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It’s not often you read a book that makes you reassess your opinion on the way a whole topic has been discussed in literature until now. Before reading ‘The View on the Way Down’ my main point of reference when it came to books-about-depression was Sylvia Plath. Her novel ‘The Bell Jar’ and – in […]
July 31, 2013
Dostoevsky called it “flawless as a work of art”, William Faulkner declared it “the best [novel] ever written” and it has been referenced everywhere in the succeeding literary canon from Chekov to Lemony Snicket. But how does Tolstoy’s epic tragedy stand up today? Thankfully, a book this magnificent will never really fall, but, by the […]
March 6, 2012
If a book doesn’t grab you the first time around, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t fall in love with it on a second attempt. This is something I’ve realised on a number of occasions, but perhaps the most memorable instance of me having to reassess a first impression was on revisiting ‘Looking for Alaska’ by young […]
November 22, 2011
Last week saw me deeply, unhealthily excited about something that doesn’t often fill me with enthusiasm – a film adaptation of a favourite book. The book in question is ‘The Hunger Games’, a Young Adult dystopian novel by Suzanne Collins. If this is the first you’ve heard of it, you can bet it won’t be the last, because […]
November 2, 2011
How much do you know about the German occupation of the Channel Islands in World War Two? Next to nothing? Thought so. The same goes for writer Juliet Ashton in Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrow’s heartwarming epistolary novel, ‘The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society’. And she, through her correspondence with the extraordinary members of the eponymous […]
October 16, 2011
‘The Giant’s House’ by Elizabeth McCracken is a love story, that much is clear. The question is, what sort of love? Is it passionate or platonic? Reciprocated or unrequited? All we can be sure of is that our narrator, Peggy Cort, is in it, and that the object of her affections is very, very large… The […]
October 6, 2011
Feel like a ride on an emotional rollercoaster? Then maybe you should try reading ‘When God Was a Rabbit’ by Sarah Winman, because this novel is about life – absolutely all of it. In this case it’s the life of Elly Portman, our narrator, and that of her older brother Joe, whom, rather sweetly, she “never […]
Rachel Mary Reviews... 
November 5, 2013
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