Review: The spirit engineer

Title: The spirit engineer

Author: A.J. West

Pages: 304

Published: October 7th, 2021 by Duckworth Books

Genre: Historical fiction, Mystery, Adult, Paranormal, Gothic

Goodreads rating: 4.17/5

My rating: 1/5

Add on: Goodreads / Amazon

Trigger warning: death, blood, beating, mental illness

Synopsis:

Belfast, 1914. Two years after the sinking of the Titanic, high society has become obsessed with spiritualism in the form of seances that attempt to contact the spirits of loved ones lost at sea.

William is a man of science and a skeptic, but one night with everyone sat around the circle something happens that places doubt in his heart and a seed of obsession in his mind. Could the spirits truly be communicating with him or is this one of Kathleen’s parlour tricks gone too far?

This early 20th century gothic set in Northern Ireland contains all the mystery and intrigue one might expect from a Sarah Waters novel. Deftly plotted with echoes of The Woman in Black, readers will be thrilled to discover West’s chilling prose.

Based on the true story of William Jackson Crawford and famed medium Kathleen Goligher, and with a cast of characters that include Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini, The Spirit Engineer conjures a haunting tale that will keep readers guessing until the very end.

Review:

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
I had great expectations from The spirit Engineer, which combines a lot of my favorite genres/situations: ghosts, spiritism, historical fiction, seancè, the sinking of the Titanic, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and a beautiful cover.

I ended up deeply regretting the time I spent reading it. The night I finished it, I had had problems to fell asleep, causing it by the terrible ending.
For the first 30% of the book nothing happens: is about boring arguments between the MC and his family, him talking bad about his colleagues, and no ghosts.

I want my books full of ghosts!! Real and terrifying ghosts!!

My main issue with this book is William Crawford: he’s totally unlikeable. He’s mean with his family, sarcastic and annoyed by his children, whiny and invidious, and most of the time just stupid. There’s nothing about him that I liked, even worse when he became involved in the seances.

A lot of the great revelations or plot twists were easily guessed if someone is familiar with this kind of gothic story.
The tragedy of the Titanic and the lives of those who have lost someone is barely mentioned, same for Sir Conan Doyle and Houdini: they appear only in a chapter, but I really liked them, they are portrayed well in my opinion. Such a shame it doesn’t elaborate on the Titanic, a book set in Ireland some years after the sinking can talk for hours about this, and I will gladly read it.
And I don’t want to talk about the ending, but I hate this kind of revelation in horror/gothic books.

In conclusion: I save nothing about this book, except the cover.

Just one damned awful book: a review

Title: Just one damned thing after another

Author: Jodi Taylor

Genre: science fiction, time travel

Pages: 322

Publisher: Night Shade

Goodreads rating: 3.89

My rating: 1

Trigger Warning: sexual assault, s*x scenes, death, blood, war, curse words.

Synopsis:

“History is just one damned thing after another.” —Arnold Toynbee
Behind the seemingly innocuous facade of St. Mary’s Institute of Historical Research, a different kind of academic work is taking place. Just don’t call it “time travel”—these historians “investigate major historical events in contemporary time.” And they aren’t your harmless eccentrics either; a more accurate description, as they ricochet around history, might be unintentional disaster-magnets.
The first thing you learn on the job at St. Mary’s is that one wrong move and history will fight back—sometimes in particularly nasty ways. But, as new recruit Madeleine Maxwell soon discovers, it’s not only history they’re often fighting.
The Chronicles of St. Mary’s tells the chaotic adventures of Max and her compatriots—Director Bairstow, Leon “Chief” Farrell, Mr. Markham, and many more—as they travel through time, saving St. Mary’s (too often by the very seat of their pants) and thwarting time-travelling terrorists, all the while leaving plenty of time for tea.
From eleventh-century London to World War I, from the Cretaceous Period to the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria, one thing is for sure: wherever the historians at St. Mary’s go, chaos is sure to follow in their wake.

