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Every time I return to Middle Earth, it's like visiting an old friend. The familiar faces, the smells of pipe smoke and trees, the quiet hum of the river – it all washes over me with a sense of peace and belonging. Tolkien's world-building is so immersive that I can almost feel the road going ever on beneath my feet and the cool breeze on my face.

The setting is truly a masterpiece, but it's not just that which draws me back. It's the characters. Frodo, with his quiet courage and unwavering determination; Gandalf, Sam all all the fellowship – these are people I've grown to love. Their journeys, their triumphs, and their struggles feel deeply personal.

Then there's the story itself. With each reread, I discover new nuances, hidden meanings, and deeper connections between the characters and the themes. I mentioned the sense of peace in my first paragraph. Of course that is how the story starts - it gets much darker, but that sense of peace is carried in the hearts of the characters as a sense of what is important, it is the reason they struggle against the darkness. This book reminds us what is important in life, in so many ways.

The Fellowship of the Ring is more than just a book; it's a world, a journey, and a friend. It's a place I can always return to and find solace, adventure, and a sense of wonder.

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This is a darn good detective story but also seriously gets you thinking (it’s also a totally different thing to the TV series once you get into it).

Minor – Chapter 1 style - spoilers ahead

The basic plot revolves around two seemingly normal cities existing in the same space somewhere in Europe. One city, Besźel, really reminds me of Bratislava when I first moved there. Lots of beautiful old architecture showing past wealth, but currently crumbling away from neglect. The other city, Ul Qoma is surging ahead economically and is full of glass and steel new construction.

The story follows Inspector Tyador Borlú, of the Besźel Extreme Crime Squad (who strikes me as if Inspector Frost grew up in Bratislava) who stumbles upon a crime that forces him to confront this very complex situation.

This is very much our world with Google and Microsoft Word and without any magic or fantastical elements. Everything is as it is today – if Besźel and Ul Qoma existed somewhere in Europe.

The two cities are physically intermingled. One building might be “in” Besźel the next might be “in” Ul Qoma. This isn’t magic, it’s just that the inhabitants of each city are trained to actively ignore the other, even though the physical evidence of both cities is present. From birth they are trained to see their city and to “unsee the Other”.

Making sure that the system is enforced is Breach. Breach is referred to as “a power” that is “invoked”. The agents of Breach seem to be human, however they seemingly materialise whenever someone “commits an act of breach” by interacting or visibly noticing the other city. These agents are hard to look at and usually simply make the one who committed breach simply disappear. No one understands or knows anything about Breach except that they are there in the same way as gravity. You may not understand it, but it works and there’s no point in arguing with it. If you don’t treat it with respect, it will have you.

If you want a good old fashioned detective story but also want to really explore a setting with a ton of mysteries – this is an excellent read.

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Young-adult fantasy told in first person through the eyes of El, a 3rd year (~16 years old) female student in the ‘Scholomance’, the magic school of the series title. We as reader are thrown directly into her life at the school, which is completely cut off from the outside world of the adult wizards (there are no teachers here). In this first book of the series, we are then taken a-pace through a series of the school’s non-stop horrors as we learn most of the students die in increasingly gruesome ways; there’s magical monsters at every turn, work assignments that turn deadly, contaminated food, bullies and cliques, and a good dose of adolescent angst. In fact, it’s all quite a good deal of macabre fun, and told with much delightful malice. One of the main themes is how much easier life is if you come from a position of privilege, in this case meaning that you enter the school from a specific ‘enclave’, and thus have a ready-made support network. Without this, students such as El need to find or join such a network by brilliance, drudgery or even offering themselves as cannon fodder. El, however, is so cantankerous, she pushes everyone away and can’t get into the position to show that she is brilliant, namely she has very powerful spells. Although that makes her interesting, it is definitely frustrating that we have an awful lot of text dedicated to her self pity, stubborn pride and even her trying to talk herself out of both. As a counterpoint, we thankfully have the ‘enclaver’ Orion, also acting as romantic interest, who has a gift that means he is courted by all rather than being seen as a person, showing that privilege isn’t necessarily all wonderful either (or at least in this school). The book would be better if we directly switched to other points of view to contrast with El’s everlasting sardonic inner monologue, but I can see that would be complicated for the intended audience. The other negative is that the world is just a too far out there to be believable - as bemoaned by El, it is really is just far too non-stop - but suspend all that because I just need to know how are characters are going to survive graduation, and that’s the next book… #BookReview