Review – A Wizard of Earthsea (graphic novel) [Fred Fordham]

Posted November 7, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

A Wizard of Earthsea

by Fred Fordham, Ursula Le Guin

Genres: Fantasy, Graphic Novels
Pages: 270
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Ursula K. Le Guin's timeless and revered A Wizard of Earthsea is reimagined in a richly expansive graphic novel by acclaimed artist Fred Fordham, creator of stunning adaptations To Kill a Mockingbird and Brave New World.

Ged was the greatest sorcerer in Earthsea, but in his youth he was the reckless Sparrowhawk. In his hunger for power and knowledge, he tampered with long-held secrets and unleashed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tumultuous tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death's threshold to restore the balance.

Experience the bestselling first adventure of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle as a masterly crafted graphic novel. Fred Fordham brings new life to Le Guin's iconic fantasy classic with his breathtaking illustrations and thoughtful text adaptation.

Fred Fordham’s graphic novel adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea is something that I can well believe it a deeply considered labour of love, sticking close to Ursula Le Guin’s exact words and changing very little in the adaptation, and approved by her son. It’s a very wordy graphic novel, actually, taking a lot of Le Guin’s narration verbatim, and moving other bits into dialogue to keep as much as possible.

I think something that took a lot of liberties would have been very different, but maybe… a bit more enjoyable to me? It’s not that it was a bad read, but I’m not sure that it added a lot to the world of Earthsea, and I think anyone who is put off by the language of the original is going to be put off here, even though there are also pictures.

I also have mixed feelings about the art. I know others find it beautiful, but I find it rather murky, with many panels barely lit at all, and people/objects hard to discern. This is almost certainly exacerbated by me not being a very visual person at all and having no visual imagination, but it still made it hard for me to really enjoy this adaptation, despite some of the scenes being very beautiful and adding a lot of life.

Overall, not really what I’d hoped for, but hopefully it’s bringing Earthsea to audiences who might not have read it!

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Fred Fordham, graphic novels, SF/F, Ursula Le Guin

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted November 7, 2026 by Nicky in General / 3 Comments

Haaaaappy weekend! It’s been a busy week, though it always seems to be a busy week around here!

Books acquired this week

Wooo, another pre-order came in! I thought Mistakenly Saving the Villain was supposed to be released in October, but I guess either it got changed or the date I saw before was an error. I’ve been eagerly waiting for it, either way! I’d actually preordered it back in August, knowing I’d want it ASAP on release.

I did also snag a handful of novellas that looked tempting in honour of Novellas in November. I deliberately went for a bit of a spread of genres, since it seems like a good opportunity to dip my toe into different authors and try things.

Excited to read all of these! I’ve already made a start.

Posts from this week

As usual, here’s a round-up of the reviews first! Don’t forget that these are from the last few months, and don’t represent what I read this week. I have sooo many reviews backlogged and ready to post, but I try not to flood the blog — and to post some variety. My descriptions of my ratings are literal, too: if I rated something 3/5 stars, I promise I really did like it!

Poetry: Off the Shelf, ed. Carol Ann Duffy (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Fantasy manhwa: Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, vol 4, by Umi and Sleepy-C (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Sci-fi horror: There Is No Antimimetics Division, by qntm (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Fantasy: The Green Man’s Heir, by Juliet E. McKenna (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Mystery: Let Him Lie, by Ianthe Jerrold (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Non-fiction: Embers of the Hands, by Emma Barraclough (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Poetry: A460: Poems for the Road, by Ness Owen and Sian Northey (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)

Of course, there have been a bunch of non-review posts:

Man, it’s good to be able to schedule posts again! This was my most organised week in a while, even given I’ve been drafting and formatting posts in advance again for a few months.

What I’m reading

As usual, let’s start with a sneak peek at what I’ve been reading! Last Saturday the Haunted Shelf readathon ended, so I got enthusiastic… as ever, don’t take any book’s inclusion here as a recommendation, though! It’s just a log of what I’ve read — reviews come later.

Here are the books I’ll be reviewing some time soon:

My plan for the weekend involves reading a lot of novellas, unsurprisingly! But I also hope to sort through some books and start some more of my longer reads as well, focusing on sci-fi and non-fiction (in aid of the other reading challenges I’ve joined in with this month)… though I’m also likely to tackle Mistakenly Saving the Villain vol 4, and/or start my reread of After the Disabled God of War Became My Concubine.

