Halfman, Halfbook

3 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

At the age of ten, Mia Corvere witnesses her first execution. It is a moment that will change her life and her destiny forever. The desire to have retribution against those who slighted her family burns fiercely within her.

To do so she must embrace that fury and become a weapon without equal. She decides that she must join the Red Church of Itreya and become one of their very best assassins. However, surviving a building full of murderers is going to take some doing…

Her and her fellow acolytes’ training is intense, bloody, brutal and relentless. She makes friends with some of them, others she is ambivalent about, and there are others that will become enemies for life…

The training covers every method that they can think of for killing people, but the Red Church has another range of methods of death that their imaginations have not even considered yet.
Not every acolyte will make it to the end of the course and be in the final selection. The rate of attrition is high for failure, and they have to be aware that things that they have recently learnt will be used against them. She doesn’t know if any of her friends will be there at the end, let alone if she has enough mental strength to pass the course.

It is a fast-paced and thrilling ride. There were parts of this book that I liked, the imagination it takes to come up with this assassin’s church and the world-building I particularly liked. The plot is half decent, too. I could predict some of the outcomes, main character, first book in a series, etc, etc, but not the journey that he drapes around the characters, to the ending. There were parts I wasn’t that keen on, it is incredibly violent, so might not be for everyone. He is also keen on info dumps, and I thought that these got in the way of the plot sometimes. Most annoying were the footnotes; I’ve grown up reading Pratchett, who was a master at them, but Kristoff’s were huge and, in my opinion, mostly unnecessary. So overall, not bad, but I’ll probably not bother to read the rest in the series.

3 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Who says that blokes don’t read romance? That is quite a few of you then… Romance is the genre that I deliberately avoid, or more appropriately, run screaming from the boudoir… However, this is one of the fine offerings from the British Library’s Tales of the Weird Series, and the title Doomed Romances bring a whole different connotation to the word…

The Invisible Girl by Mary Shelley

This is the first Mary Shelley story that I have ever read! It is a strange tale of love and loss with whispers of folklore ad fairy tale woven in. But the strongest theme is the gothic melodrama that permeates the prose completely.

Carmilla by J. Sheridan le Fanu

A very gothic melodrama with vampires. I felt it was very overwritten; why use one word when you could use twenty instead? There is a strong lesbian theme between the daughter and the lady who is staying as a guest in the house.

Mr. Captain and the Nymph by Wilkie Collins

Somewhere in the Pacific, a ship encounters an island. The natives that live there seem friendly and welcoming, so the sailors go ashore, and it allows them to restock supplies. Alongside the main island is another, and they are curious as to what or who is on there. The natives strongly recommend that they do not set foot on the island as it is the home of a sorcerer, and it is a taboo for anyone else but him and the nymph to be there. The captain of the ship is told about her, and when he sees her through the telescope, he becomes besotted. So much so that he is brave and foolish enough to venture onto the island…

Little Woman in Black by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Miss Sarah Pawlett was engaged to be married to Lord Bellenden. The relationship was a little unusual as she wasn’t from the aristocracy, as would be expected at the time. But this didn’t deter, Lord Bellenden.

The only problem, though, was that Sarah was head over heels in love with another actor called Ned Langley. Plus, there was a sense that she was being watched continually, and there was a small lady dressed entirely in black who sat in the same seat for every performance each night.

Who this lady was, though, would soon be revealed…

White Magic by Ella D’Arcy

I wasn’t overly enamoured with this story. It is a conversation between the narrator and their friend, but having read it twice, I wasn’t completely sure what was going on or what were the subtleties of the plot.

The Tiger Charm by Alice Perrin

This is a story set in the time of the British Raj in India. A blustering colonel sets out on a tiger hunt, dragging his wife with him. They are separated after an incident and she ends up switching to another elephant and then they are separated. When she returns, he accuses her of all sorts of transgressions that might have taken place with her new companion in his drunken rant. He still wants to shoot a tiger, though, so he sets out with her companion, with a darker motive in mind…

One Remained Behind by Marjorie Bowen

A student called Rudolph is desperate to acquire a grimoire, a book full of magic and ancient rituals and ends up arguing with an antique bookseller whose shop it is in. With a trick and some emotional blackmail, he manages to make the book his.

He wastes no time in using the book to gain fame and fortune. However, he had not ever thought through the consequences of his actions, and it all starts to unravel.
I really liked this story a lot. There is something quite satisfying about Karma…

The Lady of the House of Love by Angela Carter

I thought that this was the story that best suited the title of the book, Doomed Romances. The young lady is in a decrepit mansion with a crone as a servant. There is an innocent young soldier who stops for the night. There is a building tension as I, the reader, can second-guess his possible fate.

That said, I didn’t find it that scary. But it does have a brooding intensity that made it my top story in the collection.

