If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting! Yesterday I asked the readers of the RIASS Facebook page whether they make themselves finish reading a book that’s really not to their tastes, or whether they put such a book down. And if the latter, at what...

I used to run a blog called Misapostrophication. In large part it was a catalogue of the terrible ways in which apostrophes were misused, mostly by cafe owners who laboured under some sort of egalitarian punctuation ideal where every word had a right to an apostrophe. Now, having trudged through Rebecca Harrington’s Penelope I’m of a mind to...

With its Katniss-lookalike cover illustration, stark black and red cover scheme, and Hunger Games-reminiscent font, you could be forgiven for mistaking Lisa M Stasse’s The Forsaken for fan fiction. But never fear, if you didn’t make the connection, the ”if you love The Hunger Games read this!“ blurb on the back will drive home the...

Call me a glutton for punishment, or perhaps just a glutton for an Ancient Egypt setting. Even my recent experience involving Paul Doherty’s disappointing The Mask of Ra couldn’t put me off a bit of free time travel. (And given that it’s the end of the year, and flights are ultra expensive, vicarious travel, particularly when it comes to...

(Contains spoilers, but really, in doing so I’m saving you from having to read this book. Your regular kind and measured reviews will return tomorrow. ) ; I’ve learned to become very wary of pull quotes over the past few years: it is a risky endeavour indeed to trust a pithy little phrase massaged into carefully positive shape through...

Ricky Darlin is relieved when he wakes from a nightmare in which he’s trapped on an island. Only, upon waking he’s confronted with something worse: a version of Peter Pan who speaks in a horribly rendered Australian accent that makes him sound as though he’s been taking voice coaching lessons from Crocodile Dundee and a Cockney cab...