My Year in Books 2022: July

Well, there's two books on this month's list, so I guess that's better than the last couple of months!

Here are my posts from previous months: January, February, March, April, May, June

And here are the books (twice as many as last time!) I read in July...

The Quick by Lauren Owen (2014)

I picked this one up at my local library. It looked very Gothic (and, indeed, it turned out to be very Gothic), but outside of that I didn’t know much about what to expect. The Quick begins in the late nineteenth century on a country estate in Yorkshire, which is home to siblings James and Charlotte Norbury. We follow them through their childhood and into young adulthood, before James heads off to Oxford as a young man. For those who are less blurb-averse, and therefore happy to have the minimal information before picking up a book, it’s not a spoiler to say… The Quick is a vampire novel! In some ways, the vampires in Owen’s novel are pretty standard – holy water and sunlight repels them; mind control and supernatural healing are amongst their powers. However, she introduces some original elements that I quite enjoyed. There are two groups of vampires – an upper-class bunch attached to a gentlemen’s club, and a lower-class group who hang around the seedier parts of the East End. ‘The Quick’ of the title are the humans, the living, and some of these humans are aware of vampires and the threat they pose. When James is attacked by a vampire from the club, he and Charlotte are drawn into the battle between the factions. There’s a lot to like about The Quick, but is a little bit long and the first third is quite slow-paced. It’s worth sticking with, though, as it really gets going after that.

Mother by S.E. Lynes (2017)

I don’t know why, as I have a million and one books on my to-read pile and I promised I wasn’t going to do this again, but I read another free eBook. And it was a domestic noir (something else I promised I wasn’t going to do again). This one is a quick and easy read, and it’s certainly enjoyable enough. Mother is the story of Christopher Harris, a young man who discovers by chance that he’s adopted. He seeks out his birth mother and discovers she has been looking for him as well, and the two of them begin to build a relationship. Of course, given the genre, it’s clear there’s more going on here than meets the eye, and interspersed chapters from other perspectives (which seem to be unrelated) hint at another story to be told. As I say, it’s an easy read, and there’s a lot to enjoy. However, it is a bit predictable. It’s not hard to guess who the unnamed narrator is or how the other (named) narrator – whose story seems so distant at first – intersects with Christopher’s story, and the surprise revelations at the book’s conclusion aren’t that much of a surprise really. I liked the character of Christopher, who was just creepily ‘off’ from the start. I wasn’t as keen on the character of the mother as the motivations for some of her actions aren’t always clear, and ‘I want to get to know my son’ doesn’t quite account for everything she does.