Book Review: All My Friends Are Superheroes, by Andrew Kaufman

All Tom's friends are superheroes. Literally. Some of them have more typical superpowers, others are quite bizarre. Tom's wife is a superhero, The Perfectionist. Her superpower is to make anything perfect. The Perfectionist has a nasty, scheming ex who is still in love with her, Hypno. At Tom and The Perfectionist's wedding reception, Hypno hypnotised The Perfectionist so that she can no longer see, hear, or feel Tom. She thinks he's left her, and gets on a plane to Vancouver to start a new life. Tom takes the seat beside her. He only has the duration of the flight to make her realise that he's there - because when she arrives in Vancouver, The Perfectionist will use her power to make her new life perfect - and forget him.

The book is broken into chapters and each tells us about the different superheroes that Tom knows, his relationship with The Perfectionist and his previous attempts to convince her that he was there, or follows Tom on the plane beside The Perfectionist. The chapters are not in a linear order, but each chapter is well placed and the end is at the end!

I really enjoyed this story. It's the kind of book that you will want to give to everyone you know if you love it yourself. I can't see why anyone would dislike this, even if you don't like love stories, this one is completely free of cheesiness.

Kaufman's superheroes are not the comic book, costume wearing, world-saving characters we are all familiar with. There are 249 of them in Toronto. Many of their powers are comedic, others are useless, and nearly all of them you will recognise as belonging to real people as well. I finished the book convinced that some people I know are superheroes too, I may even be one!

A strange but lovely thing about this book is that the pages are really soft! They're quite thick and kind of glossy. I just couldn't stop myself stroking them.

The thing I would criticise about this book is the price. The RRP is £7.99 and it's £5.99 on Amazon. It's a really slim volume and some people will definitely be put off by the amount of book you get for your money. I'm not, because I enjoyed the story so much and the pages are so strokable!

Book Review: The Hawk Dancer, by Diana Saville

From The British Library

Claire Farley, a calm, professional writer of history articles living in Herefordshire, has tolerated her husband's many affairs, forgiving him each time, and after the most recent, believing that she was partly to blame because she stays in the countryside most of the time whilst he goes to London to work. She tries to convince herself that he is getting too old to have affairs, but her unhappiness is growing

When a son of a friend wants a pet hawk, she offers to house it and help look after it. She ends up fully participating in its training, and as she learns to train the wild bird, her confidence grows. She also meets a wildlife photographer and begins to build a relationship with him. She's never been able to tolerate the idea of having an affair herself before, but this time, things might be different.

I did enjoy this book but it didn't "grab" me and I wasn't convinced by the characters. They are all very middle-class, nobody in the novel has anything really to worry about beyond their relationships. The writing style was hard for me to get into, there was some lovely description, particularly of the hawk training around which the story of the human relationships is built, but the author just tells us how the characters felt a lot of the time and avoids showing us their thoughts and physical reactions. They are all very reserved people and this annoyed me, I just couldn't relate to them. The book stays mostly with Claire's point of view but sometimes switches around, and I felt that the characterisation of the other characters was weak, especially Claire's daughters.

I received this book through a swap at ReadItSwapIt and I probably never would have bought it myself. It's unlikely I'll re-read it or bother picking up anything else from this author, but it may be someone else's cup of tea.

Book Review: Lazy Eye, by Donna Daley-Clarke

I went on a writing course last year and this author was one of the instructors, and I decided that I must read her book, and eventually I did last month.

This story is told in three sections, the first and third from the point of view of Geoffhurst, nineteen year old owner of the lazy eye of the title, whose understanding of devastating events in the family life eight years ago is very different from that of the second narrator, his aunt Harriet, his mother's twin. They are both sympathetic characters with distinct voices and the story builds up really well, giving you more and more information as well as more and more reasons to trust or distrust the narrators, until finally all the pieces are laid out and we find out, as Geoffhurst does, what really happens.

The writing style is beautiful, there are some lovely turns of phrase in this book that show startling observations or sharp metaphors. Chapters and scenes are split up in a really interesting way - with pictures, word definitions, weather forecasts.

I thought this book was excellent, despite the slow revelation of facts the characterisation was great and interesting enough that I didn't want to jump ahead and find out what happened too often.

Extracts are available to read here.

Book Review: Tall, Dark and Dead, by Tate Hallaway

This book got better as I got more into it, although I find the chick-litty cover quite jarring with the content of the book! (Killing and pale yellow? REALLY?) I did find it to be too heavy on the romance and too light on the action for my tastes, although it had some nice humorous moments. One thing that I found inadvertently hilarious was that Garnet's ex-boyfriend Daniel Parrish and new boyfriend Sebastian Von Traum both had English accents. It's such a cliche for American romantic novels to star men with English accents, considering the author got the humour right with religion/subculture-tester-William, she could have noticed and mocked this cliche too for good measure!

The author has done her research into Wiccan rituals and astrology, which gives Garnet, the main character, authenticity. However, Garnet likes to pretend she knows things about vampires that she doesn't, and so a lot of questions I had about the way the vampires in the world of the book work went unanswered. The status of gods in the story was never clear either. Wiccans generally believe that the gods they invoke are not actual individual beings, but facets of a supreme power, but Garnet has a goddess, Lilith, partially and sometimes entirely possessing her. Catholic magic co-exists alongside Wiccan magic, but the author never explains how this is possible. I prefer Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series for world creation and action, but this wasn't a bad stab at the genre.

TV Review: Murder Most Famous

Isn't it exciting whenever a television programme about books and/or writing appears? And then ultimately crushing when it gets cancelled, unless it's Richard and Judy-related? Well, it is for me. Unfortunately, Murder Most Famous is only on for a week. Fortunately, it's not very good anyway.

Murder Most Famous is Celebrity Big Brother/Fame Academy but with writing. It features six "celebrities", two of whom have a bit of an unfair advantage really, being a journalist and a TV writer. The person who writes the worst piece each day has to leave the house, and the competition. The winner at the end gets their novel published. Each day they are set a research task and a writing task. Today's research task was quite ludicrous. They went to the "scene of a murder" and to a morgue to see a pretend dead body. Because real wannabe crime writers get to do this stuff all the time! They had to write a short scene with a murder ending on a cliffhanger. The part where Minette Walters gives her feedback on each of the celebrities' pieces is definitely they most interesting, and I think I'll keep watching it for that, although I'll probably fast foward to those parts - I have to record it for the rest of the week because of uni.

The worst part about this programme is that everything Minette Walters says besides the writing feedback she says, is a giant cliche, uttered without any sense of irony! Examples include:

"Will they have what it takes to survive the cutthroat world of crime writing?"
and when the losing celebrity was out:
"And then there were five."

She also introduced each celebrity the same way:

"_name_ is a _positive adjective_ _job_ but, will they be about to _positive adjective_ _reference to writing_"

All in all, a pretty cringeworthy programme. Please, somebody produce something decent!

Murder Most Famous, BBC 2, 1:30pm daily for this week only.