Review happiness

 

I opened my mail a couple of days ago and was delighted to find, amongst all the ‘dear friend I am writing to you from Botswana’, your dropbox has expired’, Amazon suggests from your profile that you would like this CD of German experimental jazz’, and all the other stuff, these wonderful reviews from Ruth Angell.

Review for The One Hundred and Fifty – Eighth Book by Kate A Hardy.

After devouring two of Kate’s other novels I couldn’t wait to read this book. I wasn’t disappointed. Her style is exciting, involving, humorous, gritty and beautiful.

Kate’s imagination and descriptions of character, place, smell, form, colour, language, relationships and emotion are utterly wonderful. I was transported deep in to her interesting and compelling world and lost until the very last word. I wanted to dive in and be in the guts of the story with the characters and experience all they were experiencing.

I love how this story is almost unbelievable and yet I found myself finding similarities in my own life and hooking elements from the characters experiences into my own. The places that Hamish finds himself on his journey are so familiar, some because I have been there myself others because of how familiarly they are described to me.

The cliff hanger ending made me shout out and wish for some resolution, I couldn’t believe I would never know, genius.

 

I love the darker side of Kate’s writing, her analysis of human behaviours when in difficult circumstances, situations not yet encountered by us in 2018 but so very possible in 2070. How death is part of survival and always very near and most likely violent.

My thoughts can hardly describe or do justice to how brilliant Kate A Hardy is at engaging the reader and bringing them into her wonderful world.

I will read her novels again and again.

Ruth Angell 2018

Three months on . . .

 

Following last post. I haven’t done much other than write, eat, sleep, be slightly sociable and deal with all the usual life-stuff that we all deal with. Half way through this re-write, I’d emailed the (potential) agent to say: ‘I’ll be sending the new draft through, end of April,’ and I will. A deadline, even if self-imposed is a good way to stop, reflect, and hope what you’ve been hunched over for many weeks is at least better than the last draft.

I’ve read through five times and three folks are reading at the moment; and I’m about to scoot through it again. There are still mistakes and my made-up language to improve on but . . . time to stop – for the moment – work on some of the illustrations whether they’d be ever used by a publisher or not. I feel the book needs a few of the visual elements camped out in my head, so, I’ll put the laptop away for a few days and concentrate on ink and paper.