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Reading date  - February 2021 Before I start this review, I have a few things I just need to say. 1)I've started having Minor Figures Oat M*lk in my coffee and it's really a gamechanger.  I've had it loads of times in the coffees I pay for outside the house but I thought they did some kinda trickery to not make it split but it's not trickery cos I'm having a coffee right now and the milk is super smooth.   2)Further to point one, I really need to get another milk frother.  My old one was from Tiger and it gave up the ghost, I replaced batteries and nothing happened.  I do have the Nespresso one but it's such a faff to get it out, plug it in and use it cos it's not involved in the machine.  I like a streamlined look in my house so keeping it out on the surfaces isn't an option. 3)I wanted to read this book for a while without having any idea what it was about.  Then I found out it was about a teacher who groomed his student.  Having been a gir...

Reading date - February 2021 You know sometimes you hear something being hyped up by everyone and think that everyone cannot be wrong and that it must be something great?  And then you think, I like this person, I've seen them on the tv so it must be as great as everyone is saying it is? This is how I felt about this book.  Everyone has been raving about it and everyone loves Richard Osman cos he's all tall and intelligent and funny. Well, let me tell you what a disappointment this book was.  I feel like he has dumbed it right down so it gets onto a daytime tv show list.  He has gone for the lowest common denominator and come up with a shitey holiday read which would fit perfectly on Richard and Judy's booklist.  I thought this would be a delight to read but it most definitely was not.  I know I sound like a literary snob when I say this and I don't care because I don't like it when books dumb things down and don't think the reader can read and understand s...

Reading date - February 2021 A very quick read.  This is my favourite type of book about killers, no fluff and straight to the point.  It covered some killer children who I had never heard of before and I feel the amount of information portrayed was perfect.  It was done in a very easy to read way and I managed to finish it during one lunchbreak. Bosh.  

Reading date - January 2021 The last book of the month.  This is one review I wrote right after reading, hence the tenses being all over the place.  It has taken me over a week to read this because it is so full on that I need to put it down and do something else for a while.   This book was suggested to me by one of my mates after I finished reading Killing for Company, which, compared to this is like a toe dip into a pool of depravity.  However, I know both are not written in the same style or for the same purpose so I shan't compare them any further.  I think when it comes down to it, I prefer Killing for Company because bar the last psych heavy chapter, it's better written in that it's direct and straight to the point and the chronology is not all over the shop.  Detail is good but you need to strike the right balance and make sure you're not just re-hashing the same stuff over and over again and boring the reader with inconsequential details. I st...

Reading date - January 2021 My introduction to the Phelps-Roper clan was via the Louis Theroux show about the Westboro Baptist Church, The Most Hated Family in America .  That was on years ago and I had some thoughts about them which I maintain to this day.  They are the family that picket the funerals of US soldiers, stating that they died because their parents are sinners and therefore the kids deserved to die.   From this, you would think that the family were going to be total arseholes to everyone and that they were a group of uneducated hicks.  Both of these assertions are untrue, they were big advocates of the civil rights movements and both the founder and his daughter (grandad and mother of Megan Phelps-Roper) are lawyers. The book doesn't sugarcoat anything and Megan explains how life was for her and her siblings, how they petitioned outside her own school, outside churches and at the funerals of the cannon fodder sent to war for a country that won't gi...

Reading date - January 2021 My feelings about Obama are clear to all who know me. I do not believe he is the saviour simply because he is not a white man.  He gave direct command for a lot more action than the orange wotsit after him, this does not mean that I rate either man highly or above the other.  They are both the same but when it comes to bombing and killing little brown kids, Obama is worse.  A lot of people seem to forget this and are so hung up on the fact that because he is an ethnic minority in power, he must be doing only good.  This isn't case at all, look at the Uncle Toms we have in the govt here over the past few years, Warsi, Sunak, Javid and Patel do not speak for me as a brown person and they don't speak for any of the brown people I know.  I know I have mixed up two points there but whatever.  Just cos they are in positions of power as brown folk, it doesn't mean they will be an ally.  Look at all the Windrush deportations going o...

