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Stephen Hayes Locked account

hayesstw@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 month, 2 weeks ago

South African author of adventure/fantasy books, mainly for children; has also written non-fiction relating to Christian theology and missiology.

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Emma Donoghue: Room (Paperback, 2010, Picador)

Room (London: Picador; Toronto: HarperCollins Canada; New York: Little Brown, 2010), Emma Donoghue's Man-Booker-shortlisted seventh …

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The second book I've read this month with the same theme, people being kidnapped and locked away in rooms where they are kept as prisoners. In this case, the woman gives birth to a child in the room, and the story begins on his fifth birthday, and is told through the child's eyes.

The child, Jack, knows no other world than Room. He gets some impressions of the world outside from books and TV, but their captor is not generous, and the mother tells him the world they see on TV or read about in books is not real, because he does not want him to be disappointed by knowing he is a prisoner, and that there is a world out there he cannot reach. She employs their time together by teaching Jack to read and write, so he has some knowledge and skills that most children his age do …

George MacDonald: Lilith (1971, Ballantine, Distributed by Pan)

Lilith, written by the father of fantasy literature, George MacDonald, was first published in 1895. …

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I've tried three times to read this book. The first was when I bought it in Pretoria 50 years ago. I got about 2/3 of the way through it and gave up. A later attempt didn't get me even that far. This time I forced myself to finish it. I didn't anjoy it much, and by the time I reached the end, Lilith's nature and fate remained unclear to me. Perhaps I should read it again.

Hans Koppel: Shes Never Coming Back (2012, Sphere)

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A woman is kidnapped and kept prisoner in a house just across the street from her home, where she can watch her husband and daughter living without her.

I was going to give it four stars, as the first 300 pages seemed fairly good, but the last 100 pages read like a rough plot outline hastily cobbled together to meet a deadline so in the end I gave it three.

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A historical novel for children, [b:The Dragonfly Pool|2544359|The Dragonfly Pool|Eva Ibbotson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1319453762l/2544359.SY75.jpg|2965195] is set at the beginning of the Second World War. Tally Hamilton is the daughter of a doctor in a poor area of London, and war seemed increasingly likely she is given a scholarship to a boarding school in Devon, where her family think she will be safer from the expected air raids.

Tally goes reluctantly, especially when her snobby cousins tell her what their posh boarding school is like, but she discovers that it is quite different. It's a kind of progressive school where the children have a lot of freedom, and tally really enjoys it, and makes some good friends. She persuades the school to enter a folk-dancing competition in an obscure East European country threatened with a Nazi takeover, and Tally and her friends find themselves in a position to attempt to foil a …

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Police procedural set in Aberdeen.

Detective Sergeant Logan MacRae use put under Detective Inspector Roberta Steel, who seems to take the credit for everything in the Aberdeen police, and insists that he work on his days off. Their main task is investigating murders of prostitutes, which makes them believe there is a serial killer.

It's so much a police procedural that one has the feeling that the real villains are rival police officers, and the main point of catching criminals is to score point over them.

N. J. Dawood: Tales from the Thousand and one nights. (1973, Penguin Books)

A selection of the tales told by Shahrazad in an attempt to save her life, …

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This is the kind of book one hears about long before one actually reads it. I saw it in the library and thought such a book of short stories would be nice to read before going to bed.

I'd read bowdlerised versions of some of them as a child, such as the story of Aladdin and the magic lamp, which has found its way into children's anthologies of short stories, as have some of the others, such as those concerning Sindbad the Sailor; actually he wasn't a sailor, he was a businessman who chartered ships to carry his merchandise, but the ships invariably got wrecked, casting him up on a strange shore, where after some hardships he usually acquired more merchandise, and restored to prosperity, returned home.

Most of the stories have the same or similar tropes, which can be summarised by the song from Gilbert & Sullivan's comic opera …

reviewed Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King (Bill Hodges Trilogy -- bk. 1)

Stephen King: Mr. Mercedes (2014, Hodder & Stoughton)

In a mega-stakes, high-suspense race against time, three of the most unlikely and winning heroes …

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Bill Hodges is a retired detective, bored with his retirement, facing the question "why kill time when you can kill yourself" when a letter drops into his mail box, claiming to me from the perpetrator of one of his biggest unsolved cases, a mass murder in which a stolen car was driven into a queue of job seekers.

