Review: The Unclaimed by Pamela Prickett & Stefan Timmermans

According to The Unclaimed - Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels by Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans, up to 150,000 Americans die and are unclaimed each year. Being unclaimed means the remains of the deceased were not claimed by family or friends, and were buried, cremated or laid to rest by local government despite attempts made to contact loved ones.

Prickett is an Associate Professor of Sociology and former broadcast journalist and Timmermans is a Professor of Sociology at UCLA, and in this book they attempt to make us care about these numbers by providing detailed accounts of four people who died and were unclaimed. The upbringing, family situation and lifestyle in the lead up to these four deaths were discussed in such detail that I soon began to lose interest. Perhaps that's the point.

Loneliness, isolation and estrangement were leading factors but also unsurprisingly was the amount of red tape surrounding death notifications, government assistance and the rules around responsibility for the dead. Some of the unclaimed had family members who refused to be involved or claim their loved one's remains due to the enforced requirement to engage a funeral home. In other cases, friends or acquaintances who tried to claim remains were turned away in favour of family members who couldn't be traced.

Far more interesting - and less frustrating - were the sections featuring the investigators, notification officers and crematorium workers involved in taking care of the unclaimed dead. It was inspiring to read about the charities and individuals who began looking after unclaimed veterans or the remains of unclaimed babies. Their empathy seemed to have no bounds and they're an inspiration to us all, but frankly it shouldn't have to come down to the generosity and goodwill of strangers.

Listening to The Unclaimed audiobook narrated by Nan McNamara, I was prepared to experience feelings of despair, however the 'hope' mentioned in the subtitle allowed me to be optimistic for the future. Surely the book would report or predict a turnaround in the numbers of people being unclaimed after death or a change in legislation or a comprehensive overhaul of government departments to streamline the process. Sadly I didn't finish the book with anything like hope for the future, and was left instead with a renewed disappointment in humanity.

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Praise Featured in The End and Everything Before It by Finegan Kruckemeyer

I'm so excited to share the news that an excerpt from my review of The End and Everything Before It by Finegan Kruckemeyer has been published in the praise section of the book!

This debut novel has been so successful it's now onto its second reprinting by Text Publishing and to see the quote from yours truly featured in the praise section was a real thrill.

For those who can't zoom in, the quote reads:

"Sublime...I found myself wanting to read it again before I'd even finished...An uplifting allegory rich in meaning...Unforgettable." Carpe Librum

You might remember The End and Everything Before It made My Top 5 Books of 2024 list, but seeing Carpe Librum in the praise section of another book was definitely a bookish highlight of 2024!

What will 2025 bring? Stick with me and we'll find out!

Carpe Librum!

Review: The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory

It's been years since I read an ebook and The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory has been on my Kindle App since 2016. This year I'm planning to read some bigger books from my backlist and coming in at 530 pages and waiting nine years, it was definitely time to read The Boleyn Inheritance.

Set in England during the reign of King Henry VIII, we're given first person narratives from Jane Boleyn (Lady Rochford, wife of George Boleyn and sister-in-law to Anne Boleyn), Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard.

Beginning in 1539, we meet Anne when she's the Duchess of Cleves. She's keen to escape her domineering brother and make the biggest match possible to become Queen of England. I really enjoyed this different perspective on Anne's life, her mindset and the way in which she navigated the challenges of coming to a land without knowing the language. Navigating the tricky court of Henry VIII was a real culture shock:

"Clearly, I will never be alone again for another moment in all my life." Page 59 Anne, Calais, December 1539

Anne's first meeting with the King was a disaster - as we know - but I enjoyed Gregory's interpretation of the events which have since become legendary.

Meanwhile, Jane Boleyn has been away from court following the execution of her husband and sister-in-law for treason in 1536. Jane is ambitious and a social climber, as becomes clear early on in the book:

"Once again I shall be at court. Once again I shall be the closest friend of the queen, a constant companion in her chamber. I shall see everything, know everything. I shall be at the very centre of life again, I shall be the new Queen Anne's lady in waiting, serving her as loyally and well as I have served the other three of King Henry's queens. If he can rise up and marry again without fear of ghosts, then so can I." Page 15, Jane Boleyn, Blickling Hall, Norfolk November 1539

Jane struggles with her role in the demise of her husband and sister-in-law and again the author offers a refreshing perspective on her motives. Jane strives to be Anne's confidant, all the while recognising the precarious nature of her union with the King:

