Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

This is an adult fantasy trilogy from Australian author Jay Kristoff. For some reason Australian and New Zealand authors don’t seem to penetrate into the British market all that well so I haven’t come across his work before but this series was recommended to me for its queer content. Across the trilogy we follow Mia Corvere and, to touch on the queer content first, the loves of her life. In book one, that’s a boy but in books two and three it’s a woman. (The books follow her across a few years from age 11 to about 20, her relationship track across young adult into full adulthood so the “boy” is not a child, but another young adult.) Mia is portrayed as loving them both, not necessarily equally but genuinely. She doesn’t label herself with modern labels in her fantasy world, but bi or pan seem to be the likeliest. Her girlfriend seems to only like women so maybe lesbian? But certainly plenty of queer content. As for the setting, this is not quite, but recognisably the Roman Empire. Th...

I’m going to take the unusual step of reviewing a book. I read Disobedience because I missed the film, and then the book appeared on my BookBub list and I thought why not? I didn’t find it a particularly easy read in some ways. The central setting is within the British Orthodox Jewish community in Hendon. There are elements of that I can relate to, clearly I’m British after all, but British Jewry is something I know very little about, and deeply Orthodox Jewry is, equally, something I know next to nothing about. Most of what I know about British Jewry is, kind of ironically, beautifully skewered within the pages of Disobedience and, although I’ve had Jewish friends over the years, none were practising so I didn’t learn anything about the religion from them. The only real exposure to Orthodox Jewry I really have is hearing about the ultra-orthodox community in Israel on the news and while I’m sure their statements are correctly presented, they are news snippets they aren’t an in dept...