Review – The Hedgewitch of Foxhall

Posted April 12, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Hedgewitch of Foxhall

by Anna Bright

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 389
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
Ffion is the last hedgewitch in Foxhall. To work her magic, she takes only what nature can spare, unlike the witches of the powerful Foxhall coven, who sacrifice whole forests to fuel their spells. But across the warring kingdoms of Wales, all magic is fading. Even the dragons have vanished.

Prince Taliesin would love nothing more than to watch magic die. But when his father charges Tal and his brother, Dafydd, with destroying King Offa’s dyke—the massive earthen wall raised by their Mercian enemies to the east, which may be the cause of magic’s disappearance—he begrudgingly seeks aid from a witch.

Because whichever prince succeeds in destroying the dyke will win the throne, and Tal is willing to do whatever it takes to become king. Even if the Foxhall coven refuses to help him. Even if he’s forced to team up with a spitfire hedgewitch who hates him almost as much as he hates her magic. And even if Dafydd proves to be a worthier rival than he anticipated…for the crown, and for Ffion’s heart.

Anna Bright’s The Hedgewitch of Foxhall caught my attention because it’s set in a historical-fantasy Wales, with Offa’s dyke presenting a huge problem because it affects magic. The main characters are Ffion, Taliesin and Dafydd, and yes… there’s a love triangle, alas.

In many ways it’s a very typical quest narrative, not very surprising, but the very Welsh setting adds some grounding to it. I mostly enjoyed that aspect, though I wasn’t always absolutely certain about the Welsh stuff. (E.g. does it make sense to ask another Welsh person, in Welsh, if they feel hiraeth, and then have to define hiraeth? Well… maybe, yeah, maybe you just hear the word and you don’t really know the full definition other than “homesickness, sort of”, so I’ll give it a pass. It did feel more like Welsh people speaking in English, though — I have absolutely asked another Welsh person if they feel hiraeth, and been asked too.) The historical grounding was probably all over the place, but I actually don’t know that much about that sort of period or Offa’s dyke, so that all got a pass from me, even though it might annoy others to no end.

There are some interesting concepts and interesting ways of handling the witchcraft, plus the various magical creatures; nothing groundbreaking, though I liked the fact that it was based on folksy songs etc. My main quibble was the constant POV-switching, and the love triangle. I just wasn’t into it and didn’t really believe in it as-given.

Warning: the pet fox Cadno dies in the first few chapters. It’s story relevant, and it’s not all it appears (trying not to spoiler), but Ffion grieves intensely, so it’s worth knowing about.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: Anna Bright, book reviews, books, romance, SF/F

Review – Solo Leveling (light novel), vol 1

Posted April 11, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Solo Leveling

by Chugong

Genres: Fantasy, Light Novels
Pages: 350
Series: Solo Leveling (light novel) #1
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
THE WEAKEST HUNTER OF ALL MANKIND!

E-rank hunter Jinwoo Sung has no money, no talent, and no prospects to speak of-and apparently, no luck, either! When he enters a hidden double dungeon one fateful day, he’s abandoned by his party and left to die at the hands of some of the most horrific monsters he’s ever encountered. But just before the last, fatal blow… PING! [Congratulations on becoming a Player.]

Having read the manhwa adaptation of Chugong’s Solo Leveling, I decided I wanted to give the light novel a try and just start with getting volume one. This might’ve been a mistake: I started it on Christmas morning and instantly knew I was going to want to read the whoooole series in pretty short order. Luckily, I was saved: someone bought me volumes two and three for Christmas.

As that story suggests, it’s a pretty quick read, and not that different from the manhwa if you’ve read that first. You get a little bit of extra insight into Jinwoo’s thoughts, but it’s amazing how much the manhwa manages to directly translate into that format. You get maybe a liiiittle bit more of the side characters as well in volume one.

Honestly, this first volume is probably the most I ever felt Jinwoo facing real peril, which makes sense. Once he’s figured out the system and started leveling up, he’s got the protagonist’s halo. When he’s still just an E rank hunter — the worst hunter of all mankind — then he could genuinely die.

Mostly, the fun of this series is watching Jinwoo go from zero to hero to obscenely overpowered, and enjoy the nods to typical video game systems as you go. It’s really not that deep, it’s just fun. That’s the same in both the light novel and the manhwa, but it’s fun to experience it again in another format, and actually more so than I thought it might be.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Chugong, light novels, SF/F

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted April 11, 2026 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

It’s the weekend again, wooo!

