Review – How to Fake It In Society

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

How to Fake it In Society

by KJ Charles

Genres: Historical Fiction, Romance
Pages: 320
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
It is 1821 and Nicolas-Marc, Comte de Valois de La Motte is making a splash in London Society. The son of Jeanne de Valois de La Motte, infamous for stealing a priceless diamond necklace meant for Marie Antoinette, Nico hopes to restore his wronged mother's reputation, if only he can raise the funds. But he must operate with great secrecy, because the Bourbon dynasty murdered his mother, and he fears for his life.

At least, that's what he tells Titus Pilcrow. Titus was a simple shopkeeper, making and selling artists' paints, when he found himself suddenly married to an immensely wealthy woman who wanted to disinherit her nephew on her deathbed. As word spreads of his fortune, Titus finds himself a target of every scammer and beggar in London…including one Nicolas-Marc, Comte de Valois de La Motte.

Nico is on his last legs, out of money, and on the run from some terrifying gangsters. When Titus offers Nico a space in his household, it's the perfect chance for him to exploit London's newest golden purse—until he falls in love with the man he needs to cheat. Still, Nico is sure they can have a happy ending together. If he can just find his way out of his own web of lies…

I received a copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

My only problem with KJ Charles’ How to Fake It In Society was that I spent the entire thing bracing for the third-act breakup. I knew it was coming, Nico knew it was coming, Eve knew it was coming, everyone knew it was coming — and why — except for Titus, and it was excruciating. It’s like watching a car crash when it’s reached the point of inevitability and it’s going in slow-mo: you can’t do anything to stop it, so you can only watch it with horror.

Nico and Titus are a lovely match, with Nico putting his effrontery and ability to manage people at Titus’ disposal, and steering him toward a path where he can be happy. Nico’s good points are also his flaws, in a way that’s delightful to watch happen to someone else — it just all makes so much sense, and even his awareness of the likelihood of the third-act breakup is part of why things spin out of control for him.

Titus is a sweetheart; I feel that in some ways, his personality has been kicked out of him by his abusive childhood and abusive adult relationship, but we see glimmers of it all the same in his steadfast sticking to what’s right over what’s easy.

The ending involves some ridiculous dramatics, which I mean in the best way possible.

Overall, a lot of fun, I just wish that romance in general didn’t rely so heavily on the breakup and dramatic get-together, because knowing that’s coming — even though I know it’ll be made good — really saps my fun. I get that it’s part of how you add the conflict in, and Charles usually does so in a way that makes sense for the characters and scenario, something that feels natural rather than contrived… but I’m still not a fan of the structure.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, historical fiction, KJ Charles, romance

WWW Wednesday

Posted March 4, 2026 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

What have you recently finished reading?

The last thing I finished was George the Poet’s Part of a Story That Started Before Me, a reflection on Black British history through poetry. It has introductions to most sections explaining what we know about Black people in a given period, some of which I didn’t know about already, so it was a worthwhile read for that alone. I wasn’t a huge fan of most of the selections, admittedly, though some of the poems have a heck of a rhythm to them — you can practically hear them spoken, you can’t help it — which was fun.

What are you currently reading?

I finished a lot of the books I had on the go, so I’m onto pastures new! I just started reading James Fox’s Craftland, though so far I’ve only read through (most of) a chapter about dry stone walls and the work that goes into repairing those. I’m curious what other almost-lost crafts he’ll discuss.

I’m also reading the February British Library Crime Classic, Carol Carnac’s The Double Turn. It feels very much an E.C.R. Lorac novel so far, though since it’s under her other name, I think the detectives are likely to hit quite different to her usual MacDonald. I prefer him, somehow; he’s a very humane, ideal detective.

What will you read next?

Probably Uketsu’s Strange Buildings, which is just out. I’ve been anticipating it for a while, and it arrived today, so it’d be nice to dig in right away.

Other than that, I don’t know, though I have my new Book Spin Bingo card ready… so maybe something from that, so I don’t end up reading nine books in one day again as I did on Saturday, stubbornly finishing February’s card.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Review – Platform Decay

Posted March 4, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Platform Decay

by Martha Wells

Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 256
Series: Murderbot Diaries #8
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Everyone's favorite lethal SecUnit is back in the next installment in Martha Wells' bestselling and award-winning Murderbot Diaries series.

Having someone else support your bad decision feels kind of good.

Having volunteered to run a rescue mission, Murderbot realises that it will have to spend significant time with a bunch of humans it doesn't know.