"She will have to learn to obey him. Not in the grand things, any woman can put on a bit of a show. But in the thousand petty compromises that come to a wife every day. The thousand times a day when one has to bite the lip and bow the head and not argue in public, nor in private, nor even in the quiet recesses of one's own mind. If your husband is a king, this is even more important. If your husband is King Henry, it is a life or death decision." Page 124 Jane Boleyn, Greenwich Palace, 6 January 1540

Serving Anne of Cleves in court is Katherine Howard who is portrayed as a young, foolish, sexually active and extremely flirtatious young lady. Anne had been the subject of unkind gossip from the court when young Kitty Howard came to her defence:

"I was so grateful to her for that. She is a foolish, frivolous little thing but she has the cleverness of a stupid girl, since, like any stupid girl, she only thinks about one thing, and so she has become very expert in that." Page 189 Anne, Hampton Court, March 1540

Despite the age gap, Katherine is encouraged to flirt with King Henry and is naive about what might follow. Seeking the King's favour and her time in the limelight, she convinces herself:

"The other wives did as they had to do, their lives ended as God and the king willed; it is really nothing to me. Even my cousin Anne Boleyn shall be nothing to me. I shall not think of her, nor of our uncle pushing her on to the throne and then pushing her on to the scaffold." Page 257 Katherine, Norfolk House, Lambeth, June 1540

Meanwhile, King Henry takes his time setting aside Anne of Cleves and making her his sister in order to annul their loveless marriage. At the age of twenty-five, Anne is frustrated that she's done nothing wrong, yet by agreeing to the terms and saving her neck, the cost of staying alive is great:

"I will have to face a single life, without lover, or husband, or companion. I will have to face a lonely life, without family. I will never have a child of my own, I will never have a son to come after me, I will never have my own daughter to love. I will have to be a nun without a convent, a widow with no memories, a wife of six months and a virgin. I will have to face life in exile. I will never see Cleves again. I will never see my mother again." Page 288 Anne, Richmond Palace, 12 July 1540

Despite knowing the history and seeing it portrayed in multiple documentaries, drama series, movies and historical fiction novels over the years, Philippa Gregory managed to make me care for all three characters. The novel takes us right up to the point of Katherine's and Jane's deaths at the Tower of London in February 1542, with a jump in time of five years to 1547 and the death of King Henry, setting Anne free from his reach at last.

This book is part of 'The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels' series, previously known as the 'Cousins War' and 'Tudor Court' series and each of the books can be read as a stand alone.

Here are all the books in the series in order, with reviews linked:

The Lady of the Rivers (Book 1) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The White Queen (Book 2) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Red Queen (Book 3) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Kingmaker's Daughter (Book 4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The White Princess (Book 5) on my TBR
The Constant Princess (Book 6)
The King's Curse (Book 7)
Three Sisters, Three Queens (Book 8) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Other Boleyn Girl (Book 9)
The Boleyn Inheritance (Book 10)
The Taming of the Queen (Book 11) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Queen's Fool (Book 12)
The Virgin's Lover (Book 13)
The Last Tudor (Book 14) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Other Queen (Book 15) ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Boleyn Inheritance is Book 10 and I can highly recommend it. The White Princess is next on my radar for the series and I've had a physical copy on my shelves since 2014. Have you read any of these?

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Review: An Immense World by Ed Yong

In An Immense World - How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, science writer Ed Yong takes the reader through a variety of species and their notable senses. These senses include: smell, taste, light, colour, pain, heat, contact, vibrations, sound, echoes and electric and magnetic fields.

Listening to the audiobook narrated by the author, interesting quirks of nature caught my attention along the way. One of those was the fact that the ears of owls are uniquely asymmetric. The left ear of an owl is higher than their right ear, enabling the bird to use the difference in timing and loudness to distinguish sounds in the vertical and horizontal.

When relating just how sensitive the sense of smell is in dogs, the author tells us:

"In past experiments they have been able to tell identical twins apart by smell. They can detect a single fingerprint that had been dabbed onto a microscope slide then left on a rooftop and exposed to the elements for a week. They could work out which direction a person had walked in after smelling just five footsteps. They have been trained to detect bombs, drugs, landmines, missing people, bodies, smuggled cash, truffles, invasive weeds, agricultural diseases, low blood sugar, bedbugs, oil pipeline leaks and tumours." Chapter 1 Leaking Sacks of Chemicals: Smells and Tastes

Insects can taste with their body parts and some have taste receptors on their wings enabling them to identify traces of food as they fly around.