Books acquired this week

First up, let’s have the library books! It’s been a few weeks since I checked out any poetry, but I found myself turning to it this week, hoping for more of Mary Oliver’s work and thus inclined to click on other stuff that looked interesting.

I also got a new book that genuinely arrived this week — this month’s British Library Crime Classic. The author wrote the Sergeant Beef short stories, if I understand rightly, so I’m not sure if I’ll like this one; it’s not about Sergeant Beef, but still, I don’t think I enjoyed the style. Still, novels and short stories can be quite different, as can different characters by the same author! So we’ll see.

We’ll see, anyway! And now it’s time to get back to the books I got in London. We’re now onto the Forbidden Planet section of the “report”! First up, the SF/F. I’d heard of a couple of these from other bloggers, or seen them around for ages (like Wooing the Witch Queen), but a couple were more random choices, like The Palace Near the Wind.

I definitely tried to let myself just browse pretty freely and go with whatever jumped out, without looking it up too much or hesitating. Sometimes the unexpected will jump out at you that way… but honestly the selection at Forbidden Planet was pretty overwhelming and I mostly found myself gravitating to titles I recognised from somewhere, ahaha.

And now onto the danmei, the very last section to explore. Most of the danmei is technically also SF/F, but they also fit together well:

The sharp-eyed and strong of memory will remember that I’ve been hankering after The Wife Comes First and After the Disabled God of War Became My Concubine for a while, so I’m curious to get stuck into them.

If you’re curious about the indie bookshops I visited, the books I got there are in part one of my London trip STS report, while part two has the non-fiction books I found at Waterstones Piccadilly (the biggest bookshop in Europe). I definitely had myself a good time for my graduation treat, ahaha, but how often does one get a master’s degree?

(Well, for me it’s happened twice, admittedly. Shush and don’t ruin my excuse.)

Posts from this week

First up, the reviews:

Fantasy: Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint (light novel), vol 2, by singNsong (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Fantasy: Breath of the Dragon, by Shannon Lee & Fonda Lee (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
History/poetry: Part of a Story that Started Before Me, ed. George the Poet (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Mystery: Murder Like Clockwork, by Nicola Whyte (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Science: The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs, by Riley Black (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Fantasy/romance manhwa: Tied to You, vol 3, by WHAT & Chelliace (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)

And quite a few other posts!

It’s been nice to get out and about doing more discussion posts, lately!

What I’m reading

This week still involved less reading than I would’ve liked, since I didn’t settle down to it very well… but I did still have some fun reads. Let’s have a peek at what this week and what might be coming up for review on my blog (sooner or later, depending on the genre — Murder Like Clockwork’s review is already up because I haven’t read a lot of crime fiction lately!):

A very small number read for me, but oh well. Maybe this weekend? Or maybe not! Whatever’s fine, really — I don’t want to force myself.

As for this weekend, I’m not sure what I’ll read exactly, but I’d like to get further into Finn Longman’s The Wolf and His King, and I also started reading Jess Kidd’s The Murder at Gulls Nest since it’s due back at the library. Ditto There is No Antimimetics Division. So maybe those!

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

Review – Tied to You, vol 3

Posted April 10, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Genres: Fantasy, Manga, Romance
Pages: 308
Series: Tied to You #3
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Wooseo has finally found a way to remove the Ring. The catch? Doing so erases all memories related to one’s fated partner. While he loathes being a burden to Jigeon, for some reason, the thought of losing him hurts just as much…In the face of Wooseo’s uncertainty, Jigeon decides to make a gambit—by revealing he is irrevocably in love with him! But all risks come with consequences, and Jigeon’s actions have pushed his brother over the edge. No more sitting on the sidelines…Jiseok refuses to let his best friend be stolen away, even if it means dropping a truth bomb of his own!

Volume three of WHAT/Chelliace’s Tied to You keeps rattling on, with Wooseo wrestling with the idea of getting the ring removed and losing all his memories of Jigeon, and Jigeon still carefully manipulating the situation to force Wooseo to ultimately see and accept that he’s his fated partner, and nothing else compares…

And of course, even Jiseok’s part of that plan, his confused jealousy boiling up and making him rash — I would sympathise more with him and think that Wooseo probably would be better with him, if he hadn’t physically hurt Wooseo because of the rivalry between himself and his brother. That’s just not okay: it’s clear that Jigeon, too, would resort to violence — but he’s never behaved that way toward Wooseo, his desired romantic partner, while Jiseok has.

