we see Linda drifting away from the segregationists and closer to Sarah. They fall in love and at the end of the book, they go off to college together for a fresh start.

What I liked…

I loved all the strong, beautiful and brave characters created in this book. All of them: the secondary characters like Chuck, Ennis, and Ruth; the main characters like Sarah, all of them. They really show great courage.                                                                                                                                                                          Ruth is Sarah’s 15 year old sister. She is treated as though she needs the most protection, but in reality, she shows some of the greatest spirit and resilience in the book. I love how this book really makes you feel and understand what it’s like to live with a mark, to be different, to be ashamed of who you really are, not just people from a different race but for LGBTQIA+ people too. I think if more people read and wrote books like this, books that give people this understanding, the world could be a much better place than it is now. The power and fire behind the messages of this book are morals that everyone should have to learn.

I also really liked seeing both Linda developing as character as well. At the start, she was not likeable at all. But as the book progresses, you see that in no way is this her fault. Growing up in a society like the one she lives in with an aggressive father who is the voice of the towns segregationists cannot be easy and by the end, her having such courage amid all the evil she’d been brought up to believe in was very honourable indeed.

What I disliked…

While I do like the development of the characters and completely support the friendship between Linda and Sarah, I do not see any reason for Sarah to have loved Linda. I completely understand why Linda could fall in love with the beautiful, strong character that Sarah is, but I don’t agree with how quickly those feelings are requited. I feel like their should’ve been much more time. I mean, by the end of the book they had only known each other for about 6 months, half of which were spent having arguments, debates or avoiding each other. In my opinion the friendship was already a huge step between the two girls and the relationship between them just came on too quickly.

Final thoughts…

I very much enjoyed this book and recommend it to anyone interested in historical fiction, equality, civil rights or just a very good read.

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Please note: I am in no way affiliated with the author or publishers. I borrowed this books from the library for my own reasons. The opinions contained within are my own and have not been influenced by any external entity!

Book Review: Pirate Lattitudes (Michael Crichton)

Goodreads Link | Author Website

“A fun read, but not his best.” – me, post-book

TL;DR – Most of the story was really good, and with a few small changes could have been amazing. Still recommended.

RAGDOLL RATING: 3.5/5 BUTTONS

Why I read it…

My brother recommended this to me. We are both big fans of pirates (both fact and fiction), always have been. He listened to the audio book and couldn’t recommend it highly enough – “A Book recommended by a friend/family” was a category in my reading challenge conveniently too. Also I like Crichton’s work, so I thought it had a lot going for it.

The Story…

Port Royal is either a paradise or a scum hole, depending on your outlook. One of the few English colonies in the midst of Spanish territories, it’s economy relies on the work of privateers – sort of ‘legal’ pirates – to bring home the bacon.

Captain Hunter is one such Privateer. Hunter, and a band of picked men set out upon a dangerous quest – to raid the stronghold of Matanceros and make off with a Spanish treasure ship. Only one crew ever attempted a raid on Matanceros, and only one man returned! The risk is great – many would call it suicide – but the reward is greater…

Meanwhile, Robert Hacklett, a devious and ambitious young man, seeks to clean up the streets of Port Royal and make it a respectable town, with disastrous results.

Please note: This book was apparently found as a full manuscript and published post-posthumously, so it is difficult to gauge how polished and finished it really is.

What I liked…

I freely admit that anything to do with pirates is likely to land more favourably with me than most other themes – I really love pirates. The book didn’t disappoint in that regard. Crichton adds lots of little details, such as pirate superstitions, codes and rules and explanations about how a ship was organised and run – this really helps flesh out the world and make it interesting and engaging. It’s not so heavy on details that it would be boring for people who weren’t that interested, but it has enough to keep pirate fans happy.

I liked the plot for the most part. The daring raid, the sea battles and the political machinations of Hacklett all mixed together to make an exciting narrative. I was really hooked into the story within a few chapters, and my interest was maintained the whole way through.

I like the fact that Crichton has written his pirate world with a leaning towards reality. The pirates are presented in all their ugly glory – violent, scheming and often unpleasant. That said, the characters are not so made to be so abhorrent that you find yourself unable to root for them entirely.

There is some diversity among the characters which is probably closer to the reality of a pirate crew than the usual white-washed crews we are usually exposed to. This is both a strength and a significant issue, but more on that in a minute.

