The Fault in Our Stars, John Green Hazel has terminal cancer but she’s not dead yet. She thinks a lot about death until she meets Augustus at a cancer support group and he accuses her of being defined by her cancer. He shares her sense of humour and love of […]
A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth The ‘word of thanks’ to the reader at the start of this mammoth novel jokes that you’ll sprain your wrists reading it. At 600,000 words — almost 1500 pages in soft cover — the length would be prohibitive for most people, but the problem for […]
Reading Macchia’s ‘Global Pentecostalism and Baptism in the Spirit’, I found myself asking in what sense his argument is global. It seems that in the western Pentecostal crisis about the efficacy of ‘baptism in the Spirit’, Pentecostal theological method as practiced in the majority world has come to be seen, […]
Monster, Walter Dean Myers Steve Harmon is on trial for felony murder. Was he part of the team whose robbery went wrong and resulted in the murder of a drugstore in Harlem, USA? A budding filmmaker, Steve’s story is mostly told through a screenplay he writes about his trial. He’s […]
TCKs are Third Culture Kids and our little Elliot is one. We’ve been keen to surround him with resources that will help him to sort out his world, however subtly. Because books and reading are a big part of our family life, we’ve been on the lookout for picture books […]
The Great Agony and Pure Laughter of the Gods, Jamala Safari The first third of this novel introduces us to Risto’s world. A son of a middle class, town dwelling family in the DRC, he spends holidays in his grandmother’s village, a world that is both mysterious and familiar to […]
Insurgent; Allegiant, Veronica Roth These are the second two books in the Divergent series. I reviewed the first one last month. I generally find sequels in dystopian worlds a little disappointing because the shininess and intrigue of discovering the new world has worn off, and that was true for these […]
Meet Jesus at uni 