You end up kind of rooting for Jigeon, despite the manipulation and stalking. He would take care of Wooseo and make him happy, because he’s so desperate for Wooseo’s love. It’s impossible to feel totally at ease in rooting for that, though, because… well… manipulation and stalking.

I wanna be really clear that I am absolutely not recommending this as a romance, for that reason. It’s intense and fascinating, but definitely not any kind of fluffy romance, despite the soulmates concept.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Chelliace, manga, romance, SF/F, WHAT

Let’s Talk Bookish: Casting in Adaptations

Posted April 10, 2026 by Nicky in General / 7 Comments

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly bookish meme created by Rukky @ Eternity Books and co-hosted by Aria @ Book Nook Bits and Dini @ Dinipandareads! Every Friday they have a different topic for participants to write about and discuss, e.g. like this post.

This week’s theme is about casting in (movie?) adaptations of books:

Casting in book-to-film adaptations is always a big topic, and recently, the Wuthering Heights movie starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi has been the source of a lot of controversy. Other 2026 high-profile adaptations include Project Hail Mary, out March 20th, and the new Hunger Games movie, set to release in the fall, both for which the casting has been received more positively. What is most important to you with casting for book-to-film adaptations? Is the perfect hair color, or right height or eyes always a must, or is personality more important? When are book-accurate looks in casting most important? What are your favorite—and least favorite—book-to-film adaptations when it comes to casting?

I must admit I don’t have a lot of skin in the game (again) because I don’t really watch movies very often — nor TV, to be fair. I have surprisingly seen Knives Out and Glass Onion, because I got curious enough about the classic mystery type setups they had going on, but otherwise I’m hard pressed to name anything particularly recent that I’ve seen. I still name Pacific Rim as a recent-ish movie I’ve seen and, uh, well…

It also doesn’t help that I don’t have a visual imagination at all: I’m completely aphantasic, right on the “5” end of the apple test scale, so I don’t really imagine characters in the way described. Instead I get more of a sense of them: you know how birdwatchers get the “jizz” of a bird? Something like that, I think.

I do love the old BBC adaptations of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, so let’s turn to those for an idea of what I think about casting. The main players here are Ian Carmichael (in the black-and-white era) and Edward Petherbridge (in 1987) — I don’t know of any other adaptations, and I don’t know if I want to, because between them Carmichael and Petherbridge set a pretty high bar. Neither of them is quite the right physical type, but they each manage to capture different aspects of Peter’s manner perfectly. I can see Peter right away when I look at Petherbridge, but for Carmichael it takes seeing him in motion and hearing his voice.

The same is pretty much true of the way they speak, to be fair, but reversed: Carmichael needs only speak and immediately he sounds like Peter, while for Petherbridge it’s more the combination… But really, both of them are wonderful Lord Peters, and I delight in their performances.

Ian Carmichael also voices Lord Peter in the BBC radio adaptations, and they’re really good. The BBC often hits it out of the park on radio adaptations, or they did a few decades ago: The Lord of the Rings had a glorious adaptation, and even Andy Serkis (who did a great job as Gollum) can’t quite dislodge my conviction that the radio adaptation’s Gollum is the Gollum. On the other hand, the radio adaptation voice of Aragorn strikes me as wrong every time, though I do get into it as the adaptation rolls along. When it comes to the movie, by contrast, Viggo Mortensen was instantly Aragorn to me: manner, voice, clothes, the way he held himself… Perfect.

(That said, I was disappointed by the movie version of Faramir and never really reconciled with that portrayal, particularly with the changes made to the character for the sake of screen adaptation. Something too “soft” about him, and no, I can’t explain that statement any further.)

There are also times when I’m very sceptical of casting, like casting David Tennant as Crowley and Michael Sheen as Aziraphale in the Good Omens series, but makeup, costuming and pure skill from the actors make it fit like they were perfect all along. I’ve heard the same about the adaptation of Martha Wells’ Murderbot, where Alexander Skarsgård has been able to win over people who were deeply sceptical; I’m definitely curious what I’ll think when I get round to it, if I ever do.

(NB: I’m aware of the allegations against Neil Gaiman. Good Omens was also Terry Pratchett’s — some say the majority of it was Terry Pratchett’s — and I think the TV show was also so much more than Gaiman, though I acknowledge his heavy involvement. I’m not sure if I’ll watch the remainder or rewatch the first two series, and at the moment I don’t expect to. All the same, David Tennant’s Crowley was perfect to me, and I don’t want Gaiman’s misdeeds to take that achievement away from Tennant. Still, I think making this acknowledgement is important.)