What I disliked…

I struggled to give this book a rating at first – and I admit I’m still not 100% sure I got it right. 3.5 buttons seems to suggest the book was terrible, which it most definitely wasn’t. It did, however, have a few things that really got to me and ultimately caused me to slash the rating quite drastically.

Trigger Warning – R*pe mention, racist content

As I said above, the pirates in this book are not presented as the dashing heroes we often find in movies – they are unpleasant and at least fairly close to what you would expect form actually pirates. In fact it’s not just the pirates – everyone in this book is pretty unpleasant. As such, it’s not hugely surprising that pirates (and anybody else apparently) might not be above a bit of rape. You definitely could write a pirate story where nobody gets raped, but that probably wouldn’t be considered ‘gritty’ enough.

The rape thing, which to my best recollection comes up three, maybe four times is unpleasant and seems unnecessary – even if it is realistic. That said, I’m no stranger to unpleasant material in books and it wouldn’t kick a whole button and a half of the rating on its own. No, the real kicker in this was the fact that for reasons known only to himself, Crichton went to great pains to point out that the most raped person in the book is a child of 14 or 15. What’s worse is the fact that he presents it as totally consensual…and I know, ‘sign of the times’ and all that but there was literally no reason what-so-ever for his to keep mentioning that this girl was a child. The characters acknowledge she is a child, and even call her a child. It’s super skeevy and massively unpleasant to read. I’m not trying to suggest that the rape of an adult is somehow better or more acceptable, but I can’t think of a way to end this sentence.

Moving away from that and onto some of the characters. I said earlier that the crew had some diversity. I also said this was a problem. There are two characters I have in mind specifically.

1. Don Diego a.k.a. Black Eye a.k.a. the Jew
2. Bassa a.k.a. The Moor

Don Diego, got his nickname for being Jewish. Bassa, we are told, somehow ended up with the nickname, despite “not beeing Moorish” (I believe the book says he is Nubian, but don’t quote me on it), and nobody knows how he ended up with it – well it’s obvious how he got it, someone saw a black man and called him a Moor.

Thing is, I understand why he mentions the nicknames – they might be unpleasant but it does flesh out the characters slightly and it’s believable. Unnecessary, but believable. This was made more annoying in the epilogue by suggesting that the characters were real people – which would have explained why you would mention these nicknames in the first place, but it turns out they are all fiction.

A big problem is the fact that despite giving these characters actual human names, he keeps referring to them by these racial epithets. It’s not even when the characters speak. The characters called Don Diego Don Diego. Crichton as narrator calls him ‘the Jew’. It is massively jarring because there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it. Sometimes he even uses both the name and the racial epithet at the same time – it’s just mindless. So points lost for that.

Triggers end.

Finally, there are a couple of appearances of the Kraken. Don’t get me wrong, I like the Kraken. The Kraken is cool. But it just seemed out of place. The book felt realistic – like real life, and I enjoyed that. The first time it appears, you could have assumed it was a whale or something as it appeared briefly and had ‘a suspicion of tentacles’ or some such. The second time it was glowing green and attacked the ship, but it came right out of left field and through a random element of fantasy into what had previously been a gritty, realistic pirate story. It was just weird.

Final thoughts…

I liked the story. I wanted to love it.

As noted above, this book was printed posthumously and discovered as a ‘complete manuscript’. Perhaps Crichton intended to work on it some more – there are a couple of places where the transition between elements is a bit janky, and it feels unfinished at times. That said, you can hardly blame the man for unfortunately dying before publication so I wasn’t about to dock points for it.

It does seem unlikely, however, that the issues I highlighted above would have been removed had the book been published within Crichton’s lifetime.

I would recommend this book to anyone who likes gritty historical fiction. If you don’t like grit and realism to the point of fault, don’t bother with it.

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Please note: I am in no way affiliated with the author or publishers. I bought this book with my own money for my own reasons. The opinions contained within are my own and have not been influenced by any external entity!

Book Review: An Argumentation of Historians (Jodi Taylor)

Goodreads Link |  Author Website

“Adventures of the Time Travelling Arsonist” ~Rejected title (probably)

TL;DR – Think ‘Female Indiana Jones’ + Time Travel and you’re pretty close to the premise of this book. A real fun read.