The Glass Bottle Trick by Nalo Hopkinson

This is a really dark story about a man who has been widowed twice before and is now married to his third wife. They had married fairly quickly after meeting and courting, and were soon to learn that his moods were dark and his temper short.

Passing on her news was going to be a challenge that she wasn’t sure she could do…
I thought this was an incredibly intense and fast-paced story.

Could You Wear My Eyes? by Kalumu Ya Salaam

I thought that this was a well-crafted story about a man who thought that having his late wife’s eyes implanted to replace his.
What he didn’t realise was what the effect of seeing everything from her perspective would be like…

I’ll Be Your Mirror by Tracy Fahey
A story of love, anatomy and discovery by a woman who becomes obsessed by an anatomical Venus, a life-sized wax model. Very much more macabre than romantic, and has a very dark plotline.

Dancehall Devil by V. Castro
I thought that this was probably the closest story in the book to horror. A woman has just entered a club and she is approached by a man who has absolutely no idea what her has just let himself in for…

3 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Fred Fredricks has an important delivery to make to someone on the moon. It is his first time there, and everything about the trip is strange. On the space flight over, he meets Ta Shu, a celebrity travel reporter and feng shui expert who agrees to meet with him again later in their visit to the moon. It is all going well until Fredricks meets the recipient of the package he is delivering, and it rapidly goes horribly wrong.

Fredricks is taken into custody following the incident. As he is an American and working for a Swiss company, there is a diplomatic standoff. Somehow, he manages to escape and joins a lady called Chan Qi, who is being sent back to Earth. They travel back with Ta Shu to China, where they evade the authorities on arrival and head to a safe house for a while. After being couped up, it gets to them, and they make a miscalculation on just how close the people looking for them are. They have to go on the run again, but they know the authorities are closing in on them.

One of the myriad factions in the Chinese security services that is sympathetic to Chan Qi has made the decision that they would be safer back on the moon and not be a distraction to the other factions on Earth. Once again, they are dispatched back on a space flight to stay in a super-rich gentleman’s called Fang Fei’s place. He is a businessman, and he has a separate base on the moon.

Even though she is 238,000 miles away, there are still people after her. They decide to hitch a ride with a couple of helium miners to an even more remote part of the moon. She decides that this is the time to send a coded message to her supporters in China, to add to the disruption as a power struggle for the president of China begins.

I have tried to keep the plot details as sparse as possible, to minimise spoilers, but there are a few. I would say that I liked rather than loved this; I had expected it to be entirely set on the moon, and was a little disappointed that it wasn’t. I would have liked it if Fred’s character had played a larger role in the story too; he was there as a bit of a stooge to the main character, Chan Qi. I felt it could have been a bit shorter, too. There were times when it dragged a bit, until the last quarter, when it flew by. Not bad overall, but not the best of his that I have read.

4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Be a traveller, not a tourist, is a phrase that is often attributed to the late Anthony Bourdain. But is there a difference between a traveller and a tourist, though? Some people think that there is, and surprise, surprise, others don’t… Though I do like Paul Theroux’s definition: Tourists don’t know where they have been, travellers don’t know where they are going.

Daniel Maurer considered himself a traveller, following in the footsteps of Bourdain, but it slowly dawned on him that maybe he was just a tourist.

Travel for almost everyone stopped during the pandemic. It took a while, but the world slowly opened up again, and Maurer became, not by choice, a digital nomad.

He ends up in Mexico and tries to find an authentic town to live in that isn’t overrun with tourists (sic). In this modern world, just the mention of a place can see massive crowds of people flocking to visit. This can have an enormous detrimental effect on the are and the people when this happens.

He is only moderately scathing on travel influencers and the lack of transparency that they have with regard to their sponsors. He is even less enamoured by AI assistants, seeing them as boring, predictable and often error-prone.

Being a travel nomad puts him in the gig economy. Yes, living is much cheaper in Mexico than in the States, but getting paid work meant that he had to lower his prices.

Moving on to Argentina, he finds that having dollars in his pocket means that he can live like a king. However, he soon learns to keep quiet about this as Argentinians are suffering from the effects of high inflation. As the economy there slowly implodes, he decides that he would be better off in Spain, the home country of his mother.

It is another country that is suffering from a massive hike in tourists and all of the accompanying problems that they bring with them. This is a phenomenon that is happening all around the world at the moment as locals struggle to cope with increasing self-entitled tourists. Instagrammable sites are super popular and these are now getting restrictions on the number of visitors that can attend.

The arrival of lots of digital nomads means that the local economies have changed completely. Rents and other expenses rise dramatically, locking out locals from the homes that they need. We have seen this effect in Cornwall and other places in the UK. Countries that were once offering golden visas are quietly dropping them. Plus, there is a concerted effort in Europe to restrict the number of short-term rental properties available.