All in all, I think I can forgive a lot of infidelity to details like hair colour, eye colour, skin colour, etc, as long as the actors can capture something fundamental about the character. Some can do both, like Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn or Essie Davis as Phryne Fisher, while some can carry the day with voice and mannerisms like Ian Carmichael as Peter Wimsey.

Sorry, though, David Wenham. You just aren’t Faramir. I’m sure you’re perfectly nice, but you’re not Faramir.

Tags: books, discussion

Review – The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs

Posted April 9, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs

by Riley Black

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 236
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Despite their cultural influence, the grand narrative of the dinosaur story is rarely told. Most of us have heard of Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, for example, but these two dinosaurs lived more than eighty million years apart--a greater span of time than the entire post-T. rex history of the planet. Furthermore, we often know even less about the environments these animals lived in--the other animals and plants inhabiting a dramatic changing Earth alongside the dinosaurs.

The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs tells the full story, a 230-million-year epic of small beginnings, spectacular golden periods, and eventual global domination--before an unthinkable asteroid event brought everything to a screeching halt, covering the major moments in evolution, extinction, and ecology. We learn that, for millions of years in the Triassic, dinosaurs were dog-sized--but slowly developing evolutionary traits like feathers and warm-bloodedness that would set them up for future success. In the Jurassic Period, these traits--and others like laying eggs and growing specialized air sacs--led to an era of rapid growth in dinosaur population and physical size. As Pangea continued to break apart, during the Cretaceous Period, dinosaurs traversed the globe, adapting to air and water--before a six-mile-wide asteroid hit Central America and brought the age of dinosaurs to a fiery end.

Using countless recent fossil discoveries, fresh understandings of genetics and evolution, and over fifty illustrations and maps, author Riley Black reveals the startling relationships dinosaurs shared with each other, the land they lived on, other animal species, and the earth as a whole.

You’d think I wouldn’t need a general history of dinosaurs — after all, I’ve read a bunch of books about dinosaurs, including highly specific ones like Spinosaur Tales (by David Hone and, unsurprisingly, about spinosaurs). But the consensus among palaeontologists changes swiftly, and in fact has changed since this was published last year… so I was eager to read Riley Black’s The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs, especially as I’ve enjoyed Black’s other books.

One part I found really interesting was the suggestion that Tyrannosaurus rex dominated its ecosystem, with T. rex individuals of different ages occupying different niches. What did I read today but an article in New Scientist saying that, well, actually we’ve probably gone back to thinking that Nanotyrannus is a different species, because we’ve found a small one that shows signs (in the bone) of being fully grown, while much smaller than a T. rex adult.

Palaeontologists will probably argue back and forth about this one for a while longer, because I was actually aware of the Nanotyrannus debate and as far as I know it’s swung between the two poles of opinions a couple of times now.

Regardless, the point is that even a general history of the dinosaurs can change quite quickly, and Black does a good job of presenting current consensus (while referencing the fact that there’s much we aren’t sure of, and that dinosaurs are actually a fast-moving area of research).

It’s very clearly presented in themed chapters, with black-and-white illustrations included, and doesn’t go too deep into technical detail, while explaining some mechanics of things like dinosaur chewing and digestion — it’s a good balance, I think.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction, Riley Black, science

WWW Wednesday

Posted April 8, 2026 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

This post is being scheduled instead of published immediately, as an experiment! A while ago, Jetpack stopped sending emails when I scheduled posts, despite working fine when I manually published them. Let’s find out if that’s still the case or if they’ve fixed their bug…

What have you recently finished reading?

Kimberly Campanello’s An Interesting Detail, a collection of prose-poems which drove me up the wall. Each one is a handful of scattered imagery linked by non-sequiturs, and I hated finding it perfectly readable and at the same time totally incomprehensible.

Before that, it was Nicola Whyte’s Murder Like Clockwork, which I found serviceable but not compelling. My review is already up here.

What are you currently reading?

I just started qntm’s There is No Antimemetics Division, which I requested from the library more or less on a whim and started today on even more of a whim. I find the idea mindboggling and possibly like it’s going to trigger existential dread, and I’m very curious how it plays out.

I have quite a lot of other books on the go, but the other thing I’m most actively reading is Stephanie Boonstra and Campbell Price’s Ancient Egypt in 50 Discoveries, which I got at the Petrie Museum and is scratching my itch for histories that are X in Y objects.