Including human children. Ugh.

This may well call for... eye contact!

(Emotion check: Oh, for f—)

I received a copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Platform Decay is the latest of Martha Wells’ Murderbot books, and it has the usual ingredients: a Murderbot who’s very done with humans (but not so done it’s actually going to murder them, at least not unless you provoke it), stupid corporates being broadly horrifying, and a bunch of humans who need protecting from the latter by the former. In addition, this one includes a torus station, which Murderbot didn’t know it’d hate so much until it was trying to traverse it.

I have to admit, I’m starting to think if Murderbot needs a break, or the feeling of a tighter narrative arc, or something: this book felt like essentially more of the same. It’s fun because Murderbot’s narrative voice is fun (mostly; caveat below), and because we care about Murderbot, but there’s much that feels like the status quo. Maybe there’s more coming due to Three’s actions in this book? There are some developments (Murderbot’s got a therapy module! and it felt like it was trying way harder to avoid lethal violence than before; Three’s getting itself involved)… but it’s hard to be sure whether we’re going somewhere specific or whether we’re just riding shotgun on Murderbot’s mission of the week, and this felt a bit more like the latter.

In addition, the narrative voice in the first chapter was too Murderbot. There were three or four parenthetical thoughts per paragraph, and it really stuttered the action and made it almost unintelligible to read at times. That’s partly because of how the book starts, and the fact that Wells seems to have wanted to make a certain aspect of the situation unclear until Murderbot’s “oh, by the way” (which failed for me, it was completely obvious).

I did enjoy the story once I got into it, but it has lost some of the freshness, and it feels like maybe it needs a heavier edit or something to rein in some of the inclination toward wordiness: yes, that’s the way Murderbot is, but it still needs to be readable. Or maybe I just need a longer break from Murderbot — that’s possible too.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Martha Wells, SF/F

Review – Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter

Posted March 3, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter

by Heather Fawcett

Genres: Fantasy, Romance
Pages: 368
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Agnes Aubert is very fond of making lists. These lists kept her afloat when she lost her husband two years ago. And now, as the founder of a cat rescue charity, her meticulous organization skills feel like the only thing standing between her beloved cats - His Majesty, Banshee and sweet elderly Thoreau, to name a few - and utter disaster.

But when Agnes is forced to move the charity, she soon discovers that her new shop is being used as a front; right under her feet is the lair of the decidedly disorganised - not to mention self-absorbed and infuriatingly handsome - Havelock Renard.

Havelock is everything Agnes doesn't want in her life: chaos, mischief, and a little too much adventure. But as she gets to know him, she discovers he's more than the dark magician of legend, and that she may be ready for a little intrigue, perhaps even romance. After all, second chances aren't just for rescue cats. . .

I received a copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I was keen to get hold of Heather Fawcett’s Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter more or less from the word go, based on the title and the fact that I really enjoyed the Emily Wilde books. And indeed, I had a lot of fun: Agnes is an older female character who lost her husband and now focuses just about constantly on the fortunes of her cat shelter, an endeavour which isn’t meeting with a lot of success in her city. She’s struggling to find a new landlord after the destruction of the last shelter, but gets drawn to a particular shop that other businesses seem to avoid.

Naturally that’s the start of the real trouble, since it turns out to be a front for an illicit magic business. Magic is particularly looked down on since a dreadful wizard recently tried to end the world — or at least, that’s what everyone assumed happened. You won’t be surprised to hear that we learn otherwise in the course of the story, though I won’t spoil the details.

There’s also a little touch of romance, and it’s partly that which made me feel like this was veeery reminiscent of Diana Wynne Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle (a mixture of the book and the Studio Ghibli film, actually). I don’t mean plagiarism, just that it has certain vibes in common, to be clear. It’s not as humorous, and it’s a bit more clearly aimed at an adult audience (the romance is very light, but the characters aren’t teenagers and don’t have teenage concerns)… but something about the way the characters interact, and the story behind the magic, gives off those vibes.

I didn’t like it as much as the Emily Wilde books, I think, but I feel fondly about it and had a good time reading. And for those who read one of my other reviews lately where I pointed out that the cats got treated as objects for human convenience, I can reassure you that these cats were definitely their own creatures entirely. I felt a little sad about His Majesty here, but at the same time, he’s very much a cat… And that’s all I’ll say about that.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Heather Fawcett, romance, SF/F

Top Ten Tuesday: Microhistory

Posted March 3, 2026 by Nicky in General / 22 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday theme is a genre freebie, so I decided to go with a genre I enjoy a lot: microhistory! I’m technically going to use the term somewhat broadly, but the idea is to take a tiny slice of history and zoom in, using analysis of that small aspect to understand bigger themes and trends.

