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It was a very long time ago that I first read Hothouse. I remembered a little about the world that the children initially find themselves in. The dumblers and running along the branches of the great banyan. I remembered Lily-yo and Gren, but beyond that I had forgotten much of the adventure.

This book is a science fiction classic and because it is such a good imaginative story set me reading science fiction for years. The story is set millions of years in the future when the rotation of the moon has slowed the earth to almost a standstill. The earth now has one face to the sun and one face from it (the dark side), just as the moon does with the earth. Vegetation has taken over, although a few insects and animals still exist - man included, the humans then are not like the humans now they have evolved to live in the new environment, and de-evolved in some senses too. Gren is an intelligent child and this attribute causes problems, and that is what makes the adventure so fascinating. Gren leaves the forest through various (mainly poor) decisions, but it is nor entirely his fault. This plot line give the opportunity to bring in new species of plant and animal. There are new dangers to overcome and new opportunities to be exploited. Eventually, through some tragedies (which are not greatly dwelt on) and through some comic scenes he makes it back to the forest.

Only one thing in the book did not work for me. They find what would not be described as a talking drone. Quite how that is supposed to have survived, power supply in tact, for thousands of millennia is not explained and for me the scene ruined the timeline that had been so carefully constructed and explained. It is only a small criticism of what is rightly a masterpiece.

The plot is a simple adventure story but the world it is set in is amazing.

Lots of effort is made to set up a very believable world in which the Axis powers defeated the Allies and split America into three. We follow the main characters through events that lead them to various conclusions. As tension heightens the narrative centres on a book, a work of fiction in which the Axis powers were defeated by the Allies and Britain and America divide the world between them, and how difficult it would be to live in that world. There are various twists along the way as the story of each character reaches a conclusion. The final twist though is left until the last few pages, and then we are left hanging.
No explanation of how it could be. Was it a figment of the characters imagination, a dream, or was it really true, and if so how could it be that the world was as the book has described it.

A fascinating world becomes real in the reading, but the end lets it down

or did I miss something?

Book 1 especially is a real page turner as we get inside the mind of a young woman forced by her circumstances to undertake a remarkable challenge so that she can continue to do what she has been doing for much of her life - protecting her family. Seeing events through her interpretations and hearing her thoughts (or memories as I suppose they really are) mean we have a very clear view of her character. The story takes us from her 'selection' through to the end of the 74th Hunger Games.
I remember hearing the author on a radio program saying something like "what Katniss does has consequences, which is why it is a trilogy and didn't stop at one book".
Certainly at the end of the first book you cannot stop, there are too many questions about what happens next. The second book though is not such a brilliant read, but here we begin to get a feel for what is happening outside in the world, rather than just inside in the character. Is this just Katniss maturing, or is there more too it?
In the third book we are into revolution and war - a very different set up from the first two and a very different approach by Katniss. For me this third story was the hardest to read, it felt as though some of the characters needed to be removed before the end, and there were increasingly strange ways of killing them, like some sort of bizarre video game. But then that is the world she lives in! That aside there are atrocities for Katniss to come to terms with and her memories become a little fragmented it seemed (as they probably would in the real world, but I was in danger of losing track once or twice).
I read all three books in the lead up to my holiday, while I was away and in the few days after, rarely have I been so captivated by a trilogy, so having read them so close together may have skewed my view.
Highly recommended if you enjoy this genre.