I also very recently started Gareth Russell’s Queen James, but I’m not far into it.

What will you be reading next?

Nobody knows, particularly not me. I have a bunch of books on the go already, so I’ll probably focus on some of that, like reading more of Queen James. My DoubleSpin choice for the Litsy BookSpin challenge is S.L. Huang’s The Water Outlaws, though, so perhaps that?

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Review – Murder Like Clockwork

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

Murder Like Clockwork

by Nicole Whyte

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 384
Series: Marchfield Square Mystery #2
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
An empty house that isn't empty. A victim who vanishes. An impossible crime?

Every Thursday at midday Audrey Brooks cleans the Petrov house. Mr Petrov is never home - in fact he seems to use the house purely as storage for his impressive collection of antiques - but that doesn't affect the care with which Audrey mops, polishes, and carefully winds each of the dozens of beautiful clocks that decorate the tall, elegant, empty London mansion.

Until the morning she finds a corpse in the back bedroom, the pristine walls and floor covered in blood, and flees the house in panic.

Fifteen minutes later, the police arrive... and find nothing. No body. No blood. The only thing slightly out of the ordinary is the clock in that back bedroom, which is now running four minutes slow.

With no victim, the police are convinced there was no murder, but Audrey knows better. A man has been killed, and if they won't do anything about it, she - and her annoying friend Lewis - will. Whodunnit is one thing, but this detective duo must also wrestle with when - and where on earth is the body? It's not long since they solved the murder of their neighbour, so they're not rookie sleuths, and at least this time the case has no connection to their home.

Does it?

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 requested Nicola Whyte’s Murder Like Clockwork to review after getting a promo email from the publisher about it… which didn’t mention that it’s actually the second book of a series. I would say that for various aspects of the setup, it would’ve been helpful to have read the first book: the characters have history, and there’s clearly backstory for Celeste that would be helpful to contextualise everything.

Because I haven’t read the first book, I’m not sure how much the reader is supposed to know or guess, which makes it hard to judge whether the book is annoyingly coy, or hinting at a backstory that’s building up between books.

The mystery itself, the central one at least, is self-contained, and it was fine. It was easy to guess who was involved and begin to guess at why, just because of the way they were introduced and the details given about them — a sort of structural clue that is hard to avoid with mysteries, admittedly, but felt really obvious here.

The relationship between the main characters was a bit… meh? Again, maybe the context would have helped; as it was, I wasn’t entirely sure why they were spending time together (other than previously solving a mystery together under circumstances not wholly explained in this volume) and why they didn’t dropkick each other into the Thames at times.

Overall, it wasn’t a bad reading experience, but I found the lack of info from the first book quite annoying, and I found it lacked a bit in subtlety. I think the publisher probably did it a disservice in not making it clearer that it was a second book; I might’ve read the first book out of interest, and not requested this one unless I liked that one.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: book reviews, books, crime, mystery, Nicola Whyte

Top Ten Tuesday: Recent Five-Star Reads

Posted April 7, 2026 by Nicky in General / 18 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday post is about places on your bucket list, but since I don’t have a bucket list and I read books heavy on the fantasy or that skip around the world a bunch… I thought I’d go rogue. I don’t rate a lot of books five-stars (“loved it”, in the scale I use) — but the books that make the cut deserve to be talked about more, I’d say!

So let’s dig in! Some of these don’t have reviews up yet, but those that do, I’ll link my review. I’ll go backwards through time, starting with the most recent. 2026 has started out pretty well, with five out of the ninety-seven books I’ve read this year so far gaining five whole stars!