So here we go! Let’s see what I can pull off my shelves.

A History of England in 25 Poems, by Catherine Clarke.
I read this last month, so my review isn’t up yet, but I think it was my first 5-star read of the year. It does a really good job of staying aware of England’s colonial history (including toward Scotland, Wales and Ireland) and picking poems that aren’t the obvious poems everyone would always pick. I highly recommend it: poetry can tell us a lot about history, because it’s written by the people who lived it.
A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, by Emma Southon.
This is a book I read quite a while ago, but I think of it very fondly. It digs into Roman society through the lens of what might count as murder — and what was just considered justified. I loved it.
The Notebook: A History of Thinking On Paper, by Roland Allen.
I really loved the way this book rambled around the history of how people use notebooks, from ledgers to ICU diaries. The idea that something that we might take for granted as much as the idea of keeping a notebook has a whole history behind it is very fun to me.
The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry, by David Musgrove and Michael Lewis.
Of course, it isn’t really just the history of the object itself, but the events it depicts, and how the events have been understood in the years since, in part because of the tapestry. I really loved this one, because it makes clear that we aren’t always certain about what happened and why.
The British Museum, by James Hamilton.
The British Museum didn’t just spring into being, it’s a whole institution with a history of its own. I will caveat that this book isn’t a critique of the British Museum; it’s in awe and support of the endeavour, and barely discusses the issues with the British Museum’s practices of cultural theft. But it’s still fascinating to learn about how the building came to be what it is today.
Soda and Fizzy Drinks: A Global History, by Judith Levin.
I’m letting this book stand in for the whole Edible Series, because I could’ve picked out a whole bunch of those. Food tells us a lot about history: how food traditions travel, whether they’re adopted, imposed or absorbed and changed, tells us a lot about contact between different cultures. (So yes, this particular book discusses “coca-colonisation”.) Sometimes with books in this series, I hadn’t really thought about the history and relevance of that particular food at all, so it’s always nice to dig in.
Chinese Dress in Detail, by Sau Fong Chan.
This book isn’t exhaustive, because it’s based on the holdings of the Victoria & Albert Museum, which inherently biases collection of European items. Still, I found it a fascinating introduction, and the author makes sure to be clear that “Chinese” is a bit of an umbrella term, also discussing Uyghur clothing history as well. Like food traditions, fashion reflects the periods it comes from, with influence from other countries as well as industrialisation and the changing needs of the population. The other “Fashion in Detail” books from the V&A are similarly fascinating.
The Button Box, by Lynn Knight.
This was one of the first books I read in this sort of genre: Knight focuses on the buttons she finds in a box of old buttons that has been used and added to by the women of her family, and thus tracks the history of not just fashion, but women’s place in society, technological advances, etc. I reread it semi-recently and didn’t love it as much as I had before, but I still remember it fondly.
Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs, by Paul Koudounaris.
Prior to reading this, I knew little to nothing about the catacomb saints. It’s not a tradition that particularly speaks to me, but I was fascinated to learn how the practice of venerating and decorating the bones of (supposed) saints reflected people’s faith. The photography for this volume is absolutely stunning, too. Macabre, but riveting.
The Sarpedon Krater: The Life and Afterlife of a Greek Vase, by Nigel Spivey.
If anything on this list is microhistory, this book’s the one. From a single vase, the scope expands to Renaissance art and modern museum collections (and looting). I didn’t know much about this specific vase before I read it, and I’m not really one for art history so I couldn’t evaluate if it was really as influential as the author says… but I loved the process of learning more about it, and the potential influence it’s had all this time.

I ended up with a “shortlist” of at least ten more books, but let’s stop there, before I get too obsessive about pruning the list. Hopefully it’s a nice spread of options for the way histories of objects or types of objects, or seemingly more transient things like fashion and food, can tell us all kinds of things about history!

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – Iyanu: Child of Wonder, vol 1

Posted March 2, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Iyanu: Child of Wonder

by Roye Okupe, Godwin Akpan

Genres: Fantasy, Graphic Novels
Pages: 120
Series: Iyanu: Child of Wonder #1
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
Iyanu, a teenage orphan with no recollection of her past, suddenly discovers that she has abilities that rival the ancient deities told in the folklore of her people.