The very first thing to comment on is the style of the printing. Dialogue is not in quotes, but italics and preceded by a long hyphen. There are no chapters in the conventional sense, the book is split up into scenes (ready for the film?).
These things take a little getting used to, but if we put presentation aside and concentrate on content the message is very different. I have lived through the lies that came out of Soviet Russia and read a little about what it was like inside. At the start of the book we see the abject poverty that existed in Stalinist Russia. Whole villages are starving to death. The first scene is about children trying to catch a cat to eat, at a time when all the cats have long ago been eaten - where has this one come from? (That piece of background has been provided for the reader, but not the characters.) The atmosphere this scene generates sets the whole tone for the book. In the next scenes, time has moved on and we are taken into into the world of the MGB (Stalin's secret police, or security service) where absolute dedication to the state is paramount and deviation, and failure is rewarded with torture and death. The paranoia is well founded. Two central characters are introduced and the competitiveness between the makes for a large part of the story. Slowly their backgrounds are exposed. Sometimes this is done by a straight forward flashback scene, sometimes by revealing the characters internal thought processes. Their relationships with others, particularly around the central character (Leo Demidov) are slowly built and expanded. We begin to find out a little about Raisa, Leo's wife.
Leo is given some awful things to do - arrest people who are clearly innocent, torture them to get a 'confession' and have them killed. Then a child is murdered and Leo is given the job of covering it up - because Communist society could not possibly have murderers - there is no need to murder.
As the power games are played out, first one then the other of the rivals is on top, but things go wrong for Leo and he is moved, finally about half way through the book our detective is in the right location to begin to solve the crime. Until then there is little clue as to the main theme of the book.
That does not make the story slow at any point, with well drawn characters and a real sense of danger there is excitement from the minute the cat is discovered all the way through. Of course towards the end of the story the tension increases and there is a real chance that they will never solve the crime.
The story is based on a real criminal case, but how closely it is impossible to say. The crime itself is bizarre enough for a double episode of CSI or a BBC mini-series. The ending however, once the crime has been resolved is even more of a surprise and I wonder how close to the real events it can be, leaving as it does the possibility of a 'happy ever after' for at least some of the characters.

This is a primarily a detective story, and like all good detective story the loose ends are carefully rounded up and dealt with. It is partly a love story, and partly a horror story, but most of all it is a story that draws you into the world in which it exists and the lives of the characters it portrays. Its description as a 'page turner' is thoroughly justified.

Having previously read and enjoyed almost all the Discworld books, I approached this one with some trepidation. Would it live up to the rest of the series, or would it be a disappointment, and therefore affect my memory of Discworld as a whole.
While not the funniest of the novels, that award goes to the early ones, it still has some great humour. This is mostly generated by the Nac Mac Feegles - always up for a fight, never up for thinking they provide the comedy and the muscle when it is needed. The story centres around Tiffany and the return of the Elves to our world, but things have changed. No only does Granny Weatherwax die early in the story, but the Discworld has progressed and we have trains.
In many ways it is a story about a young woman (don't dare call her a girl) maturing under difficult circumstances. She has already proved her worth (in a previous book), but must now establish herself, and in the most difficult of roles - the 'head' witch.

It is a compelling read, and an up-to-date commentary on our times, it is not in the top half of the series in my opinion, and lacked a really good tense fight scene. The fight was left too late and covered in too little detail, so it was over before the struggle had hardly got under-way. Nevertheless it is a good read.

It is a great title, perhaps the perfect one for a book of imaginative short stories about characters in the Bible. Although you can see that the characters were most probably there, they are not necessarily recorded - like the serving girl at the last supper. The stories are written so that the Bible story is not revealed until the very end. That leads me to a guessing game as I read each paragraph. Who is this? How will it tie in to the Bible? Of course all this is fiction and there are occasionally times when elements of the story break the belief and jar with my (supposedly) known facts. There is a mention of the game of 'not stepping on the cracks in the pavement', where my thought was that those people would never have seen a pavement. These are minor criticisms. Mostly it is the love and compassion of God that we are asked to recognize. Janet has a high view of God's love and ability to redeem even the worst people. The people are realistic too, the stories deal with the subject and their families, the redemption is not always comfortable leaving the subjects family broken.
This is not a book I would have chosen to read. It was lent to me with the question 'Do you have time to read it?' It looks quite short so I said yes, I'm glad I did, it helps me think in a different way, as imagination should.
If you read the book (or have already read it), let me know if there is recognition provided by this review.

I'm not sure if the title is a play on words, if it is then I have missed the joke. There are some very funny scenes portrayed, and there are some very serious and provocative discussions on the Christian life - should you decide to take them seriously at that point. The book is a series of letters between the two writers/speakers. I decided part way through that they had always been intending to publish them, but by the end I was not so sure. The tone is very easy going and friendly, and they take care to respect each others views and 'eccentricities'.
Its an enjoyable read, one quick similie that I particularly enjoyed described Christian's as postmen delivering the word of God to others and pointed out that postmen do not own the message, just deliver it carefully. If I were in the book there would now be some careful caveats to limit the scope, but I'm not in the book, so I needn't bother.

Well worth a read.