Review with spoiler:

This is one of the worst books I ever read, and one of the most stupid. I wasn’t thinking that for the first 4 or 5 chapters: it wasn’t a well-written story, and all the characters were acting like a teen, but the idea behind the story was interesting, and I found myself reading out of curiosity.

But then I began to see the fall of the plot: the basic rule in every story about time travel is “do not change the past”, but this rule doesn’t apply to our MC. All the science fiction parts of this book are done approximately, and we read this story like: ok that doesn’t make sense.

The historian of the St. Mary institute are sent to the past just to observe the situation but:

1. They died. A lot.
2. Our MC saves a couple of lives during WWI and nobody cares.
3. And the future doesn’t change!
4. They didn’t send the historian to the period he/she has a degree, they send them randomly.
5. We really need to talk about the final exam.
6. Like she’s just drinking tea and has done nothing and she has passed the exam.
7. They are sent in a dangerous era without weapons.

These are some of the things that I found stupid in this book, but nothing compares to the s*x scene randomly placed after a car accident. So they are like friends, he’s driving a car, she makes a dirty joke and he BAM, crush the car against a tree. He calls for help, then “take off your clothes and we make it on the car that is destroyed.” I was–>

really, that books keep goes worse every page you turn.

The characters are all historian with degrees in a specific era and they act like teenagers; the plot behind the time travel is so bad I want to cry; the sexual scenes and assault are totally amiss; even the parts in the past are annoying.

The writing style is very elementary, the dialogue is so bland.

There’s nothing except the cover that I will save about this book.  I’m sorry. Please don’t be offended if you liked it, this is only my opinion.

 

From Madness to the crime: 2 mini reviews

 

 

 

 

Title: Bedlam, London and its mad / Underworld London, Crime and Punishment in the Capital City

Author: Catharine Arnold

Pages: 320 / 352

Genre: true crime, non-fiction, history, mental illness

Editor: Simon Shuster Uk

Rating on Goodreads: Underworld 3.91 / Bedlam 3.54

My rating: Bedlam 1/5 – Underworld London 4.5/5

Trigger Warning: death, blood, graphic description of corpse, violence and murder, child abuse

Goodreads: Bedlam / Underworld London

Reviews:

I will review these two books together, because I read them in the past months and they are from the same author. And better be prepared, because one of the books will receive a negative review.

Let’s begin with Underworld London, that’s so much better than Bedlam. I have a thing for macabre and dark history, so I was always attracted by the books of Catharine Arnold. Underworld London it’s a long journey about the crime, the most famous criminals and the punishment in London.

We can read of assassin and murderers, from Newgate to Tyburn, from the middle age to the modern days. Each chapter is focused on a famous criminal of a location, but most of the times the author tends to divagate from the main topic. It’s okay, I can tolerate.

But there is a problem: a series of mistakes in one of the chapters. You maybe want to know that I’m obsessed with Jack The Ripper, so obviously I know a thing or two.

Well, in the so brief chapter about Jack and his murders, the main Inspector who conduct the investigations is named Abbeline. But everybody knows that his name is Frederick Abberline. I thought of a series of typos (it’s weird, but…) but then, I read Bedlam and a review on Goodreads has caught my attention: the reviewer says that there are a lot of errors about a character in this book.

Are you kidding me? A non-fiction book with poor research and a lot of mistakes about real people, and maybe other errors in god knows what. meybe there are mistakes about other people, or their crimes, or about the psychiatric treatment. I was so disappointed.

Bedlam is also the most muddler and chaotic book I ever read. I wanted to read about Bedlam, the hospital and the illness, the life inside the hospital and the most famous patients.

Instead, I’ve read chapter and chapters about all the supervisor of the hospital, about the land on where was the building, and a lot of digressions. A transantlantic of digressions.

It’s like: I want to read Harry Potter, instead I read a finnish manual about salmon.

I haven’t learned a single thing about the building I visited in December, and also the chapter about the Modern Bedlam, now the Imperial War Museum, is poor written. A couple of lines and that’s all. And it’s a shame because the museum is extraordinary.

I’m also disappointed because I already buy Necropolis from the same author. I don’t know if I want to read it.