It is these abilities that are the key to bringing back an age of wonders, as Iyanu begins her journey to save a world on the brink of destruction! The Corrupt--cursed wildlife and strange, divine beasts--are determined to destroy humanity, unless Iyanu can stop them.

I really liked the colours in volume one of Roye Okupe’s Iyanu: Child of Wonder, and I like the character designs too, but something about the art doesn’t work for me — kind of an uncanny valley sort of thing, I think? There are some pages where it really threw me somehow.

The story itself is fairly familiar/unsurprising, with a chosen one and an in-group protecting themselves by high walls, oppression, etc. What I got fascinated by was the backstory, partly based on Yoruba customs, which is given in snippets between the chapters and then discussed in quite a bit of detail at the end of the book. It’s an interesting set-up.

I don’t think I’ll be continuing with this series, but I’m glad I gave it a shot. It’s probably for a younger audience, mostly; I can imagine an eleven year old eating it up and loving Iyanu.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: book reviews, books, comics, Godwin Akpan, graphic novels, Roye Okupe, SF/F

Fantasy with Friends: Magical Schools

Posted March 2, 2026 by Nicky in General / 7 Comments

This week’s question from Fantasy with Friends is all about magical schools:

Do you enjoy books about schools of magic, or do you think they are overdone? Do you have any favorite magical schools or magical school books?

Which obviously immediately presents the massive Scottish castle in the room, hanging over the discussion. It was a hugely popular school story when I was younger, and it still is, and its fingerprints are inevitably all over a lot of the more recent magical school stories. Given the anti-trans views of the author, the frankly racist worldbuilding and character-naming, and the fact that the author uses her money to fund anti-trans lobbying, needless to say I hold no remaining affection for it. Generally I try to avoid interacting with people who continue to support the author and boost the books, because I don’t feel safe with them.

It gets more complicated when it comes to books that feel informed by the existence of that series. There are several published books lately that are apparently serial-numbers-filed-off fanfics, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that. I think… broadly supportive, because I appreciate people taking back their investment and turning it into something of their own. It really depends on how much work has been done to differentiate it from the original source text, and whether it’s fixed some of the underlying issues with it rather than just importing them.

(I’ve also undoubtedly read some without knowing, or at least without knowing before I actually bought it, because I didn’t actually read most of that series, and was never part of the fandom. Some stuff just sails over my head. I wish people would stop assuming the cultural supremacy of that series is so complete that everyone else must be able to recognise it!)

Anyway, to turn the discussion away from That Magic School, I do still enjoy the concept of a magical school story, both the ones that feel informed by the Enid Blyton genre of school story, and the ones that are more American like The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association. I’ve been especially enjoying ones that are told from a more adult point of view, like The Grimoire Grammar School and Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent: it brings a bit of realism to the genre — and frankly, updates it out of the early 1900s nostalgia fest.

It’s also worth remembering that there have always been other wizarding schools, like the school on Roke in A Wizard of Earthsea. That feels to me like it springs from different roots, and I definitely don’t feel like that kind of otherworldly wizarding school is played out as a story, nor so beholden to That Series.

So yeah, ultimately I feel like the subgenre got over-dominated by That Series and responses to it, and I’d love to see more fantasy schools that aren’t essentially based on British boarding schools of the early to mid 1900s… but I’m not averse to the subgenre automatically. Bonus points if you manage to be queer-inclusive!

Tags: discussion, discussions, Fantasy With Friends

Review – Seasonal Disturbances

Posted March 1, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Seasonal Disturbances

by Karen McCarthy Woolf

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 84
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Following her groundbreaking 2014 debut An Aviary of Small Birds ("technically perfect poems of winged heartbreak" - Observer), Karen McCarthy Woolf returns with Seasonal Disturbances. Set against a backdrop of ecological and emotional turbulence, these poems are charged yet meditative explorations of nature, the city, and the self. A sinister CEO presides over a dystopian hinterland where private detectives investigate crimes against hollyhocks; Halcyon is discovered as a dead kingfisher, washed up on an Italian beach. Lyrical and inventive, McCarthy Woolf's poems test classic and contemporary forms, from a disrupted zuihitsu that considers her relationship with water, to the landay, golden shovel, and gram of &. As a fifth-generation Londoner and daughter of a Jamaican emigre, McCarthy Woolf makes a variety of linguistic subversions that critique the rhetoric of the British class system. Political as they may be, these poems are not reportage: they aim to inspire what the author describes as an "activism of the heart, where we connect to and express forces of renewal and love."

