Sam's Fireside - Cosy Book Reviews & Recommendations

"LIFE is many things - good, bad, steady, unexpected - but we can all agree that each one is UNIQUE. " I didn’t really know what I was getting into with All This & More 🤔. It’s a concept I’ve only ever experienced as a child, through the Choose Your Own Adventure stories 📚. Peng takes that idea to a whole different level, delivering it in a far more complex and lengthy way. I’m not sure how much my experience was affected by listening rather than reading 🎧, but whenever a choice came up, I almost always selected the option that said continue listening. It was simply easier, especially as I was usually doing other things at the same time 🏃‍♀️🧹. The only exception was right at the end, when I chose to listen to all three endings 👀. The book blends fantasy, sci-fi, and time travel 🚀✨, which—for the purposes of this story—is explained through quantum physics 🔬. That’s something I don’t understand and probably never will 😂! I’m also not sure whether we’re meant to lik...

'The illusion of some level of democracy over there keeps the people satisfied.' I have had this book on my shelf for a couple of years (sorry Russell), 🙈 but as the second book in the series is out next week, I decided I would read them back to back. Of course I hadn't looked at the synopsis for ages and so I had no idea what I was getting into, and admittedly it did take me a while to get to grips with the characters, the story and the slight weirdness of it all. However, once I'd got all that sorted in my head, I flew through it.  Britannia Rises starts off a bit slow, but once it gets going the pace really picks up. Before I knew it, I was racing through the pages trying to keep up with the action.. The book is a dystopian take on an alternative view on the monarchy and Britain as we know it. Gone are the days of our adorable Queen, and in steps her son, and more importantly, her grandson who is set to change our country as we know it. All this is in the book, don...

“There are only two types of being with such power - those who have no vested interest in the contents contained within the artefact, completely ignorant of its contents, of its worth, a rare being indeed; and those born of the Elder God! So, which are you?” The Book of Consciousness is the book that everyone seems to want to get their hands on, some to make their existence better, some to make others’ existence worse. Ignatius and Indigo are just a couple of humans who stumble upon the reality of demons, gods, dragons and super-beings, and that maybe there really is something beyond the world in which we live. Once you get past the world-building, who is who and what is what, Timeslayers is a fascinating, thought-provoking read. I actually read it twice, almost immediately. The first time to figure it all out, and the second time to settle down and enjoy the story. In my head, Ignatius and Indigo are a couple of strange eccentrics who just don’t want to be the same as anyone else, a...

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐   This is a pretty awesome book and the first in the Jimmy and Andrew adventure series. Jimmy is a young lad who has always wanted a dog, and so, for his ninth birthday, his Dad takes him to the rescue centre and Jimmy chooses Andrew - or rather Andrew, chooses Jimmy! Written as a children’s book, this will easily entertain and educate adults, too. I certainly didn’t know about some things Goldstein writes about, in particular, the Egyptian history he explains in great detail, through Andrew (yes, the dog)! As we travel on Jimmy’s adventures, if there are words or situations that he doesn’t understand, these are explained to him and consequently, any kids reading the book will learn lots of new stuff too. I googled American Stonehenge, and it really exists, although in New Hampshire, not Washington State. Something else that I wasn’t aware of but loved reading about. Think Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, meets Harry Potter with some aliens thrown in and you’ll have a good idea of...

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I love a dystopian; the world is ending, kind of book and The Book of Sand by Theo Clare didn’t fail to deliver. Written with a parallel timeline, Mckenzie is a teenager, living in the present day in Virginia in the USA. Spider (I couldn’t work out what age Spider was supposed to be), is living in a parallel universe somewhere in a desert, which comprises various countries, states and cities from around the world. He is surrounded by his desert family and they are on a mission to discover the Sarkpont and although they aren’t sure what that is; they know that other families are searching for it too. They also know that if they don’t find it, their quest is over. We flit back and forth between Mckenzie and the family in the desert, both linked in some way, although it’s a while until we discover how. Seemingly, Mckenzie’s life is just that of a normal teenager’s, although she appears to have some psychotic episodes. So at first, I wondered how this fitted into a fantasy novel and ...

⭐⭐⭐⭐    I reviewed Worldlines by Adam Guest for Online Book Club, and although I thoroughly enjoyed it, I often found myself trying to follow the ‘worlds’ too closely, trying to understand whether there really was the possibility of us occupying several dimensions at once, and this detracted from the flow of the novel. Worldlines is a sci-fi/fantasy novel about a multiverse rather than a universe, where the protagonist, Gary, gradually realises, with the help of his university professor, that he might be actually existing in more than one world at any given moment. Events are happening around him that he has no memory of and which he cannot explain. With the help of his friends and family, he attempts to discover the scientific background behind what’s going on and whether it could be real. Wordlines seems to have some sort of science behind them and whether this is based on evidence or just in the author’s imagination is unclear. Regardless of this, it is a well-thought-out ...