Review round-up

There's a new review from me at The Bookbag, of Margery Allingham's Police at the Funeral (an Albert Campion novel). Probably worth a look if you like your crime semi-cosy and irreverent (Father Brown, Lord Peter Wimsey for instance). I'm taking a short break from The Bookbag to concentrate on the Ilkley Literature Festival for a bit - I'm still reading books I got interested in via last year's festival, and this year's is less than a week away.

I recently read The Good Children by Roopa Farooki, which has been on my To Read list since I saw her at last year's festival. The novel was long and engaging, essentially a family saga of four siblings (two brothers, two sisters) from Lahore. They're born into an 'old money' Muslim family before Partition, and the novel follows them for sixty or seventy years as they spread out and develop their own lives and families, yet are still caught in their mother's web back at the ancestral home. I found some of the siblings more fleshed-out as characters than others, but I like the way chapters are from one sibling's point of view, and there may be another sibling's view of the same event given in another chapter which doesn't always match. Read it if you're interested in Partition, culture clashes, the effects of separation on family ties, and the intrinsic similarities between apparently different siblings.

I also read some poetry (gasp!), as mentioned here recently. Specifically I read Glad to Wear Glasses a 1990 collection from John Hegley who I couldn't get tickets to see at his last local event (probably Bradford Words in the City earlier this year). I've heard (and enjoyed) his quirky, gently funny poetry on BBC radio plenty of times so I thought reading this collection might be easy and fun. Sadly, much of it felt to me like reading the script for someone's stand-up comedy show. Without his delivery (which for some poems I remembered hearing, and for others I could at least imagine) it fell a bit flat, and some poems were more like one-liners anyway. Disappointing, but I'll just file this in 'poetry that I don't enjoy reading', stick to listening to John Hegley on the radio, and move on to reading some other stuff.

Expect more reviews or mini-reviews of books related to the Ilkley Literature Festival over the next couple of weeks, and possibly reviews of the events themselves. Since The Pickled Egg festival review website is no more (felled by a virus, too expensive and complicated to cure) reviews will probably appear here rather than anywhere else. Phew, now to go rehearse my story for our Fringe event again.