Ramesses the Great, by Toby Wilkinson. (Finished 30th March 2026.)
I tore through this one! It helps that Ramesses is a very compelling figure, but Wilkinson presents his evidence well and without speculating too much on stuff we can’t really know for sure about Ramesses II’s inner thoughts, he gives us a good idea of the man all the same. Not always likeable, inasfar as we can make that judgement from this distance of time and from a different culture, but certainly fascinating.
Blue Horses and Felicity, by Mary Oliver. (Finished 26th March 2026.)
It’s cheating a little to bundle these together, but I did read them at the same time! These two poetry collections are both lovely: I find Oliver’s poetry really accessible to read, without being too simplistic.
The Library of Ancient Wisdom, by Selena Wisnom. (Finished 28th February 2026.)
I liked this one a lot: I’ve read a couple of other books on ancient Mesopotamia, but don’t feel like I have the same grasp of it as I do ancient Egypt. This gave me some of that, through focus on the library of Ashurbanipal. It’s necessarily limited and doesn’t really touch on the lives of common people, but it was still pretty interesting.
A History of England in 25 Poems, by Catherine Clarke. (Finished 9th February 2026.)
I thought this one was great: the choice of poems sometimes surprised me, but was always illuminating, and Clarke has a pretty good grasp of the problems between England and the other countries it shares an island with. There were things I’d have liked to see more of, but I was still really happy with this one.
Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail — The Art of Succession -Relics of Heritage-. (Finished 25th December 2025.)
I suppose I could skip this one as it sort of feels like it doesn’t count as a book read, but on the other hand I find the game’s artbooks really interesting, because they give you a glimpse at the original designs of familiar bosses, characters and in-world assets. It might be a quick read (since it’s almost all images), but a picture’s worth a thousand words and all that.
Strangers and Intimates, by Tiffany Jenkins. (Finished 13th November 2025.)
This one actually stuck with me less than I’d expected given the high rating, but it did raise interesting questions for me about why the value people place on privacy changes, and the differences between generations. There were some fascinating reflections on the scandal with Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and how that has changed politics.
You Should Be So Lucky, by Cat Sebastian. (Finished 28th September 2025.)
This is a lovely romance, with some grumpy/sunshine dynamics, but it’s more than just a list of tropes. There’s a lot of healing from grief, and a lot of hope (even in times that weren’t so great for queer people). Also, there’s a dog!
Empress of Salt and Fortune and When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, by Nghi Vo. (Finished 2nd and 5th June 2025.)
These were rereads, so perhaps it’s no surprise that they got such a high rating! They’re the first two books in the Singing Hills series, at least in publication order — I do think they’re also a good place to start in getting to learn about where Chih is from and what they do, and they have my favourite formats for the series too, being focused mostly on stories told to Chih. Some of the later books are more about Chih themself, which is also fun, but I like these best.
Hemlock & Silver, by T. Kingfisher. (Finished 25th May 2025.)
2025 and 2026 have been the years of T. Kingfisher for me, it seems. This one just grabbed me at the right time, I think, and I thought the ideas and the way of retelling the Snow White and Rose Red story were just so fun. Also the mirror monsters were a work of horrible genius.
Cold Night Lullaby, by Colin Mackay. (Finished 22nd May 2025.)
This was another reread. I’m not sure I ever expected to reread this one, because Mackay went through horrors and he certainly paints them vividly in his poetry, but… something made me feel like it was the right time to read it. It’s a poetic working-through of the things he witnessed in Bosnia when he went there as an aid worker — including the mutilation and murder of the woman he loved.

Sorry for going off-piste, but I look forward to seeing everyone else’s TTT posts this week! Maybe you’ll inspire me to create a bucket list.

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – Part of a Story that Started Before Me

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

Part of a Story that Started Before Me

by George the Poet (editor)

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Poetry
Pages: 272
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Part of a Story That Started Before Me is an extraordinary new collection of poems chosen by acclaimed spoken-word performer and social commentator George the Poet.

Taking readers on a thought-provoking poetical journey through Black British history, the anthology brings together some of the most exciting wordsmiths from across the diaspora and fascinating era-by-era notes from historian Dr Christienna Fryar.

From Africans in Roman Britannia to the first Black actor to play Othello on stage, from Malcolm X's visit to the West Midlands to highlighting an organizer of the UK's first Gay Pride, this important collection reveals unsun people and events from our past to recognize the intrinsic impact they've had on Britain today.

Part of a Story that Started Before Me (edited by George the Poet) is a collection of poems about Black British History, reflecting on historical figures and moments in verse, and also providing short introductions to the position of Black people in those periods for almost all of them — there’s just one section without, for some reason.

The majority of the poems are in the most modern sections, despite the premise; there’s just a handful for most historical periods before WWII. The poems themselves aren’t dated, though a few are definitely a touch older (like the Derek Walcott and Grace Nichols ones); I don’t know if any were prompted/commissioned specifically for this volume.

I wasn’t a huge fan of most of the poems, though that’s almost immaterial since here they’re doing their job of reflecting on history. (Plus, gotta note that a couple did stand out, in a couple of cases because they had such a great rhythm and sense of sound that you almost couldn’t help but hear them.) I personally wouldn’t choose it as a poetry collection, but it was worth the read, including for the historical and editorial context provided.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, history, non-fiction, poetry