Bill knows he should take the letter to his old colleagues in the police, but the letter invites him to an internet chat site, where the killer taunts him, and he turns private detective, seriously seeking to catch the killer before he kills again. And the closer he gets, they more it becomes clear that only he, and his associates, a young black student and a middle-aged woman with mental health problems, will be in a position to stop the killer before he kills again.

It's not a whodunit, since the reader …

R. J. Palacio: Pony (2023, Penguin Books, Limited, PENGUIN)

Twelve-year-old Silas is awoken in the dead of night by three menacing horsemen who take …

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Silas Bird, a twelve-year-old boy, lives with his father, a pioneer photographer, in the Mid-West of the USA. His mother died when he was born. His father is kidnapped by a gang of counterfeiters who believe that his photographic skills will help them. He tells Silas he will be back soon, and that he should stay and wait for him at home.

Then a horse belonging to the kidnappers returns to Silas, who takes this as a sign that he should follow his father and try to rescue him. He calls the horse Pony, and, though he had not ridden a horse before, sets off to follow the kidnappers through the woods, accompanied by his invisible friend Mittenwool, a ghost that only he can see.

The story is set in the 1860s, and in that sense is a historical novel, in that the historical background shapes the story. It is …

One mistake can cost you everything...When you catch a twisted killer there should be a …

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A police procedural set in North-Eastern Scotland.

Sergeant Logan McRae and his team have to deal with a great variety of crimes, major and minor, and also have to deal with overlapping investigations by other branches of the police. As the title implies, this book deals mainly with missing and dead persons.

One man is arrested for torturing another, and the children of the torture victim are missing. In another case, the body of a young girl is found, and she appears to have been murdered, but no child of that description has been reported missing. An investigation into the theft of ATMs leads to a drug-dealing suspect, and investigations are sometimes hampered by jurisdictional disputes between different police teams, so the Sergeant McRae finds that he sometimes commended and reprimanded for the same incident.

There are some unexpected plot twists which lead to Sergeant McRae and those he loves …

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Odd Thomas can see dead people. His ability to see dead people has sometimes caused him to get into trouble in the past, which is why he is now a guest at a monastery in the Sierra Nevada of California, hoping to find some peace and tranquillity.

But, because his ability to see dead people allows him to see the ghost of a monk who is thought to have committed suicide, and now occasionally rings the church bells, Odd Thomas also has keys that allow him access to most parts of the monastery and the nearby school for disabled children. Odd Thomas also has the ability to see bodachs, shadowy harbingers of death, whose gathering in the rooms of some of the children in the school suggests that they may be under threat of death. As a snowstorm builds up, and a monk disappears, Odd must try to discern the …

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Doro, an immortal being who has lived for thousands of years, moving from body to body of hosts he kills, has a breeding programme which eventually produces Mary, at telepath who has powers almost equal to his own. She discovers, or creates, the Pattern, which enables her to draw others to herself, and creates a kind of community. But Doro seeks to inhibit its growth.

This belongs to a subgenre of the science fiction I read in my youth, most of which was written in the "psi boom" of the early 1950s. These stories featured people who had "psi-powers", such as telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, precognition and the like. [b:Mind of My Mind|6609765|Out of My Mind (Out of My Mind, #1)|Sharon M. Draper|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347602096l/6609765.SX50.jpg|6803732] deals mainly with people who are telepathic, and thus able to read other people's minds. When young, this ability is latent but those who have it …

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[a:Tom Holland|52292|Tom Holland|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1223405186p2/52292.jpg]'s thesis is that the moral and ethical values of Western Civilisation have been shaped mainly by Christianity, and in this book he tries to follow and explain the process by which this happened. He covers a broad sweep of Western Christianity, sometimes illuminating particular historical events and periods as he does so.

I think it is a book that would be useful for most Christians to read; Western Christians, because it is about them and their history; Orthodox Christians living in the West, or in any society where Western values are influential, to help them to understand the society in which they live. It would also be useful for Orthodox Christians not living in the West, because the West is influential even in places where its values are not dominant. It will be useful to people living in sub-Saharan Africa and much of Asia, especially those colonised …