Karen McCarthy Woolf’s Seasonal Disturbances had a few poems or bits of poems that I found interesting and enjoyed, but overall it wasn’t a favourite. It might be partly the fault of the ebook format (I read it from the National Poetry Library’s Overdrive offerings, and Overdrive seems to not always display things the way they’re meant to be read), because there was eventually an explanation for what seemed like random unrelated lines at the end of a poem.

That said, I can only review based on the experience I actually had, and that was pretty confusing. It felt at times like the different stanzas of poems had no relationship to one another at all (and I don’t just mean the one about water that was definitely deliberate, which taught me a new term, “zuihitsu”). Maybe I’m not clever enough for this! Though, clever or not, I have two degrees in English literature, did study poetry within that, and did get good grades, so take that for what that’s worth — partly personal taste, partly not knowing what a “zuihitsu” is in advance, etc.

There was a bit from ‘Ars Poetica 101’ that I did like and wanted to save for myself for later (excerpted below), so it wasn’t a wholly bad experience — but definitely not a great success for me.

Poetry is
what the sea sings to the
last insatiable human
who thinks he’s the only one with a voice
to flood the dark with music and
dance or wonder who we are
and why we’re here or how we
became I, so exclusively…

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Karen McCarthy Woolf, poetry

February Reading Wrap-Up

Posted March 1, 2026 by Nicky in General / 6 Comments

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus — Happy St David’s Day! I can’t believe it’s 1st March already, and time for month #2 of my reading wrap-up. For now it’s mostly the same stats and format as last month, but still excited to hear if anyone has any fun ideas for additions.

February in general:

February involved quite a bit of gaming, so a quick shoutout for the new-to-me games I was really loving: Loophole (a fun puzzle game with time travel and tricky paradoxes) and The Chef’s Shift (a typing game that’s also a restaurant management sim). I’ve been trying to do better at getting 100% achievements in the games I pick up and not consigning games to oblivion half played, so I really got stuck into those and got 100% on both, plus a few games I’d been neglecting for a while, like Fossil Corner (a game where you sort fossils, and find fossils matching people’s requests).

My wrist was pretty painful and stiff early in the month, but I kinda figured out why and gave myself a bit of a break, and was able to get back to physio without too many problems. I don’t know if it’s helping, but I’m giving it a bit more time before I go back to the GP, since I know I was (accidentally) doing some stuff that hurt my wrist in the last couple weeks.

I also sorted out my attendance at both my graduations: I’ll be graduating with an MSc in Infectious Diseases from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine at the end of March, and then from the University of London at the end of April. I’m in one of the last few cohorts to do so, since University of London shut down the course and LSHTM decided to keep it going by themselves. It’s kinda nice that I still get to graduate from both, as it means I’m graduating from the same university as my mum did (albeit in different subjects/from different schools, as she’s a doctor).

Alright, now let’s talk about the really important stuff: books!

Reading stats:

Total books read: 37
Total pages read: 8,660
Rereads: 1
ARCs: 6
Series finished/up to date: 2
Books owned pre-2026: 8
Books owned from 2026: 18
Borrowed books: 10

Fiction: 24
Non-fiction: 4
Poetry: 9
Comics, manga, manhwa, etc: 12

I’m ending the month ahead on my yearly reading goal, wooo. One major cause of that was mainlining the manhua adaptation of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation. I read the light novel recently, but reading an adaptation is always a little different, and I found it helped bits and pieces of the story come together for me that hadn’t really clicked before. Volume 13 should finish off the story, and is out in March, so I’m looking forward to finishing the series.

I read less non-fiction than I expected, but more poetry. I’m still enjoying exploring more poetry!

Progress on reading goals:

Overall total books read: 68/400 (2 books ahead)
Overall total pages read: 15,966/100,000 (472 pages behind)
Books read from backlog: 21/100
Books owned since 2026 and not yet started: 12/20

Good progress here, really! I was a few books behind (and further behind on pages) until I did a marathon of reading yesterday to finish off my BookSpinBingo card. I actually managed it, finishing nine books in a single day, which was a lot of fun but not something I want to do often, ahaha.

I need to work more on getting the number of books I’ve bought this year and not started doooown, since my graduation this month means a trip to London and therefore to a bunch of bookshops.

