Odyssey

Image credit: Amazon

I have recently been meditating on several ironies in the world, most pointedly the argument in mainstream cinema that there are too many reboots and remakes and not enough films being made from original content. On the opposite side of the coin, in the world of literature there are seemingly endless fonts of (at least) semi-original content, and isn’t it funny to consider the joy of reading something that is essentially a reboot of a classic work? What is it about literature that makes the remake more enjoyable than cinema? This train of thought was prompted after I closed the cover on this week’s book of choice: the fourth instalment in Stephen Fry’s Ancient Greek series – Odyssey

As the name suggests, the book is a retelling of Homer’s epic poem of Odysseus and his dramatic adventures on a ten-year journey home from the Trojan War. As the Olympian gods fidget uncomfortably at the idea that mortals are moving on without them, petty squabbles turn deadly when Poseidon sends a great storm to punish Ajax. While the other fleets survive and make it home, poor Odysseus’ ship is buffeted from shoreline to shoreline with the cunning king and his men faced with many trials and tribulations that waylay them for over a decade.

Odysseus’ story is a mighty one that really highlights the idea that home is where the heart is. Like its predecessors – Mythos, Heroes, and Troy – Odyssey retells the story, jumping from kingdom to kingdom, in a clever and concise modern voice that not only expertly conjures the scenes in the mind’s eye but also simplifies them and powers through them with a pace that pushes the reader further and further along in the story – like Poseidon’s stormy seas.

Image credit: AXSChat

While primarily a tale about the allure of home and the anchor that a steadfast home and hearth is to morals, the book also explores the human nature of evolution and social progression and delivers a tickling truth in the idea that ‘the times are a ‘changin’ is actually an idea that has been around for millennia. Added to this at the very end is an indulgent little social commentary on the current progression of mortals and storytelling: the evolution of AI.

While I didn’t find Odyssey as compelling as his other books in the series, I can’t deny that the hero’s journey narrative archetype is a classic for a reason and it’s really nice (and relatable) to read a book about a hero going through epic adventures just so he can sleep in his own bed at the end.

Author: Stephen Fry, 2024

Published: Penguin Random House UK, 2024

Box Office Poison

Image credit: Amazon

After quite a long stint of fantasy, history, and cats it was certainly time to take a break from fiction and dive into reading about my other great love from the human experience: films. I’ve had a love of movies from a very young age, particularly talking about the reasons why I like certain movies, what makes them so good (or sometimes bad). So, when Partner gifted me Box Office Poison by journalist Tim Robey, you better believe I was excited to read it.

Beginning with Intolerance (1916) and finishing up with Cats (2019), Box Office Poison, a term that was once used to describe actress Katherine Hepburn, chronicles the delicious dramas and disasters of a carefully chosen lineup of cinematic flops.

From billowing budgets that bankrupted studios, to the increasing social need for censorship, to creative conflicts, and misread interpretations of source material, the book is more than a mere collection of reviews about films that bombed. It simultaneously is an exploration into the Hollywood evolution story, the changing times, and how cultural, social, and technological attitudes and aptitudes influence the industry. Robey explores a whole range of potholes and roadblocks that caused films to underperform at the box office, as well as outrage social groups, destroy careers, demolish empires, and sink into obscurity. Each film’s entry focuses on a different villain: budget balloons, social intolerance regarding sexual identities, scheming moneymen, and more besides, and what makes the book particularly interesting is the fact that a compelling evolution narrative takes shape in the background, telling a story despite the unconventional, compilation format of the book.

Image credit: Amazon

Robey writes professionally as well as with an attitude and a deep love and appreciation of cinema, providing a reading experience that feels a bit like a lecture of a favourite subject in university. Both facts and opinions are delivered with the same passionate tone that enlightens and excites the reader as well as very subtly draws their attention to the evolution narrative taking place in the background.

Box Office Poison is both a fascinating and fun collection of film reviews that gives insight into a huge industry as well as chronicling an intriguing tale about its evolution over the last century. While it’s insightful and entertaining, it’s also provocative and piques a desire to track down the films that it examines and give them a watch (a few of them anyway).

Author: Tim Robey, 2024

Published: Faber & Faber Limited, London, 2024

Nightingale

Image credit: Amazon

So, I have recently joined a real book club - as in I am soon to attend a meeting with a bunch of people I have never met in which we discuss a book that I would probably have never picked up and read under my own power. I have just closed the cover of said book and figure, what better to why to try and decipher what I think about it than writing my own review? The book: Nightingale by Laura Elvery, a debut novel.

Mayfair 1910: Aged and frail at the age of 90, Florence Nightingale is no longer of sound mind. After a celebrated career as a nurse, writer, statistician and female pioneer, she now lives as a recluse: bed bound and constantly haunted by memories of lovely and tragic times from her past. One night she is visited by a young man named Silas Bradley who claims that they have met before, during the Crimean War. The encounter forces Florence to recall a most trying time, traumatic even, as well as try to remember a strange and ambitious nurse named Jean Frawley.

Part historical fiction and part ghost story, Nightingale is the first novel from Australian author Laura Elvery. It’s a dramatic exploration into the final days of a great, but considerably undercelebrated historic figure that explores themes of memory, gender roles, the horrors of war, and the way in which even the most adventurous life can go in a circle.

Narratively, it’s both an easy and challenging book to read. It’s easy in that Elvery’s prose is simple and sensual, using tangible sense words to create the scenes and implant the reader right in the middle of them. I was able to bang this out in two days: through its language, it’s a book that instantly envelopes the reader and inspires the constant flipping of pages. But it’s challenging too in the narrative techniques Elvery uses to tell the current story and ones from the past. There is a fair amount of time jumping, made easier to grasp as each new section in time is pronounced in a chapter title or letterhead. We then have the different points of view in which the novel is written. We have the chapters written as the aged Miss Nightingale, contents of which are already to be taken with a grain of salt as the blurb hints that this is an unreliable narrator. Elvery is cleverly playing with this technique, making us think longer and harder about it as we know that the interactions that Florence has during these scenes may well be in her own mind, while at the same time her interior monologues might be the closest thing we get to clarity with her. We then have the chapters in the voice of Silas. These threw a spanner in the works for me, as it’s through Silas’ character that the ‘ghost story’ part of the novel comes in to play, but this is merely an idea that is hinted at and then made murky in the way that Silas is described, his interactions with other characters besides Florence, and the timeline that we are given. The middle of the book then jumps back in time and speaks in the voice of the omniscient narrator, recounting the encounters between the central triangle of Florence, Silas, and Jean.

Image credit: Faber Academy

Elvery’s sensual language works to smooth the jaggedness created by the character POV break-ups and it’s during the middle part of the book that we get to see the real and ‘historical’ part of the novel, as this is where the character of Florence Nightingale, as the world saw her, is depicted. A woman with ambition, who took the gender roles assigned to her by time and society and made them bigger, broader, heavier…sigh, only to have the men who created her workload blame her for the everything that was and became wrong with it. The Florence we see is inspiring and patient, a stoic matron.

While I don’t know if I would read this book again, I was certainly entertained and challenged by it. It’s transportive, inspiring, engaging, and thought-provoking: a brilliant debut novel.

Author: Laura Elvery, 2025

Published: University of Queensland Press (UQP), 2025

We'll Prescribe You a Cat

Image credit: Dymocks

After closing the cover on the Temeraire series, I was certainly done with fantasy for a while but at a loss as to what to read next. At the recommendation of my partner, I had had a book sitting on my bedside table for months, which I was able to finally crack the cover on during a recent holiday trip. A delightfully sweet and wholesome collection of stories that I powered through in two days, we’re talking about We’ll Prescribe You a Cat.

Tucked away in an alley in Kyoto is the Nakagyo Kokoro Clinic for the Soul, a clinic that most patients discover through hearsay that specialises in the healing power of cats. While the patients that find their way there are often puzzled at the clinic’s methods, they can’t argue with the results: a disheartened business man discovers the joy of physical labour, a middle-aged father finds relevance at his job and home, a young girl navigates the complexities of schoolyard cliques, a hardened designer learns the precious balance of work and life, and a geisha manages to finally move on from the memory of her lost cat.

Similar to Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this book is a collection of individual stories that are tied together by a building. In BTCGC it’s the café where you can travel back in time that inspires the heartwarming stories of character growth and here it’s the clinic that works to the moto, ‘cats can solve most problems.’ Humorously, each character ends up bringing home a cat from a consultation, despite not really knowing anything about caring for the creatures, and through this forced period of temporary pet-ownership their worlds are opened and transformed. It’s similar to the manga and anime series My Roommate Is a Cat.

The stories are sweet and relatable and made just a little sensational by the funny and nonchalant narrative treatment of such an abstract clinic concept. Admittedly I have not read a lot of Japanese fiction, but what is appealing to me most from what I have read is the narrative minimalism that flavours the novels. The prose is simple, even blunt, which allows the emotional clout of the story to just wash over the reader in all its lovely wholesomeness. It also makes books such as this very easy to read and devour in no time at all, adding to the delightful reading experience by giving that quick and delicious feeling of achievement when we close the cover.

Image credit: Penguin Random House

We’ll Prescribe You a Cat is the type of book that consistently makes you audibly sigh happily, it’s a cosy little read made up of compelling stories of relatable characters that envelop you right from the first page. It’s funny, fresh, sweet, and sometimes a little melancholy; a delightful and comforting reading experience that makes the day better.

Author: Syou Ishida, 2024

Published: Penguin Books, 2024. Translated from Japanese by E. Madison Shimoda.

League of Dragons

Image credit: HarperCollins

We’ve made it! The final book in the exciting, dramatic, and action-packed Temeraire series: League of Dragons. I’m not going to lie, after being firmly planted within the fantasy genre for so long, I am sooo ready to read something else. That is not to say that I have not enjoyed this series. While the initial, somewhat childish, joy that made my heart flutter when I read the first couple of books definitely petered out as the story got more elaborate and the convoluted, I still enjoyed the journey and was satisfied in the end.

With Napoleon’s invasion of Russia thwarted, the time to strike a final blow is upon the Allies. But their numbers are dwindling and internal squabbles and prejudices threaten to tear them apart. While Captain Laurence struggles to bring his own enraged countrymen under his newly-appointed command, Temeraire has his claws full trying to dissuade all the dragons his can against siding with Napoleon who has publicly promised the dragons of every country – including the ferals- new rights and powers if they fight under his banner.

League of Dragons brings us back to the action-packed and narratively enthralling drama that catapulted us into the second half of the series. Reminiscent of the fourth and fifth books, it’s a well-paced balance between wartime action and closeted narrative drama that widens the arc of the series and brings that second, underlying story into the limelight: the changing relationships between humans and dragons in European civilization. Until now we have been drip-fed the drama of the simmering revolt of the British dragons, but here it finally comes to a head and makes for very entertaining scenes in which the dragons diplomatically puzzle out how they can best improve their status and treatment at home without upsetting their sense of duty. It’s a very nice example of character development that had almost gone unnoticed, veiled by the captivating action of the central, wartime narrative.

As we more or less know how the war will pan out, the drama of the central plot is made enthralling thanks to Novik’s thrilling descriptions of aerial combat interspersed with scenes of social drama and intrigue that still manage to draw a delighted ‘ooh’ from the reader as they flip the pages.

Being the final book, it’s time to tie everything up and sometimes that can be hard to do with long-running series. But I think that Novik has closed up the series nicely, ending on an uplifting and hopeful note that life goes on…

Image credit: NPR

At the end of the day, I really enjoyed the Temeraire series. Yes, there were peaks and troughs in the action and the pacing sometimes, but ultimately this series is a fun and fresh fantasy series that pulls you in and keeps you enthralled with its characters and engaging story.

Author: Naomi Novik, 2016

Published: HarperVoyager, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd, 2016.

League of Dragons is the 9^th and final in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series. It follows Temeraire, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, Empire of Ivory, Victory of Eagles, Tongues of Serpents and Crucible of Gold, and Blood of Tyrants.

Blood of Tyrants

Image credit: The Nile

We’re closing in now to the end of the Temeraire series – an exciting and compelling set of adventures set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic War, with dragons. As I’ve written before, there have been some definite peaks and troughs in the second half of the series, with Tongues of Serpents taking a bit of a narrative plummet, but rising up again with Crucible of Gold. I have just closed the cover of Blood of Tyrants; the penultimate book in the series, which took me a good while to get through as, alas, while there is a lot of narrative stuff happening, it proved to be another trough.

Laurence and Temeraire find themselves separated once again, as a shipwreck sees Laurence stranded alone and without his memory in Japan. Unable to recollect the last few years, Laurence finds himself dangerously entangled in political intrigues that could be both fatal to himself and England’s position in the Far East. Meanwhile Temeraire conducts a desperate search for his beloved captain, unaware of the powder keg that his actions might set off. Time and the odds are truly against the pair, as Britain’s potential allies begin to dwindle and Napoleon marches an army on Moscow.

Beginning on a dramatic note with Laurence alone and suffering from amnesia, Blood of Tyrants is the thickest book of the series. Rightly so, seeing as we travel through different countries and see a lot of narrative dramas from Temeraire’s search for Laurence, to an assassination attempt on him and Prince Mianning in China, and finally the mustering of a great force to aid Russia. In between all this, we have little stories of conspiracy, espionage, and the varying cultural attitudes towards dragons that could well add fuel to the fire of rebellion.

I found myself struggling to get through this instalment – putting it down and not really being inspired to pick it back up again, and I think the reason for this is because there is so much crammed into it that it lost something of its intrigue. I can’t quite pinpoint what the problem was, but I just did not find this book as compelling as the others; something in the prose just felt shallow and I struggled to get lost in the world as I had done with the previous books.

The timing of the action too, worked to make Blood of Tyrants a bit disjointed: still compelling but rather that I felt I needed to read on to understand what had just happened rather than thrillingly following the sequence of events.

Image credit: NPR

In the end I think that the penultimate book of this exciting series suffered from a case of overindulgence; narratively, dramatically, environmentally, etc. A case of too many cooks in the kitchen. There was just so much happening that needed to be pushed towards conclusion that the initial magic that made me fall in the love with the series at the beginning was lost. But at least we can’t claim there was ever a dull moment and I am ready to see how it all works out in the end.

Author: Naomi Novik, 2013

Published: First published in Great Britain by Ballatine Books, 2013. Pictured edition published by HarperVoyager, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd, 2014.

Blood of Tyrants is the 8^th book in Novik’s Temeraire series. Its follows Temeraire, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, Empire of Ivory, Victory of Eagles, Tongues of Serpents and Crucible of Gold.

Crucible of Gold

 

Image credit: Amazon

After the dip in excitement and action that was the last book, I was worried that the Temerarie series had gone the way of so many others – after a few books the series just loses its flair and continuing to read it becomes a mildly satisfying chore rather than an enjoyable pastime. This happened with Skullduggery Pleasant and Artemis Fowl for me, so I don’t mind admitting that I was rather scared when I cracked the cover of Crucible of Gold.

Laurence and Temeraire are set to accept their new lives in the penal colony of New South Whales when news reaches them that Napoleon has not only invaded Spain but also forged an alliance with the Africa’s Tswana Empire and brought revolution to Brazil. The government has turned to Laurence, convinced that he is the best man to negotiate a treaty. And so, reinstated, Laurence and Temeraire embark for Brazil but their mission is thrown into disarray when they are forced to land in the hostile territory of the Incan Empire where an old enemy appears to tip the scales further towards disaster.

At this stage of the series the plot tactics to allow Laurence and Temeraire to continue their wartime adventures seem to be becoming a little bit hand-wavey, but we won’t let that get in the way of a good story. While still massively disheveled and fallen from their former stature, our heroes are nonetheless back to travelling the world and having grand and dramatic adventures surrounded by new and excessive hardships.

In Crucible of Gold, we are introduced to the unique dragons of the Incan Empire and the book very largely in part becomes an anthropological culture study of the relationship between humans and dragons in this part of the world. While these parts of the story are fascinating on a novel level, they are also helping to shape the larger story arc – as Temeraire and his draconic friends are exposed to these different ways of thinking, they begin to question their relationship with humans in their own country. This brings a lovely tingling of anticipation into the series, as we have to wonder if the British dragons will grow to resent their country’s attitudes towards them and rebel.

Image credit: NPR

The type of action and excitement that colour the earlier books is back with more dramas, more character development, and more fascinating environments, making Crucible of Gold is a compelling read that catapults the series out of its slump from the sixth book. I can’t wait to crack the cover of the next one!

Author: Naomi Novik, 2012

Published: First published in Great Britain by Ballatine Books, 2012. Pictured edition published by HarperVoyager, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd, 2014.

Crucible of Gold is the 7^th book in Novik’s Temeraire series. Its follows Temeraire, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, Empire of Ivory, Victory of Eagles, and Tongues of Serpents.