User Profile

Clare Hooley

clare_hooley@ramblingreaders.org

Joined 1 year ago

Former biologist; now working in science publishing. I ❤️ #PaperPlanners #stickers #running #baking #blogging Currently cutting, punching and decorating my 2025 planner; getting back to doing a bit more running 🏃‍♀️

Mastodon mastodon.me.uk/@clare_hooley Personal blog: coffeenow.moomop.uk/ (reviews duplicated here) Fediverse social for personal blog mastodon.me.uk/@coffeenow Mostly read fantasy, romance… oh and cookbooks. Lots of cookbooks.

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Clare Hooley's books

Cookbooks (View all 58)

Fantasy fiction (View all 18)

R. Scott Bakker: The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (Paperback, 2007, Overlook TP) 4 stars

Better, especially in the final third, but too bleak for too little plot

3 stars

With me very much liking the first book and very much not liking the second, as I started this, I already feeling skeptical about the series.

Well, overall, although this book was better than the second, there’s not enough for an redemption.

With the first book focussing on the political machinations before the Holy War, and the second trudging though the war itself, here it’s mostly philosophy and metaphysics. Although I do like some of this, even when it makes for hard reading, there’s only so much dense pondering I can take when we still don’t get any further on with the plot.

For the first two-thirds, everyone is continually just fawning over the main character and how great they are, when really, as the reader, we only see a sociopathic and misogynic mad man. It’s stupid to think others couldn’t see that at all, especially as magic isn’t invoked …

reviewed Labyrinth's Heart by M. A. Carrick (Rook and Rose, #3)

M. A. Carrick: Labyrinth's Heart (2023, Orbit) 5 stars

Ren came to Nadežra with a plan. She would pose as the long-lost daughter of …

A finale worthy of the world

5 stars

#BookReview

After the dramatic events at the end of The Liar's Knot, we enter this book aware of what’s behind the much of the ill our main characters, Ren, Vargo and Grey, are fighting.

The trouble is, although these three are now revealed and reconciled with each other in all their various guises, having become embroiled in multiple personas or other lies, at some point it was inevitable there would be consequences of such deceptions.

For Ren, however much she adores the new family she’s gained by becoming Traementis, it’s based on a falsehood, and it’s really the work that she does in her Vraszenian guises of Arenza Lensky and The Black Rose that she’s passionate about. Is there any way for her to not break with the Traementis while following her heart?

For Vargo, and his spider, he somehow needs to keep the trust of those he relies on …

reviewed The Liar's Knot by M. A. Carrick (Rook & Rose, #2)

M. A. Carrick: The Liar's Knot (EBook, 2021, Orbit) 5 stars

Trust is the thread that binds us . . . and the rope that hangs …

Found family, sumptuous world-building and intricate politics

5 stars

#BookReview Here, we continue with story of Ren, a would-be con artist, who’s achieved her goal of being accepted as a full member of the noble House Traementis in the Renaissance Venice-inspired city of Nadežra, where this trilogy is set.

However, Ren’s now a long way from her main motivations being those she started with, as she has a new tangled web of heart and home considerations to think of at every turn.

The primary thrust of this second book takes us back to the mysterious curse on House Traementis, something that was introduced a bit too hurriedly in the first book.

Who or what is it that has the power to so profoundly affect families so as to cause entire family lines to die out? Why is the crime lord Vargo seemingly also so interested in this problem? How does this link to the 200 years of tension between …

reviewed The Mask of Mirrors by M. A. Carrick (Rook and Rose, #1)

M. A. Carrick: The Mask of Mirrors (Orbit) 5 stars

Nightmares are creeping through the city of dreams . . .

Renata Virdaux is a …

Expertly crafted political fantasy

5 stars

#BookReview This book is the first in a completed trilogy, written by two authors under the pen name of M. A. Carrick. It follows the stories of multiple characters as they try and negotiate the turbulence of life in the Renaissance Venice-inspired city of Nadežra.

Our main protagonist is Ren, a city native (who are of Vraszenian race), who has returned to Nadežra after being forced to flee it after betraying the sinister leader of their group (knot) of child thieves. Together with her sister Tess, she is trying to move up in the world by executing a con trick passing herself off as the daughter of an estranged relative of one of the ruling Liganti-race gentry families - the Traementis family - in order to be taken in by them officially.