Blogging stats:

Views: 13.7k
Visitors: 11.9k
Likes: 353
Comments: 389
Reviews: 28
Other posts: 16

A busy month! I’m not entirely sure why, though I’m sure bots are a part of it. Still, all the numbers are up, including likes and comments, so I don’t think it’s just bots. It’s probably also the fact that I took part in Top Ten Tuesday and added a new weekly meme I participate in (Fantasy with Friends), plus trying to be generally active and add fun blogs to my own RSS feed.

Most viewed posts:

Review – Heaven Official’s Blessing, vol 3 (63 views)
Top Ten Tuesday: Cool Typography (57 views)
Review – The Correspondent (56 views)
Top Ten Tuesday: British Library Crime Classics (50 views)
Review – The Other World’s Books Depend on the Bean Counter (LN), vol 3 (48 views)

I continue to get a fair bit of traffic to reviews of The Other World’s Books Depend on the Bean Counter, which I guess is due to the anime. I wonder if I’ll see more for Heaven Official’s Blessing, given the release of the new short film, though I think the audience for the short films are already pretty locked in and don’t need to read book reviews to know that Hualian invented love…

My own favourite posts:

Posts I loved from elsewhere:

From Reactor Magazine: How to Uphold the Status Quo: the Problem with Small Town Witch Romances, by Jenny Hamilton
From Books, Bones & Buffy: NIGHTSHADE & OAK by Molly O’Neill – Review, by Tammy
From Books, Bones & Buffy: STRANGE ANIMALS by Jarod K. Anderson – Review, by Tammy
From The Bibliosanctum: Book Review: Strange Animals by Jarod K. Anderson, by Mogsy
From Book’d Out: 2026 Non-Fiction Award Announcements, by Shelleyrae
From Books, Bones & Buffy: A FOREST, DARKLY by A.G. Slatter – Review, by Tammy

Alright, that’s me for February! Time to go and start on that March reading.

Tags: books, monthly wrapup

Review – The Hungry Empire

Posted February 28, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Hungry Empire: How Britain's Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World

by Lizzie Collingham

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 367
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
The glamorous daughter of an African chief shares a pineapple with a slave trader ... Surveyors in British Columbia eat tinned Australian rabbit ... Diamond prospectors in Guyana prepare an iguana curry ... In twenty meals The Hungry Empire tells the story of how the British created a global network of commerce and trade in foodstuffs that moved people and plants from one continent to another, re-shaping landscapes and culinary tastes. To be British was to eat the world. The Empire allowed Britain to harness the globe's edible resources from cod fish and salt beef to spices, tea and sugar. By the twentieth century the wheat to make the working man's loaf of bread was supplied by Canada and his Sunday leg of lamb had been fattened on New Zealand's grasslands. Lizzie Collingham takes us on a wide-ranging culinary journey, charting the rise of sugar to its dominant position in our diets and locating the origins of the food industry in the imperial trade in provisions. Her innovative approach brings a fresh perspective to the making of the Empire, uncovering its decisive role in the shaping of the modern diet and revealing how virtually every meal we eat still contains a taste of empire.

Lizzie Collingham’s The Hungry Empire takes two different tacks in addressing the subtitle, “How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World”. One is to discuss the food the British Empire imported to Britain, the adoption of new spices, of sugar, of tea — a fairly well-worn story, but nonetheless part of understanding imperialist expansion, and sometimes even the explicit cause of it.

The other is to discuss the less intentional way that food travelled with immigrants and slaves, especially the slaves, or was shipped around the world to cope with the needs of slaves and indentured people, and how these diets affected health. The latter part was a bit more interesting to me because I’d read less about it elsewhere. As a note, it’s fairly dispassionate about all this, rather than outraged at the casual treatment of people as chattel; it does comment about stuff like horrible conditions on slave ships and the high mortality rates, but it mostly just gives the facts… aside from when discussing opium and China, at which point it gets very defensive about Britain’s role in that and argues that the impact of opium on China is over-exaggerated. It’s hard to say how to take that without more context.

I did find the book fairly slow/long-winded, personally; there was something about the author’s writing that I really couldn’t keep my attention on for long, unfortunately. I found the inclusion of the recipes an interesting idea but intrusive — they aren’t always positioned at the ends of chapters, and sometimes just break in mid-paragraph. Weird choice.

It’s an interesting book and I am glad I read it, but it was definitely slow-going.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: book reviews, books, history, Lizzie Collingham, non-fiction