Once the fourth volume of the latter hits, that’ll be my first priority this week! I hope it’ll get dispatched on Tuesday and arrive on Wednesday. 🤞

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Linking up with Reading Reality’s Stacking the Shelves, Caffeinated Reviewer’s The Sunday Post, the Sunday Salon over at Readerbuzz, and It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? at The Book Date.

Tags: books, Stacking the Shelves, weekly roundup

Book Blogger Hop: Owning a Bookshop

Posted November 6, 2026 by Nicky in General / 6 Comments

It’s Friday, so it’s time for the Book Blogger Hop again, hosted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer. I’ve made my own image from a stock photo (credit: Anna Shvets) to avoid adding images created via generative AI to my blog. Feel free to use it too if you would like!

This week’s prompt is a what-if:

Imagine you owned a bookstore—what would it feel like?

Oof, probably quite stressful! Managing stock, dealing with customers, handling rent and taxes and paying any employees… yeah, I can’t help it, my brain jumped straight to the practicalities! Running any kind of business is way more stressful than cosy fiction likes to make it seem. Much as I love my cosy stories, that’s the first thing that came to mind!

But… if I did… I imagine that there’d be some amazing moments, too. Getting to know regulars and being able to hand them the right book in the right moment. Knowing my shop would be a nice escape for people from the busy high street or whatever’s going on in their heads. Handling all those lovely, lovely books… and getting to curate the selection to have a little something for everyone. That would be a lot of fun.

If I owned a bookshop, I’d definitely make sure to make it the kind of haven that a reader like me would enjoy, with a little of everything, so that’d be really satisfying, too.

Tags: Book Blogger Hop, books, discussion

Review – A470: Poems for the Road [ed. Ness Owen & Sian Northey]

Posted November 6, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

A470: Poems for the Road / Cerddi'r Ffordd

by Sian Northey (editor), Ness Owen (editor)

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 114
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Fifty poems by Welsh poets celebrating the A470. Originaly written in Welsh or English, every poem has been translated into the other language and set out side by side as we travel the length of the country.

Coming in from outside Wales, the A470 isn’t such a feature, and since that was pretty much always my lot, somehow Ness Owen and Sian Northey’s earlier anthology, A470, didn’t speak to me as much as Afonydd did (even though I knew few of the named rivers in Afonydd, I had the Taff and the nameless — so far as I know — streams coming down from Caerphilly Mountain in mind).

Still, it’s a deeply, profoundly Welsh project, celebrating poets writing in both English and Cymraeg, translating each to the other so both halves can read the work. There’s a good selection of poets here, and I’d be curious to read more of some of them.

I think it’s maybe slightly less well presented than Afonydd, but overall… yeah. Another lovely collection.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Ness Owen (editor), poetry, Sian Northey (editor)

November Reading Plans

Posted November 5, 2026 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

I’m not sure if this will be a regular monthly feature, but this month happens to have a bunch of fun things going on, and I’d have liked to share more about the Haunted Shelf Shenanigans last month… so let’s have a chat about my reading plans for the month!

First up, there’s a readathon on Dreamwidth’s readingtogether community designed to focus on unread and half-read books in November. I have a plethora of those, so here are my targets:

Finish five books from my “paused” pile on StoryGraph
Finish five books from my backlog (that aren’t already in my paused pile), i.e. books bought before 2026 began
Finish five books bought in 2026 (that aren’t already in my currently reading/paused pile)

I figure that’s very doable (at least at my current reading pace), without constraining me too much on what to read. It should be able to feed into most of my other reading challenges this month!

Speaking of which…

Learn more here!

If you’ve hung around here much, you’ll know that I’m a fairly big non-fiction reader, and I hope to join in with the posts about this and do some non-fiction reading this month — especially since I didn’t fit in a lot of it last month. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll read, but here are some possibilities:

With My Own Hand (Ashley Douglas)
The Castle: A History (John Goodall)
A Lab of One’s Own (Patricia Fara)
The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading (Sam Leith)
X Marks the Spot: The Story of Archaeology in Eight Extraordinary Discoveries (Michael Scott)

But I’ll lean into my whim here, as ever. There are lots of books in my non-fiction bookcase that I haven’t read yet!

Review – Embers of the Hands [Emma Barraclough]

Posted November 5, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

by Eleanor Barraclough

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 384
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
A new and original history of the Viking Age, told through the objects that defined the lives of its people - from powerful leaders to naughty teenagers

Imagine a Viking, and a certain image springs to mind: a nameless, faceless warrior, leaping ashore from a longboat, and ready to terrorise the hapless local population of a northern European country.