In a chapter about bats and their ability to hunt prey with echo location, the author meets with a bunch of Lepidopterists at their lab. Entering the flight room of the bats, Yong can see a cloud of snow like substance hanging in the air that has come off the moths brought in for the bats to catch. If you've ever caught a moth or butterfly - or even cleaned up a dead one - you'll have noticed the powder or dust that comes off them after handling.

I was surprised to learn this substance is actually made up of tiny scales that serve an important function for moths and butterflies and apparently it's a common occupational hazard for Lepidopterists to become allergic to the scales due to overexposure.

"When not inflaming the airways of scientists, the scales protect the bodies of moths by absorbing the sound of a bats calls and muffling the resulting echoes. This acoustic armour is just one of several anti-bat defences." Chapter 9 A Silent World Shouts Back: Echoes

Very interesting. An Immense World - How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong was a detailed and thorough look at the senses of multiple species in depth and I'll admit my attention started to wander. The frequent references to a creature's umwelt* during the audiobook's 14+ hours of listening time become repetitive and I wished the author had used an alternate phrase from time to time.

An Immense World is recommended for those interested in biology, science, chemistry, physics, nature and the environment.

* I'd never heard of the world 'umwelt' and had to look it up, but it means 'the world as it is experienced by a particular organism.'

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

2025 Reading Challenge Sign Ups

It's a new year and a fresh start for annual reading challenges. I'm reducing my goal to 65 books this year so I can tackle some chunky and challenging books that have been on my TBR for ages. I'm also signing up for the following two reading challenges in 2025.

Non Fiction Reader Challenge 2025

Hosted by fellow Aussie book blogger Shelleyrae at Book'd Out, I'm signing up to complete the Nonfiction Nibbler level of the challenge. For this, I'll need to read and review 6 books from any 6 of the categories listed below.

1. History
2. Memoir/Biography
3. True Crime
4. Science
5. Health
6. Food
7. Travel
8. Garden
9. Myth, Legend and Folklore
10. Islands
11. How-To
12. Published in 2025

Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2025

Hosted by Marg at The Intrepid Reader, I'm signing up to complete the Medieval Reader level this year and will need to read and review 15 historical fiction books in order to successfully complete the challenge. I'm currently reading The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory so that'll be my first book for the challenge.

Are you participating in any reading challenges this year? Do you have any reading goals for 2025? I'd love to know and you can track my progress throughout the year over on the Challenges 2025 page.

Review: Dark Serpent by Paul Doherty

Dark Serpent by Paul Doherty is the 18th book in the historical mystery series featuring Sir Hugh Corbett, The Keeper of the Secret Seal. It's 1311 and Hugh Corbett is hired by King Edward II and his favourite Piers Gaveston to investigate the murder of Corbett's friend, Ralph Grandison. Ralph - who suffered from leprosy - was killed with a poisoned dagger that formed part of the Crown Jewels stolen years earlier and it appears an assassin is killing members of the now dissolved Knights Templar.

Then there's the matter of a rogue vessel named The Black Hogge preying on English merchant vessels that could be funded by a French duke or even the King of France himself. 

Series favourites Ranulf-atte-Newgate, Senior Clerk in the Chancery of the Green Wax and Chanson, Clerk of the Stables, assist Corbett in his investigations as they gather clues and eliminate suspects.

Here again Doherty confidently brings the medieval streets of London to life, as demonstrated when describing the scene of an execution. Two execution carts have arrived and the crowd is surging:

"Executioners, faces hidden behind devil masks, managed the high-sided carts. The four prisoners in each were made to stand so the accompanying mob could hurl both abuse and refuse at them. Shouts and curses dinned the air, followed by a hail of filth and slops. Bagpipes wailed. Drum beats echoed. Trumpets and hunting horns brayed their shrill, discordant blasts. Relatives of the condemned clung to the sides of the carts, shouting to their menfolk. Warlocks and wizards in dirty robes and funnel-shaped hats pushed rags through the slats of the carts to catch some of the prisoner's bloodied sweat, which they could later use in their midnight ceremonies. Quacks, conjurors and cunning men also tried to keep close; the leavings of men condemned to hang were said to contain certain healing properties." Page 53

This medieval mystery had me guessing the entire time and I could definitely relate to Ranulf's frustration as Corbett kept his observations to himself until the final satisfying reveal.

