Hello guys!
I'm starting this week with a new Mark This Book Monday review for an eARC I was very lucky to snag during a Read It Now offer on Netgalley, and this week all reviews will be for ARCs, I need to catch up on my reviews, and I've been reading mostly only ARCs to do so.
This is first review towards my ARCs/books for review category in my 105 Challenge, so I hope I can manage to complete it all!
The Ghosts of Heaven by Marcus Sedgwick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was extremely lucky to be able to download The Ghosts of Heaven via Netgalley's read now, so thank you Macmillan!
This is my first Sedgwick book I've read, even if I've had Midwinterblood in my Kindle library for a while (I'll be pushing it up on the line to read now), and I have really loved not only the writing but the way he builds up the stories, and weaves small threads all along the four of them.
The first story might very well be my favourite of them all, but it'll be most likely a tie between first and fourth. Probably because both appealed to some of my faves: prehistoric times and science fiction. On the first story a girl wants to learn the knowledge and magic of the cave inscriptions and the cave paintings, and I simply found fascinating how the social status and organization was described here. Language, symbols, fights for survival, I really didn't want this story to end!
The second story was also equally fascinating but I had issues continuing with it because of a personal pet peeve. Witch hunting stories make me angry, plain and simple. I cannot help but feel a white hot rage against those "men of god" that killed innocent women because they were healers, or simply because someone pointed a finger at them. Once I resigned myself to the injustice, I also found quite fascinating how spirals are present in many things, unknowingly and with a meaning long forgotten or never known consciously.
The third story is set in more recent times and I found it both intriguing and disqueting. Set up in an asylum for the lunatics/mentally ill and with a look at what dealing with the insane was back then, and what was considered insane too. The spiral is debated as a delusion or a sympton of one, and from all fours stories is the one that I connected with the least, even the poetry was fascinating.
Story number four, science fiction, happens in a ship travelling through space and this I feel it's the story richer in explanations about the spirals, but also rich in making us wonder, making us ask questions, and linking all four stories together. And the story is not only about the spirals, but also has a bit of a murder mystery touch and talks about diverging paths and choices.
Fibonacci numbers, paleolitic/neolitic symbols and art, the Golden ratio both in architecture and nature, light waves, the more we understand about the world, the more we see the spiral, the helix. A truly fascinating book full of food for thought and that I feel like I will be re-reading and doing a bit more research on images and traditions and theories in the future! Very well deserved 4 to 4.5 stars!!
View all my reviews
I'm starting this week with a new Mark This Book Monday review for an eARC I was very lucky to snag during a Read It Now offer on Netgalley, and this week all reviews will be for ARCs, I need to catch up on my reviews, and I've been reading mostly only ARCs to do so.
This is first review towards my ARCs/books for review category in my 105 Challenge, so I hope I can manage to complete it all!
The Ghosts of Heaven by Marcus SedgwickMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was extremely lucky to be able to download The Ghosts of Heaven via Netgalley's read now, so thank you Macmillan!
This is my first Sedgwick book I've read, even if I've had Midwinterblood in my Kindle library for a while (I'll be pushing it up on the line to read now), and I have really loved not only the writing but the way he builds up the stories, and weaves small threads all along the four of them.
The first story might very well be my favourite of them all, but it'll be most likely a tie between first and fourth. Probably because both appealed to some of my faves: prehistoric times and science fiction. On the first story a girl wants to learn the knowledge and magic of the cave inscriptions and the cave paintings, and I simply found fascinating how the social status and organization was described here. Language, symbols, fights for survival, I really didn't want this story to end!
The second story was also equally fascinating but I had issues continuing with it because of a personal pet peeve. Witch hunting stories make me angry, plain and simple. I cannot help but feel a white hot rage against those "men of god" that killed innocent women because they were healers, or simply because someone pointed a finger at them. Once I resigned myself to the injustice, I also found quite fascinating how spirals are present in many things, unknowingly and with a meaning long forgotten or never known consciously.
The third story is set in more recent times and I found it both intriguing and disqueting. Set up in an asylum for the lunatics/mentally ill and with a look at what dealing with the insane was back then, and what was considered insane too. The spiral is debated as a delusion or a sympton of one, and from all fours stories is the one that I connected with the least, even the poetry was fascinating.
Story number four, science fiction, happens in a ship travelling through space and this I feel it's the story richer in explanations about the spirals, but also rich in making us wonder, making us ask questions, and linking all four stories together. And the story is not only about the spirals, but also has a bit of a murder mystery touch and talks about diverging paths and choices.
Fibonacci numbers, paleolitic/neolitic symbols and art, the Golden ratio both in architecture and nature, light waves, the more we understand about the world, the more we see the spiral, the helix. A truly fascinating book full of food for thought and that I feel like I will be re-reading and doing a bit more research on images and traditions and theories in the future! Very well deserved 4 to 4.5 stars!!
View all my reviews