Yet while such characters define the Viking Age today, they were in the minority. This is the history of all the other people - children, enslaved people, seers, artisans, travellers, writers - who inhabited the medieval Nordic world. Encompassing not just Norway, Denmark and Sweden, but also Iceland, Greenland, parts of the British Isles, Continental Europe and Russia, this is a history of a Viking Age filled with real people of different ages, genders and ethnicities, as told through the traces that they left behind, from hairstyles to place names, love-notes to gravestones.

For the first time, you can immerse yourself in the day-to-day lives of extraordinary culture which spanned centuries and spread from the edge of the North American continent to the Russian steppes, from the Arctic wastelands to the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Caliphate.

I’m not quite sure why it took me ages to read Emma Barraclough’s Embers of the Hands, because once I got into it, I really enjoyed it. The premise is to get close to real people of the Viking era through mostly material remains, like the outline of a teenager’s foot scratched into the timbers of a boat, or the slightly asymmetrical and well-worn heavy woollen dress preserved in icy conditions.

This mostly works pretty well: Barraclough does have to spend time just giving straight-up context, of course, so it isn’t all artifacts all the time — but there are enough fascinating finds and inferences drawn that it felt relatively fresh. Many of them I knew little about, which was also nice: she does discuss the Lewis chessmen, which I’ve read quite a bit about, but otherwise most of the finds were new to me.

Her style is pretty easy to read without becoming so breezy it felt like she was leaving out information or getting too flippant (though flippant can still be fun and informational when it’s well done!). I think it’d have benefitted from the recent trend toward in-line colour images alongside the finds she’s talking about, but there is a section of colour plates which is well worth perusing (it’s right at the end in the ebook version).

There are plenty of notes, as well, and in comparison with the fact that I do actually know something about this period from a mostly-literary perspective, I feel pretty confident in recommending it.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Eleanor Barraclough, history, non-fiction

WWW Wednesday

Posted November 4, 2026 by Nicky in General / 8 Comments

What have you recently finished reading?

It’s been comics and poetry collections mostly for the last couple of days, perhaps because I was reading so intensely at the weekend! I think the last thing I finished was Kim Moore’s The Art of Falling, which is a poetry collection by a British poet from Leicester. I enjoyed it quite a bit, overall, though I’m still letting it settle before I actually write my review.

What are you currently reading?

I only have two books actively “in flight”: Any More Questions for the Corpse? by J.J. Unthank, and John Goodall’s The Castle: A History — the latter of which I haven’t touched in a few weeks, whoops.

I’m not sure yet what I think of Any More Questions for the Corpse? — I’m already 20% of the way through it, but not totally sure I’m enjoying it. There’s some intriguing stuff about the world-building, but something about the style isn’t quite working for me, I think.

What will you be reading next?

I still have some spooky books I’d like to finish (or at least try) in the wake of Halloween and the Haunted Shelf readathon: Emmeline Duncan’s Chaos at the Lazy Bones Bookshop, for one. Mostly, though, I’m thinking about starting my reread of After the Disabled God of War Became My Concubine, in prep for the next and final volume which is coming next week! I know I only read it in August, but I was honestly tempted to reread it right away, so I wanted to do a reread before reading the final volume.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Review – Let Him Lie [Ianthe Jerrold]

Posted November 4, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Let Him Lie

by Ianthe Jerrold

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 249
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Murder begins with the death of a kitten...

Artist Jeanie Halliday is thrilled to move into a country cottage of her own, next door to the home of her dear childhood friend Agnes. But the countryside idyll isn't quite what she might have expected: Agnes is suddenly and unaccountably unfriendly for one thing; and then the neighbours are a little peculiar - old Mr Fone, obsessed with burial mounds; the scandalous Hugh Barchard; and an estranged mother taken to brandishing pistols around.

Soon after the feline victim is found, a shot is heard - the corpse of Robert Molyneux, Agnes's husband, is discovered with a bullet in his brain. Was Molyneux a meddler in sacred places, a secret lothario... or simply a man who knew too much? And how does the unfortunate cat fit in? It will fall to Jeanie to assist the local police superintendent and fit the pieces of a baffling mystery.