RAGDOLL RATING: 4/5 BUTTONS

Why I read it…

Did you read my “TL;DR”? How was I not gonna read it! Seriously though, I love historical fiction, I love time travel and sci-fi…it was just an obvious move for me.

Also it was in the “A Book Published This Year” category of my reading challenge. One thing I should mention at this point is that this book is part of a series and I wish I had started at the beginning.

The Story…

An Argumentation of Historians is the 9th book in the series The Chronicles of St. Mary’s. Unfortunately I haven’t actually read the rest of the series, so I can’t give a great deal of overview but I’ll do my best.

Historian Max works at St Mary’s, travelling through time in order to document as much of history as possible. After the unexpected appearance of an illegal time traveller during a visit to Tudor England, Max persuades her coworkers to lay a trap to catch the villainous Clive Ronan (who I have to assume is well established as a nemesis in the previous books).

Unfortunately, the trap fails and Max finds herself stuck with no hope of rescue in the year 1399. Despite being stuck in an unfamiliar time, fortune smiles upon Max by dumping her at St Mary’s…or at least, the St Mary’s of 650 years ago. The story follows Max and her attempts to survive in a harsh new environment, and hope for a rescue that might never come…

What I liked…

The premise is perhaps the part I like the most about this book. As I said above, I love time travel and historical fiction, so the combination of the two was never going to be a hugely difficult sell (although it wouldn’t be the first book I’ve read with this premise that I completely hated).

The story itself is fun, the character of Max is entertaining, and the story is written as if Max was telling it to you in person one evening round a camp fire. I personally am I big fan of informal writing, however this isn’t for everyone so be warned.

There were a lot of references to the previous books in the series during this book. Something about different worlds, or possibly different realities; more time travel; an Arch Nemesis and also a whole host of characters who got little interesting teaser lines which would make sense if you had read the rest but made little sense to me…but I enjoyed those because it still fleshed the world out a bit and it made me want to know more about the St Mary’s setting.

It seems a little odd to say this about the final book in a series I haven’t actually read yet, but it left me wanting more. I want to read both the next book, whenever that comes out, and all the previous ones too. The story references the previous books quite a lot, which is a bit of a pain if you haven’t read them, but not so much that it becomes unreadable. You certainly could read this book as a standalone, but unless it turns out that the other books are terrible I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing so.

What I disliked…

There was nothing about the story I disliked – apart from the fact that I didn’t know who anybody was or what the setting was, but that was entirely my fault for starting at the end of the series.

However, I’ve rated this book 4 buttons out of 5, and the reason for this is presumably more the fault of the publishers than the author, but you never know.

Specifically, this book could have done with another run through by a proof reader (assuming it actually had one) and another look by an editor. The first thing that struck me was that the text was slightly offset on the page – presumably intended to compensate for the binding, but it was too much and it looked really strange. I got used to it, but it really bugged me when I started reading. That in-and-of-itself wouldn’t have lost the book any marks, but then came the spelling and wording errors.

I get it, spelling errors happen. Sometimes you just miss things – I’m sure there are spelling errors on this site! That said, I’m neither a profession author, nor a proof reader, I’m just some mug on the internet with nothing better to do. I can take the odd error here and there, in fact I wasn’t even going to mention it originally, but by the third time I’d seen the word “off” spelt “of” (and this was far from the only problem) it had annoyed me so much I couldn’t not say something.

In addition there was a phrase to the effect of “There is no hard evidence for a sixth sense” which massively irritated me, since I would have thought most people by now where aware the the ‘5 senses’ thing we were taught as children is bunk. There were also a few occasions where it felt like the author had rewritten a sentence, but failed to properly delete the previous attempt and ended up with a garbled mess – a mess which apparently nobody at the publishers caught.

Having said that, I realise these complaints are – despite taking up most of the review space – fairly minor on their own. They just really bugged me. Hence the lost Button in the rating. It’s not something that would stop me reading the series or recommending it to others.

Final thoughts…

When all is said and done, I really enjoyed this book and I intend to read this rest of the series, copy errors be damned.

I would recommend this for historical fiction fans who like a bit of science fiction (because if you hate sci-fi, you probably won’t enjoy reading this much). Just remember to be warned about the writing style – it’s not for everyone!

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Please note: I am in no way affiliated with the author or publishers. I bought this book with my own money for my own reasons. The opinions contained within are my own and have not been influenced by any external entity!