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Showing posts from February, 2025

Structural Issues (Cecilia Peartree)

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I had been waiting for quite a while for the third in one of my favourite series by one of my favourite authors, so I could hardly wait to read it when it was finally published. While the story managed to wrap up some plot threads that had been left dangling after the first two books in the series, in a way that was satisfying in itself, I couldn't help finding the structure of the story a bit laboured. After thinking about it for quite a while, I realised why I had noticed this. The answer surprised me. I had myself wrestled with a similar writing problem in the past.  I am a very low-profile writer - I have written and self-published a lot of novels but none have been wildly successful, which I think is partly because I tend to write in the odd gaps between genres. This is more or less unintentional. My cosy mysteries are either not cosy enough or not mysterious enough, and my historical romances are not romantic enough, though I have found a few loyal readers who seem to stick b...

The Great Divide – A book review by Sarah Nicholson

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Sometimes you come across a great book by chance, in this instance I found it when scrolling on the Borrowbox library app. Sometimes you read a book and you have to share it with everyone because it is so well written and the theme of the novel is so topical. The book in question is The Great Divide by Cristina Henriquez. I listened to it and the narration is excellent, with distinctive accents for each character. Although as with “listening” to any book I did struggle to work out who was who at the beginning, without the benefit of flicking back a few pages to clarify, but it was well worth persevering. According to Wikipedia “the most common meaning [of The Great Divide] is the Continental Divide of the Americas, which separates the watersheds of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans”. The novel is set in Panama in 1907 at the time when the Panama Canal was built, a construction which crosses the Great Divide and divides a country in the process. Panama has often been in the news...

Participation, Beauty and Meaning

  Participation, Beauty and Meaning: An Account of My Research Journey*   ‘ Reading literature can help one regain one’s balance when the mind is distressed or out of equilibrium, as a result of illness, disability, or a traumatic event encountered in the course of an ordinary life’.    I wrote this in my first ever ESREA paper in 2017 and it was the beginning of a journey that I made to find out whether there was any truth in the theory known as bibliotherapy.    In my research since then I have posed the question of whether a reading of literature can help to heal minds and hearts? As a result, I have come across indications from my own life and from outside sources that this can be so. I have amassed a vast number of articles on the subject and published several essays, both in educational journals and as part of a group of bloggers. Most of the latter are writers of novels for children and adults.    Since I joined this group, about five years...