Biswas, Damyanti, You Beneath Your Skin, Fiction, (Indie: 2019)
Link :Amazon, Goodreads. Price £2.99 at time of review
Anjali strives to be the perfect professional psychiatrist and the perfect single-mother to her autistic teenaged son. Her lover, married Police Commissioner Jatin, is in danger of losing his promotion due to political scandal. When a woman is raped and horribly disfigured, he concocts a plan to use those closest to him – including Anjali – to personally solve the murder and rebrand himself a champion of women’s rights. The consequences of this choice will tear their worlds apart.
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Directing Little Wonder Radio Plays means I have read several hundreds of play submissions. Many of them are bursting with passion for their themes: anti-patriarchy, anti-feminist conspiracy, dealing with Alzheimer’s, coping with loss, divorce, corrupt politicians, global pandemics. This is great! Passion is great!
At the same time, everyone in the human race suffers from a little beastie known as confirmation bias: we are more likely to believe things we believe already, and we like to hear stuff that tells us we were right all along.
So, everything is great, right? Passionate people write plays (books, poems, films) for people who share their passions to agree with. Unfortunately, everything is not great. Nine times out of ten an excess of passion results in crap writing.
In this article I am going to explore why your passion is sabotaging you, and what you can do to make it work for and not against you.
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Atwood M, The Testaments, Speculative Fiction, (Penguin 2019)
Link :Amazon, Goodreads. £10 at time of review
In an increasingly believable dystopic future, the greater part of the United States has been overthrown by the religious fundamentalist nation Gilead. The Testaments are the story of three women fighting to overthrow Gilead, one the storyteller, pulling the strings, the other two puppets struggling to survive her manipulations.
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Druon, Maurice, “The Iron King” (Harper Collins: 1955), tr. Humphrey Hare
Link :Amazon, Goodreads. Price at time of review: £6.99
At the beginning of the 14th century King Phillip IV is trying to release France from an age of serfdom at the same time as managing incompetent sons, faithless daughters-in-law and a scheming Queen of England (who happens to also be his daughter.) But will it be his final, bloody victory against the order of the Knights Templar that the brings an end to his reign and launch Europe into the hundred years war?
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Reading is an essential part of being a writer. Reviewing a book (or play, or poem) can not only add to the pleasure of reading, but for a writer is an essential way to reflect on what did and did not work in the text (and then steal what worked).
I have two ulterior motives for writing this article. First, I would really appreciate more reviews for my novel Vile. If this post inspires you to write a sentence or two it would help me out. Go on. Click the link. I promise it won’t bite.
Second, this month I am branching out into book blogging! Writing about what I am reading will be a good form of reflective learning, and seems like a really nice community to join. I have been talking to lots of other book bloggers and here I will try to put together my thoughts ready to start publishing reviews this week.
So, how do you write a good review?
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