Reviews tagging 'Medical content'

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

4 reviews

katewhite77's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful mysterious sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

A Glorious Crime Caper

Set in the ceady under world of 1920s Soho night life. Missing girls., bent coppers, straight coppers, an assortment of loveable rouges with some plain old rouges thrown in. Oh and did I mention and did I mention a fiesty librarian on the lookout for adventure. All woven together in a beautifully crafted narrative. 

This is the definition of Darkly Comic and is easily one of my favourite books of the year so far. I would like to particularly recommend the audiobook as the narrator does the humour in this novel an incredible amount of justice. 
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zara89's review against another edition

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adventurous dark medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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nialiversuch's review

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dark emotional funny informative mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

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znvisser's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

This was fun! Lots going on, many characters including intelligent dogs (love it), and then women and girls everywhere following their dreams and outsmarting men. Early on my brain made a Peaky Blinders comparison and honestly, I held on to it because it helped me with the setting as I don't recall having read a lot of fiction from this time period before. I was however a bit disappointed by Niven's character, who was introduced interestingly (e.g. as a relative outsider to his family, coming back from the war) but his character fell flat fast and these promises from the start didn't really get thoroughly explored. I do understand it's hard to have so many characters and have them all be layered and pronounced, but the author succeeded in this far better for the women (and policemen?) in this story. However, I am not going to complain any more about that, because we all know there are more than enough books out there where women are prone to this fate. I loved how the author used perspective changes and timelines to play with the reader's perspective. In part due to it, the plot wasn't as mysterious as the setting, with many easter eggs and predictable turns and events
, and a slightly unsurprising moral along the lines of "the bad people are not as bad as they seem, and certainly not as bad as the people who are supposed or appear to be doing better"
. But to me there was some playfulness to the predictability and I rather enjoyed it, moreover because I am not particularly looking to be misled in my reading. Anyway - fun! Might pick up some more historical fiction from this time period. 
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