I hadn’t come across Ianthe Jerrold before, but her work came up while I was perusing similar books in Kobo Plus, and I’m always keen on trying more classic crime fiction, so I thought I’d give it a go. Let Him Lie falls into the spot in the tradition where ordinary citizens with no aspirations to turn detective end up doing a spot of amateur detection in order to figure out who has actually committed a murder.

I’d say Let Him Lie’s Jeanie isn’t much of a deliberate detective. She tries to find things out mostly out of curiosity a couple of times, but her discovery of the murderer is largely incidental, and she’s not really systematic about the whole thing. It’s almost more of a study of what it’s like to be caught up in the outskirts of a violent crime — but the reader does get enough information to start putting some of it together.

Overall, for me it fell down a bit on the characters, because Agnes turns out to be straightforwardly just a bit contemptible. There’s no real complexity there, and her anguish about being found out for… having a sister who was an actress was way overdone. I believe there were and are people like that, to be clear! I just found it not so enjoyable to read because I kinda hoped she’d get what was coming to her, while also not believing that she actually had anything directly to do with the crime because she’s so ineffectual.

It was equally clear that several other people weren’t likely criminals because they were generally too sympathetic, too unsympathetic, etc — the twist wasn’t clever in that way.

I’d be curious to read some of Jerrold’s other work; it’s not that I think it’s bad, it just wasn’t entirely the shape and tone of mystery I prefer. It’s entirely possible that some of her other mysteries will work better for me.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, crime, Ianthe Jerrold, mystery

Review – The Green Man’s Heir [Juliet E. McKenna]

Posted November 3, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Green Man's Heir

by Juliet E. McKenna

Genres: Fantasy, Mystery
Pages: 368
Series: Green Man #1
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
A hundred years ago, a man with a secret could travel a few hundred miles and give himself a new name and life story. No one would be any the wiser, as long as he didn’t give anyone a reason to start asking questions. These days, that’s not so easy, with everyone on social media, and CCTV on every street corner. So Daniel Mackmain keeps his head down and keeps himself to himself.

But now a girl has been murdered and the Derbyshire police are taking a closer look at a loner who travels from place to place, picking up work as he goes. Worse, Dan realises the murder involves the hidden world he was born into. When no one else can see the truth, who will see justice done?

Juliet E. McKenna’s The Green Man’s Heir was a bit up and down for me. In the first half of the book, the main character acts like a teenage boy, and the way women’s bodies are described is just… facepalm. I think there are reasons it’s that way, for characterisation and to later contrast the purely mortal sex with the temptations Daniel experiences with the naiad — but that doesn’t mean I had to enjoy reading it.

That aspect does improve, but the pacing feels pretty weird, with the book falling pretty sharply into two halves: it feels like two novellas in a series welded together to make a single book, even though the ending leaves plenty of room for the sequels as well. It feels like one arc (the wose) gets resolved in a fairly neat way, and then it leads into a whole second story that’s only tenuously linked.

The second half is definitely my preference, though; Eleanor seems pretty great, and the lore is pretty fun. I won’t spoiler what Daniel runs into, because it’s a pretty cool reveal.

Overall, I probably wouldn’t keep reading the series if it weren’t for the second half of the novel, where it feels like things settle in and some of the annoyances smooth out. Right now, I’m willing to give the second book a try and see how it goes.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Juliet E. McKenna, mystery, SF/F

Top Ten Tuesday: One-Word Reviews

Posted November 3, 2026 by Nicky in General / 32 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt is a fun one: “One-Word Reviews for the Last Ten Books I Read”. Let’s see if I can keep it that succinct! It won’t be quite the last ten books I read exactly because I’m writing this a couple of days in advance…

Devil Inside, by Clay McLeod Chapman. “Transgressive.”
Paper Girls, vol 1, by Brian K. Vaughan et al. “Confusing.”
Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse. “Electrifying.” (Yes, I am pleased with myself, why do you ask?)
The Nightmare Before Christmas, by Sara Raasch. “Cute.”
Startup Hell, by Caitlin Rozakis. “Familiar.”
The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City, by Susanna Clarke. “Short.”
Wearing the Lion, by John Wiswell. “Infuriating.”
Kakegurui, vol 1, by Homura Kawamoto. “Oversexed.”
Domnall and the Borrowed Child, by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley. “Inconclusive.”
The Airless Year, by Valentine Barker, Adam P. Knave, & Frank Cvetkovic. “Stifling.”

I’ll be curious to see what everyone else is reviewing, and what you all have to say!

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday