T Kingfisher – Paladin’s Strength
Another wonderful warm hug of a book from T Kingfisher. Like the previous book in the series Paladin’s Grace this is a pure romance novel dressed up in fantasy adventure clothes but it can’t help wearing it’s awkward heart on its sleeve. The characters leap off the page immediately becoming old friends and the relationships are just adorable, never feeling forced or unrealistic. While the story is of secondary importance it still delivers plenty of excitement, a bit of horror and some gloriously unsettling bunny rabbits. I ADORE these books.

Natalie Haynes – Pandora’s Jar
This book takes a dozen or so female characters from Greek mythology and shows how the telling of their stories has changed over time, not so much giving new perspectives on them, but sometimes just re-promoting older versions. Haynes focuses on the ancient sources themselves for the most part, but also covers the rest of history – art, theatre, opera and modern media too. Each story is fascinating and shows how rich the myths were in the first place, and how the telling of stories is linked so strongly to the beliefs and fashions of the period of the teller, not the period of the events. It’s interesting to take a chapter per character, but I do wish there was a way to also do the opposite presentation and focus a bit more on how each period of history retold all the myths, joining the two sides of the story together. The other frustration is that for a book that talks a lot about representation in art there is only one picture per chapter, so you have to read a lot of descriptions (and/or google the images in parallel). Despite these quibbles though, it’s a fascinating book that really made me think.

Eoin Colfer – High Fire
The title and cover of this book makes it look like just another generic dragon book. It’s not that book and it’s not that dragon. This dragon lives in a swamp in New Orleans where he is hiding from humanity, drinking heavily, swearing a lot, watching a lot of television and generally wallowing in a really bad mood. His mood gets considerably worse when a showdown between a trouble making kid and a local policeman/criminal overlord wannabe lands in his back yard. The book is about as far from a generic dragon novel as is possible, the book and the characters embrace the insanity of the situation without undermining either the drama or the emotions. It was both a lot of fun to read, and genuinely thrilling as it twisted and turned.

Eva St. John – The Quantum Curators and the Faberge Egg
A team of Quantum Archivists travel from an alternate timeline version of Earth where the library of Alexandria was never destroyed and they travel to various points in history on our Earth to rescue important objects before they are lost of destroyed. It’s a bit Indiana Jones but with more wibbly science and better gadgets and I really enjoyed it. We’re launched straight into everything and the plot moves quite fast, I could actually have enjoyed spending more time on the set up and just spending time with the characters and this has the potential to become a fun series.
The Quantum Curators and the Enemy Within
The second book in the series continues to move quickly but smoothly, expanding the world’s that the author has created and delving deeper this time into how the alternate Earth of the curators works. We’ve jumped forward in time a bit which works really well so that our eyes into the world has been there a little while and can act as both our guide and the audiences questioning voice. The mystery/conspiracy elements are well paced and kept me guessing throughout, but not in a frustrated way where it felt like I was being deliberately misled at all. A fun and easy to read series, I look forward to the next one.

Heide Goody and Iain Grant – Oddjobs 5: The Long Bad Friday
I’d been really disappointed by book 4 of this series, but having got that far, I figured I might as well read the final book. It was better than the previous one, back to the main characters and the familiar locations of Birmingham, but it inevitably lost its way. The problem with the series is that what I loved was the contrast between the mundanity of civil servants/academics dealing with alien gods who are bringing about the apocalypse. It was just normal (ish) people dealing with the periphery of an extraordinary set up. But when everything starts getting bigger, the books lose their charm. Also unfortunately this book is way too long, too many weird names and gods to keep track of, too many different threads and an ending that I didn’t really understand or like. Unfortunately given the way the series ends, I’m not sure I can really recommend it.