Reviews and Comments

This is an interesting book but if anything it's too ambitious in what it's seeking to cover. There's a lot of history to cover in explaining the background to the Islamic Revolution, the Revolution itself and then the way Iran has progressed since then. Because there's so much going on, and Axworthy is determined to cover it all, it can feel breathless at times, jumping from event to event without much of a pause for breath or deeper analysis. It's very good as an overview of everything that's happened, but it'll likely leave you wanting more depth on the issues that most interest.

I picked up this book after seeing her spoken-word show of the same name, which covers similar ground to this and I'd also strongly recommend. This is a short collection of poetry, but one that resonated really strongly with me in its themes of searching for a way to be honestly yourself even if you're not quite sure who you are. There's a lot of humour in these poems, but it's through jokes that she can slip in with ideas and thoughts that have you thinking twice and wondering about your own choices as she lays bare some of her own.

There's good bits in here, but for me they didn't really come together as a whole. I feel like I've read this story or variations on it several times, and there's not really anything that happens in here that you wouldn't expect once the premise has been established. It's well-written, but the messages within it are very simplistic and feel like something you'd find on an inspirational poster. It also had points where it seemed that the author had the alien "discovering" music or poetry or whatever, and his tastes just happened to coincide with the author's. Why not have an alien who finds the secrets of the universe buried in Napalm Death or Bob The Builder rather than Debussy and the Beach Boys?

I have depression, and the way I often describe that is to explain that there are times when my brain doesn't like me. It's very hard to explain that feeling of part of you explaining to you all the ways you're worthless, but I recognised it in this account of mental illness and the effect it can have on your life. What this book captures is the way in which something that from the outside seems absurd can become entirely logical to you because something inside you is telling you that's how it should be. This book manages to combine oh-my-God terrifying and laugh-out-loud funny, often in the same paragraph about the same event.

Like The Psychology Of Time Travel, this too features a tight-knit organisation based around closely held knowledge. Here it's a sprawling family holding a magical secret and the story unfolds around that secret and the world that has grown around it. It's an engaging and fascinating story, though sometimes oddly paved especially in the conclusion and explanation.

This is a tour de force of language, a tale told in a realistic nineteenth-century voice full of slang and turns of phrase that make the milieu come alive. With a novel like this there's a tight line to walk between authenticity and understandability, but this manages it with each piece of new terminology understandable in its context neither bewildering the reader not requiring the narrator to break the tale to become a glossary for us. It makes for an entertaining picaresque as we transit through the underbelly of London in the company of a pair of 'resurrection men' and petty criminals, seeking their one big score to fund a better life elsewhere. An entertaining read, well worth your time.

This was interesting but a bit of a mess. The set-up and the ideas are fascinating, but there are too many times when the author's focus doesn't tell the story. A major development between two characters at the start gets glided over and we end up getting told a lot about the importance of their relationship, but it never feels like we've been shown it. Some parts when the narrative jumps around are part of a literary device and the stream-of-consciousness nature of the storytelling, but others feel like the author not checking on themselves. There are quite a few parts in this that feel like they really needed a good editing and proofreading before publication. The heart of the story and the key ideas are good, but the execution doesn't deliver on that promise.

A fascinating and powerful read, moving between wonderful moments of nature and deep dark times of grief-driven near-madness and obsession. For me it captured that sense of unmooring one feels after the death of a parent and how Macdonald tried to gather meaning back into her life by devoting itself into the training of a goshawk. Rich and lyrical prose captures the feeling of being out in the eastern countryside and the freedom that can be found there to leave an old self behind. A book that will speak to people in different ways, just as the story of TH White resonates with Macdonald through their shared belief in the power of a hawk to make them whole.