Reading date - January 2021 This is a book I have had on my bookshelf for ages..and by ages, I mean years.  I bought this back in 2014 when the film came out (I only know this because the book has a film sticker on it) and when I was working in Canary Wharf. For some reason, I never ever got around to reading it so I decided now was as good a time as any to do so. This book is so easy to read.  Many people had told me that the story was harrowing and that it really upset them but I must be either a cold-hearted bitch or I just didn't find it as sad as everyone else said..which I think is just the same fact repeated.   The book is sad, but it's not like cry your eyes out, break your heart sad like A Little Life (which I read last year, was).  Only two books have ever made me cry, one is my To Kill a Mockingbird and the second is A Little Life.  If that book doesn't make you cry then you're totally dead inside. Anyway, getting back to this beauty.  The b...

Reading date - January 2021 What was promised here was a taut thriller full of suspense.  What I received was...is detailed below. The basic premise of this book is that it is set somewhere remote in Scotland, where there are loads of pine and it's all country-sidey, e.g. you can't just walk to the local Tesco and when it gets dark, it gets eerie.  The kind of place where you don't look out the window when it's dark incase something stares back at you. The author is good at making things seem scary and taut and you feel that you're in the same place as the characters so brava on that aspect of things.  She is good at setting the scene and I could feel how cold and unwelcoming the place was as I read.  However, once you get taut and know that something fishy is going on, you waste so much time just wishy-washying around waiting for something to happen.  The blurb states that someone goes missing, this doesn't happen until a good 200 pages in.  Until then, yo...

Reading date - January 2021 I have been wanting to read this book since I first heard about it as I think it's very unfair when a man murders women, they always focus on the man and not on the victims.  A lot of the time this is done because society deems the victims as being worthless as they're not "respectable" woman, due to them working the streets at night (or day, I dunno how it works).   I was in my last year at uni when the Suffolk Strangler struck and I was studying the law of evidence at the time.  I remember when it first all kicked off, we discussed it in class and I said it seems like this is a modern day version of Jack the Ripper and the Yorkshire Ripper, in that there was a man out there who seemed to have something against women and was killing those he thought nobody would miss.  And what happened there? There was a man who had something against women and was killing those he thought nobody would miss. Any review I write up on here is not going...

Reading date - January 2021 This book is about the miners' strike of 1984.  The year I was born.   I enjoyed this book because it told the story of what was going on from both sides.  On one side, it had the miners and on the other side it had the unions and the MPs who were in charge of sorting the issues out.  Of course, everyone knows what happened as we no longer have a mining industry or community of note in the UK.   One of the books I read last year which wasn't reviewed on here was the Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell and that gave me a fantastic background into what it would have been like to live as a miner and how dark, dirty and dangerous the job was.  My best friend's grandad was a miner and he has dark lines on his forehead where the coal has settled in his skin.  It is fascinating to me but I don't obviously go staring at him cos I am not a moron. Anyway, this book is interesting as it shows how hopeless the situation was an...

Reading date - January 2021 I stupidly put this book up for swapping thinking I wouldn't like it.  Decided to read a chapter of it to see how it was and I fell in love with it. I usually don't like chick lit and that is exactly what this book is but I think underneath that, it's a good book about addiction and how once you've made it, the only way is down.  All the characters are different and yet you take to all of them..then you start to un-take to some of them but I feel the remain true to how anyone would behave in that situation. The book tells the tale of three friends, two who come from nothing and one who is a semi-star.  The girls come to the big smoke and they make it.  The book follows their lives and loves through many years, focusing on how you can obtain everything but then once you do, it's a hard battle to actually keep everything.. I really liked this book and I feel it is everything that I wanted the Bell Jar to be.  Would deffo recommend!...

Reading date - January 2021 We.made.it.  We made it through the shittest year most of us have ever experienced.  I won't bang on too much about how shit 2020 was but as I sit here now in the second week of 2021 writing this, cases are apparently going through the roof and we are in lockdown 3.  The govt won't close the borders so whilst TK Maxx remains too dangerous for most of us, Z listers and "influencers" are able to fly away on "business" to Dubai.  What a load of old shite, they wouldn't know business if it smacked them in their coke filled noses. My first book of 2021 is Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi.  I obtained this book in December and I am sticking strictly to my rule of finishing books before I buy new ones.  I have done well at this..  *EDIT* : she did not do well on this as she has bought six more books since this date. I had such high hopes for this book.  Hopes that vanished the more I read.  I cannot understand how this got nomin...