During the time that he spends in Barcelona, he comes to see for himself how the tourists or guiri, and they are known there, are becoming less and less welcome. The city is beginning to restrict how many shops selling tourist tat are allowed. In July 2024, there was a huge protest against tourism; visitors were squirted with water pistols and attractions were cordoned off with fake police tape.

‘The idea of ‘I’m not like the others’ is very egocentric,’ Pardo said. ‘I think it isn’t possible nowadays to come to Barcelona and not be a tourist. If you come, you must accept it: you are just another piece of the mass. And it’s not each person, it’s the mass that is killing the city.

Cruise ships are also becoming a target for locals’ ire. The island of Ibitha can get three huge ships a day, and these can bring 10,00 disembarking from the ships. 10,000! This huge influx of people, coupled with the fact that the ships pollute a lot, are not particularly green and sustainable. Some countries are now starting to limit the number of ships docking and are insisting that low-sulphur fuels are used to combat pollution.

Other places are pushing back on anti-social behaviour too, restricting drink sales for example. In a twist of irony that you couldn’t make up, the anti-tourism protests have become a tourist attraction in their own right.

Like in other countries, migration is becoming a political hot potato, and this is causing some countries to lurch towards right-wing parties. Strangely, though, the predominantly right-wing capitalist system demands that low-paid workers exist to maximise company profits and executive pay. Utterly mad system when you think about it.

Maurer visits Expo 2025 to see what the future of travel offers from a corporate point of view and would it would look like. Having read his description of the event, I think it sounds horrendous… Whilst tech and apps could offer assistance in finding lovely places to visit, it struck me most as being a way to fleece consumers from increasingly larger sums of money.

One good this was that countries are now offering regenerative tourism. You help in some way or other, and you are granted benefits in kind. Key to it is that you are helping the area that you are staying in, rather than money disappearing into the corporate coffers.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell – Edward Abbey

How do we answer that Maurer poses at the end of the book:

Can we learn to move as thoughtfully as we can, as carefully as we can?

I thought that this was a really interesting book. Through numerous examples, he asks some very thought-provoking questions about the nature of travel and tourism and it made me think about just how it is affecting people and places that are becoming inundated with thousands of people on a regular basis.

I do feel, though, that he didn’t fully answer the question that he posed in the book; so, what do we do about travel? Not that this is a fault, he wants you to think about the consequences of what you do and where you go and the choices that you make. We have to make sensible and sustainable decisions going forward.

If you like to travel, then this book would be a great place to start before you book that next flight or holiday.

4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Like all good plans, the idea for this trip formed over a few beers one evening. With his friends, Danny, they had been putting the world to rights before Danny finally got around to asking him the question that had been distracting him for a while. Had he heard of Interrail? Quite a daft question to ask a travel writer.

Of course, he had.

The reason for the question was that Danny had seen that they were having a half-price sale to celebrate 50 years of the service. Danny had the idea that they should spend an entire month travelling around Europe. He was so enthused by the idea he had even broached the subject with his wife and been given a provisional pass.

They bought tickets there and then on the bench in Soho Square, before heading to Stanford’s to get a couple of maps. It didn’t take them long to concoct a plan, and they both knew the destination: Istanbul.

Sadly, a half-price Interrail ticket wouldn’t let them go on the horrendously priced Orient Express. Instead of spending vast amounts of time sorting their itinerary out, they decided to let serendipity reign and follow their instincts and the tracks. This, they hoped, would add a level of jeopardy to the trip and help them see a completely different range of places and people.

They arrived at St Pancras for the Eurostar in good time. There was a slight concern that their first destination, Paris, had been on fire because of riots. They were both slightly apprehensive as they disembarked the train in the station.

However, all seemed well as they alighted in Paris and they headed to their hotel, which just so happened to be in the same area that George Orwell stayed in many years before. They had a night out on and returned late to the hotel. Strasbourg was tomorrow’s destination and they had a train to catch early afternoon.

This was the beginning of the long winding route that would take them across Europe on their way to Istanbul. They pass through Germany, Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria; almost exclusively on trains, but with one trip on a bus because of strikes. It makes for entertaining reading, too, which, if you have read any of Chesshyre’s work before, you’d be familiar with. They get on really well and their account of their travels out there did make me laugh a lot at times.

After they reached Istanbul, Danny had elected to fly back home to relieve his wife from looking after the three children. Chesshyre was going to have to make his own way home, a challenge he relished. Rather than go back the way he had come, he chose a route that would take him through Greece, across the Adriatic to Italy and along one of the world’s most beautiful railway lines in Switzerland and then onward to the Netherlands.

I have read a number of Chesshyre’s books in the past, so I was really looking forward to this, and I am glad to say, it didn’t disappoint at all. It is both an entertaining and informative read. He has a keen eye for detail and particularly likes the variety of stations and the architectural differences they have. I haven’t expanded on the events of the route, because I think that this is something you should read and discover for yourselves when you read it. This is something that I can wholeheartedly recommend that you do.