#BlogTour ORFEIA by JOANNE M.HARRIS #BookReview #Orfeia @Joannechocolat @gollancz @RandomTTours

A huge delight to be the latest stop on the Blog Tour today for ORFEIA by JOANNE HARRIS. My thanks to the author, publisher and Anne of Random Things Tours for letting me be part of it all and sharing my review!

ABOUT THE BOOK

The stunning new novella from No 1 bestselling author Joanne Harris:

 Orfeia is a gender-flipped retelling of the Orpheus Myth, beautifully illustrated by Bonnie Helen Hawkins When you can find me an acre of land, Every sage grows merry in time, Between the ocean and the sand Then will you be united again. So begins a beautiful and tragic quest as a heartbroken mother sets out to save her lost daughter, through the realms of the real, of dream, and even into the underworld itself. But determination alone is not enough. For to save something precious, she must give up something precious, be it a song, a memory, or her freedom itself . . .

Praise for Joanne’s previous novellas: 

“It may be a little book, but it has considerable power to enchant” – METRO on A Pocketful of Crows 

“Love, treachery, the call of the ocean: this wintry modern fairy tale features all three… perfect for anyone who loves a good story.” MAIL ON SUNDAY on The Blue Salt Road

PUBLISHED BY GOLLANCZ

PURCHASE LINKS

Goldsboro Books  – signed first edition

hive.co.uk

Blackwell’s

Joanne Harris is an Anglo-French writer, whose books include fourteen novels, two cookbooks and many short stories. Her work is extremely diverse, covering aspects of magic realism, suspense, historical fiction, mythology and fantasy. In 2000, her 1999 novel CHOCOLAT was adapted to the screen, starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. 
CHOCOLAT has sold over a million copies in the UK alone and was a global bestseller. She is an Honorary Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, and in 2013 was awarded an MBE by the Queen. Her hobbies are listed in Who’s Who as ‘mooching, lounging, strutting, strumming, priest-baiting and quiet subversion’. She plays bass guitar in a band first formed when she was 16 and runs the musical storytelling show Storytime. Joanne lives with her husband in Yorkshire, about 15 miles from the place she was born. Find out more at http://www.joanne-harris.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @Joannechocolat

MY REVIEW

A truly magical retelling of the Orpheus myth that draws deeply on the emotions of loss and grief and the journey that your state of mind may take you on in those darkest times.

Fay is struggling to cope with the loss of her daugher Daisy.  She is drifting along, feeling out of place and without purpose.  She has turned to a counsellor to try and help her make sense of where she finds herself  but she finds herself going through the motions of life and just telling the counsellor what she thinks she wants to hear without really acknowledging the pain she is feeling.

She takes to running at night and feels more at home amongst the darkness and is led on a journey by those she meets to a place where she is led to believe she can save her daughter.  

Abandoned London is the place she finds herself, a place that has been taken over by nature, a wild place and somewhere she feels more at peace than anywhere else of late. There are those there to help her but some want to lead her on the wrong path and get her to make the wrong choices – who does she believe?

What i loved about this book was the emotion and the despair that Fay felt was so believable.  When grief has you alive but not living.  Her world had been shrunk by the darkness around her and she was struggling to see any light.

I really love these re-tellings! And the beautiful illustrations work so well alongside the story.  

A magical, emotional and captivating tale.

★★★★★

Advertisement

#BookReview The Blue Salt Road by Joanne M.Harris

About the book

An earthly nourris sits and sings
And aye she sings, “Ba lilly wean,
Little ken I my bairn’s father,
Far less the land that he staps in. 
(Child Ballad, no. 113)

So begins a stunning tale of love, loss and revenge, against a powerful backdrop of adventure on the high seas, and drama on the land. The Blue Salt Road balances passion and loss, love and violence and draws on nature and folklore to weave a stunning modern mythology around a nameless, wild young man.

Passion drew him to a new world, and trickery has kept him there – without his memories, separated from his own people. But as he finds his way in this dangerous new way of life, so he learns that his notions of home, and your people, might not be as fixed as he believed.

Beautifully illustrated by Bonnie Helen Hawkins, this is a stunning and original modern fairytale. 

Published by Gollancz

Purchase Links

Goldsboro Books– signed first edition

hive.co.uk

waterstones

MY REVIEW

A beautiful book, both inside and out, telling the story of Selkies and how the wants and whims of Folk can change their destiny and their way of life. 

The author does a wonderful job of exploring the folklore behind Selkies and weaving a wonderful tale of how selfish someone can be in their desire to get what they want, at the expense of the happiness of the other person. 

The two main characters are fascinating creatures – a young selkie prince is bored of his life in the water and dreams of walking on land amongst the ‘Folk’, and Flora is sick of being on her own and hears of a way to meet the man of her dreams. As time goes by, both of them begin to question the way their lives are turning out and it is an absorbing tale that unfolds of how the past has a way of catching up with you and that the truth is never far away.

I loved the magical feel of this story and the illustrations throughout are also exquisite and add the perfect finish to this book. I loved it!

🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊

A Pocketful of Crows by Joanne M. Harris – my review

THE BLURB

I am as brown as brown can be,

And my eyes as black as sloe;

I am as brisk as brisk can be,

And wild as forest doe.

(The Child Ballads, 295)

So begins a beautiful tale of love, loss and revenge. Following the seasons, A Pocketful of Crows balances youth and age, wisdom and passion and draws on nature and folklore to weave a stunning modern mythology around a nameless wild girl.

Only love could draw her into the world of named, tamed things. And it seems only revenge will be powerful enough to let her escape.

Amazon UK

MY REVIEW

Wow! They say the best things come in small packages, and this little book demonstrates this perfectly! Such a stunning cover too!

This is a wonderfully staged ‘fairytale’ with a twist! It’s a very simple story – girl meets boy, girl falls in love, boy betrays girl, girl gets revenge – but the writing style is so beautiful that it creeps under your skin and holds you spellbound throughout. It is based on the poem ‘The Child Ballads, 925’

The ‘wilding girl’ is one of the travelling folk. They don’t mix with the villagers, they just watch from afar, and she collects coloured things that the villagers drop. One of these things turns out to be a charm left by a girl with the name of ‘William’ left on there. From that moment it seems that the wilding girl is destined to meet William, and her whole world is turned on its’ head.

Before she is happy to live her life through the nature she is surrounded by – one day she is a vixen, the next a hawthorn – but when the emotion of ‘love’ appears in her life she can think of nothing else. And this powerful force that enters her life is soon her downfall as her beloved William betrays her in the worst way, and all she can think of is revenge.

I loved how the story switches from traditional fairytale with its’ beauty and wonder, and then soon draws into the darker side of fairytales and human emotions and how far she is willing to go to free herself of her strong feelings to William and how this impacts the villagers she once kept away from

Such a magical read from the way she transforms into a variety of wildlife and the simplicity of life she leads, to the perspective of first loves and how it consumes you and can make you lose your identity, to the desperation of finding out love is not all it seems. It really takes the reader on a twisted journey and I can’t wait to read it all over again!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an advanced readers copy in return for a fair and honest review.