However, as Ren negotiates her con, helped along by her marvellously fun, and sometimes scandalous, appearances as a …

reviewed The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance, #3)

Naomi Novik: The Golden Enclaves (2022, Penguin Books, Limited) 4 stars

Graduated school, but the work continues

4 stars

This final book of the Scholomance trilogy starts as our heroine, the wizard El (now about 18), is plunged back into an isolated present-day Welsh commune. There she has to deal with her grief at being forced to see her boyfriend Orion left to an eternity of being eaten by a beast known as a maw mouth and uncertainty that she will after all fulfil the prophecy that she will turn in an evil ‘malcifer’ witch. It’s not long before El is called, somewhat bitterly and begrudgingly, to use her exceptional abilities to help rescue enclaves, the residences of extremely privileged wizards. During these escapades, El teams up with the academically minded Leisel, now also an ‘enclaver’, and together with one of El’s friends from the previous books they work to discover Orion’s fate. [Aside: there’s a physical relationship between El and Leisel here - I didn’t find this at …

reviewed The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance, #2)

Naomi Novik: The Last Graduate (2022, Penguin Books, Limited) 4 stars

More delicious malevolence

4 stars

#BookReview This book, second in Naomi Novik’s young-adult dark academia fantasy series ‘The Scholomance’, starts exactly where we left off in the first book (ramblingreaders.org/user/clare_hooley/review/558898) with our two main protagonists, our narrator El and and her perhaps boyfriend Orion, now seniors in the deadly school. The end of the senior year is when both of them will face ‘graduation’ - a literal gauntlet run through a room filled with wicked hungry magical monsters (always deliciously well-described by Novik’s writing) that, in a standard year, only about half those entering survive. Of course with El and Orion both being so exceptional, we know this isn’t going to be a standard year. El has mellowed out (grown up) from being quite so whiny and angsty, although her sarcastic streak remains undimmed, and now even has friends. Owing to events at the end of book one, she also can’t be invisible …

reviewed A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance, #1)

Naomi Novik: A Deadly Education (Paperback, RANDOM HOUSE UK) 4 stars

A delicious coming of age magic school fantasy

4 stars

Young-adult fantasy told in first person through the eyes of El, a 3rd year (~16 years old) female student in the ‘Scholomance’, the magic school of the series title. We as reader are thrown directly into her life at the school, which is completely cut off from the outside world of the adult wizards (there are no teachers here). In this first book of the series, we are then taken a-pace through a series of the school’s non-stop horrors as we learn most of the students die in increasingly gruesome ways; there’s magical monsters at every turn, work assignments that turn deadly, contaminated food, bullies and cliques, and a good dose of adolescent angst. In fact, it’s all quite a good deal of macabre fun, and told with much delightful malice. One of the main themes is how much easier life is if you come from a position of privilege, …

R. Scott Bakker: The Warrior Prophet (The Prince of Nothing, Book 2) (Paperback, 2005, Overlook TP) 4 stars

Struggling on in the war march

2 stars

After setting up such an amazing world, I struggled with this sequel. The book this time focuses on the development of Kellhus, the warrior-prophet of the title, as he continues to exert his manipulative control on the Holy War. I mostly enjoyed his sections, and found the theology and philosophy interesting. Sadly, everyone else is just far too superficial, even more so when we lose much of the mage Achamian as a countering character. As we march across the continent lurching from battle to battle, anything which is fresh and pithy, and properly grim (there’s an excellent section on finding water), becomes ploughing on through a repetition of the same again and again, so there’s little that really advances the plot or keeps us immersed in the horror, it’s just the killing off another 30% of one or another army. I just seemed to be skimming a lot of text …

R. Scott Bakker: The Darkness That Comes Before (2004) 5 stars

What a world

5 stars

[edited from original to expand into fuller review] Proper epic fantasy - in fact, it’s dark fantasy written before the grimdark explosion, in a truly well developed world. We we follow the tale of three people who are instrumental in arranging a holy war reminiscent of The Crusades; one sorcerer, one warrior and a monk who’s trained in being able to perform miraculous feats of psychological manipulation.

We’re literally dropped right into a world that has so many religions, philosophies and political factions, and it’s difficult to get through the first chapters as there’s no exposition at all - I even had to find a version of the map online with dates on because it hangs together better if you at least follow the locations of the places referred to.

But if you persevere, there’s so much reward. Sure it’s dense and intense, especially with the hefty doses of philosophy …

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reviewed Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett (Emily Wilde, #1)

Heather Fawcett: Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (EBook, 2023, Little Brown Book Group) 5 stars

Fae and frolics - a slow-pace romance fantasy

4 stars

Emily Wilde is a scholar from a 19th century Cambridge (UK), but in a world where the Fae are elusive but very much accepted as real. While continuing her work to complete the Encyclopedia of Faeries of the title, she travels to investigate the Fae of Scandinavia, and we follow her tale through her journal entries. What’s clever is an unusual and sensitive portray of Emily, who we see finally able to overcome some social ineptitude and start a slow-burning romance with her dashing academic rival and Cambridge colleague, Wendell, who of course has a mysterious background. My favourite parts were the Fae stories themselves (including the interludes outside the plot - literal stories within the story presented as journal footnotes); there’s nothing particularly new there, everything is very traditional folklore - it’s just very well done. What does jar is that the author clearly has no idea of Cambridge …