Tink's Book Reviews

The Fen is a liminal land. Real people live their lives here. They wrestle with sex and desire, with everyday routine. But the wild is always close at hand, ready to erupt. This is a place where animals and people commingle and fuse, where curious metamorphoses take place, where myth and dark magic still linger. So here a teenager may starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl. A woman might give birth to a, well, what? In a town, where a girl wastes away into something peculiar. A woman gives birth to something inhumane yet feral. Where one woman wrestles with the conspiracy theories and prophecies of her fisherman husband, and where a young girl becomes infatuated with a wall - is anything reality for much longer? Where hope, fear, love and sexual desire all become mingled into one. Where life ceases to live and hardly exist at the same time. Where chaos and beautiful, wonderful things come together as one, and then nothing all at the same...

Once a year the infamous Master Legend hosts Caraval - open only to those who have been invited.  This year the week long game is on Legend's glittering Isla de los Soenos, where the winding streets are an elaborate snow-covered maze and the people are never who they seem to be.  At midnight on the first day, the show beings and the visitors become players. Each of them vying for the coveted prize: a single wish.  Scarlett has only one wish in life, to finally be able to visit the legendary Caraval with her younger sister Donatella. So when Tella suddenly goes missing Scarlett knows there's only one place and once place only where she will have fled to.  Caraval is the greatest mystery this side of Trisda, where anything goes and anything can happen. If you win all your dreams will come true with just one wish from Legend, the grand carnival master - the man who everyone knows but has never been seen.  Though Scarlett can't ...

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral.  Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother.  When a forty year old man returns to his hometown for a funeral, he finds himself driving back to his childhood home but not knowing why, especially driving down to the end of the lane that was at the bottom on his house.  When he gets there he meets an old woman, and not just any old woman, there's something different about her, something that draws him in to her. He has a feeling that he knows the woman, but he's never seen her in his life.   Then it all comes back to him, walking down to the small pond behind the old woman's house, he soon remembers why he knows her, his childhood and the dreaded memori...

Alice In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll When Alice follows a white rabbit in a waistcoat down a hole, she finds herself in a mixed-up world where nothing is as she expects it to be and anything can happen. Alice meets a pipe-smoking caterpillar, a grinning cat, a Mad Hatter and the formidable Queen of Hearts. Alice is fed up of the dinner party her family are throwing and is fed up of trying to be paired with someone to marry. So whilst on a walk through the garden, she notices a white rabbit, though not just any white rabbit, one that has a little waist coat, a pocket watch and most of all, can speak.  Curious, Alice decides to follow the Rabbit, but when he jumps into the rabbit hole at the bottom of a far away tree, Alice doesn't know what to do. So when she looks further into the hole and falls down it, she is in a whole new world. When she lands, Alice finds that she must go through the first door that she sees, though it is as small as a doormouse and there's no wa...

The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury If El Greco had painted miniatures in his prime, no bigger than your hand, infinitely detailed, with his sulphurous colour and exquisite human anatomy, perhaps he might have used this man's body for his art... Yet the Illustrated Man had tried to burn the illustrations  off. He's tried sandpaper, acid, and a knife. Because, as the sun sets, the pictures glow like charcoals, like scattered gems. They quiver and come to life. Tiny pink hands gesture, tiny mouths flicker as the figures enact there stories - voices rise, small and muted, predicting the future. Blending magic, imagination and truth with Bradbury's rich storytelling skills and beautifully crafted imagery, these startling and thought provoking visions of humankind's destiny.  Imagine being in the future, what would you think 2021 would be like? Will there be flying saucers? Aliens? Robots? Sit back and let Ray Bradbury be your guide, and take your into a world...

Drummer by Jan Page Liam tries to stay away from home as much as he can - especially if his dad's around.  Usually he just hangs out with his mates, skating. But today, Liam's had an idea: to form a band, with him on drums. All he needs is a kit, so Liam heads for the local junk shop. But the owner, Weird Welly, freaks him out, hinting that something terrible is about to happe n . Something bad to do with the band.  Then the really  weird stuff begins... What if you could rewind and fast forward your life. To be able to see what your life would be like int he future, to be able to know what was exactly going to happen? Would you take that chance, or would you change time itself, just to save one life? Or maybe more.   For Liam Condie, this is exactly what happened. Yes, I know it's hard to believe.  He and his friends CJ and Daz get a crazy idea to start a band. They hardly know any instruments themselves, but they are determined to lea...