My Book Recommendations Part 5

I love doing these posts and I'm super excited to share two more of my favourite books with you guys today. I hope I'm not the only one who loves these recommendations, but even if I am, oh well. Take a look and maybe find something new to read!

Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente

This book is one of the best things I have ever read, hands down. I mean, I obviously only share my favourites here with you guys, but this is close to the top of the list. It is beautifully written, dark, gritty, and romantic (in all sorts of twisted ways) while also being a sort of social commentary on Soviet Russia. Valente recently announced that she is coming out with a companion novel for it and I am ecstatic!

Summary: Koschei the Deathless is to Russian folklore what devils or wicked witches are to European culture: a menacing, evil figure; the villain of countless stories which have been passed on through story and text for generations. But Koschei has never before been seen through the eyes of Catherynne Valente, whose modernized and transformed take on the legend brings the action to modern times, spanning many of the great developments of Russian history in the twentieth century.

Deathless, however, is no dry, historical tome: it lights up like fire as the young Marya Morevna transforms from a clever child of the revolution, to Koschei’s beautiful bride, to his eventual undoing. Along the way there are Stalinist house elves, magical quests, secrecy and bureaucracy, and games of lust and power. All told, Deathless is a collision of magical history and actual history, of revolution and mythology, of love and death, which will bring Russian myth back to life in a stunning new incarnation. (via goodreads)

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman never disappoints me. This isn't a very long book, but it's absolutely brilliant. Gaiman's writing is on point, per usual, and the story is captivating and magical and a little scary in all the right ways. If you're a Gaiman fan and you haven;t read this yet, you really should.

Summary: Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what. (via goodreads)

There you go, some more reading material for you all. Both of which I can guarantee you are excellent, as far as I'm concerned at least.

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