This is the longest series I've ever read and for that reason alone I feel compelled to continue. What's the longest series you've read? If you like the sound of a series, do you start with the latest release or go back to the beginning and read the first book? Often a series will get better over time as the author's writing ability improves, or sometimes the initial magic can be lost and instead, new instalments feel formulaic and stale.

The formula in this series remains the same, yet I still enjoy reading the latest instalment every now and again. However I'm now terribly behind in the series, with Devil's Wolf (Book 19), Death's Dark Valley (Book 20), Hymn to Murder (Book 21), Mother Midnight (Book 22), Realm of Darkness (Book 23 and Banners of Hell (Book 24) published a few months ago still to read.

I guess I'd better get a move on!

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

My Top 5 Books of 2024

In 2024 I met my reading goal of 75 books with 15 books earning a 5 star rating. This was down from a total of 19 books in 2023 that earned 5 stars.

Covering a range of genres, three of the books featured in this Top 5 list were reviewed for a publisher, one was from my own backlist and another was borrowed from the library.

Turns out winter was my best reading season of the year with three of my selections falling within the month of July.

Here are my Top 5 Books of 2024 in the order I read them:

1. The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown

This is a fantasy novel with time travel featuring a bookseller in New York by the name of Cassie. When a regular customer leaves her a book with an inscription inside, Cassie discovers it's a one of a kind with the ability to turn any door into a door to anywhere. It transpires that there are more books with differing powers actively being sought by eccentric collectors, nefarious actors and scary people who travel the world hunting the books for their own dark purposes.

The writing is rich and evocative and I loved learning about the other special books, the powers they held and the motives of those seeking them. The Book of Doors is an impressive debut with a stunning cover design.

2. The Summer I Robbed a Bank by David O'Doherty

David O'Doherty is an Irish comedian and I listened to this middle grade novel for kids on audiobook so I could enjoy his distinctive accent and endearing storytelling style. 12 year old Rex is sent to stay with his Uncle Derm on remote Achill Island for the school holidays and was expecting to have a boring time, what with all of the sheep, but things didn't quite go to plan.

The author's sense of humour and imagination worked exceptionally well with his observations of people and relationships in a very appealing way, making The Summer I Robbed a Bank a funny, feel good read.

3. A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas Westerbeke

It's 1885 in Paris and Aubry Tourvel is a precocious young girl of just nine years of age when she falls inexplicably ill. Suffering excruciating pain and bleeding from the nose and mouth, the only thing that soothes her seems to be movement. Forced to travel to keep her illness at bay from that point on, days and weeks pass but the reader experiences her travels in flashbacks when sharing her encounters with people she meets along the way.

A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas Westerbeke could be categorised multiple ways, it's a travel story, historical fiction, action adventure, science fiction and urban fantasy. It contains a mystery puzzle ball and a secret library, I mean what more could you want?

4. The End and Everything Before It by Finegan Kruckemeyer

An intergenerational saga that is far from linear, each generation of characters within The End and Everything Before It offers a parable within their tale, yet this happens without clear dates to place characters in chronological order.

In doing so, Kruckemeyer has produced a highly original, loosely structured dreamlike group of stories connected by geographical proximity through time and I loved this literary fable about love, loss, legacy, purpose and community.

It's an uplifting allegory rich in meaning that makes you appreciate the importance of love and remember we're here for a short time and need to make it count. The ending was sublime and I learned later in the year that an excerpt of my review has been published in the praise section of the book's second printing!

5. 12 Rules For Life - An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson

It's likely 12 Rules for Life - An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson is now one of my favourite self help books of all time. Incorporating psychology; psychoanalysis; neuroscience; philosophy; ancient and modern literature; history; mythology; religious texts; poetry; current affairs; cases from his work as a clinical psychologist and stories of his life growing up, it's a difficult book to define.

Listening on audiobook to his distinctly Canadian voice, the author's overall message is to encourage and inspire all of mankind to strive and improve themselves and continue to evolve. While plenty of people in the world don't want to do that, or believe they don't need to do that, I don't know anyone who wouldn't benefit from doing precisely that. I'm also planning to read Beyond Order - 12 More Rules For Life this year.
________________________________________________________________________________

Being published in the praise section of The End and Everything Before It by Finegan Kruckemeyer was an absolute highlight for 2024!

That said, what I love about this year's list is that every book was by a new-to-me author. I've been creating these annual top 5 book lists since 2014 and this is the first time that's ever happened.

Have you read any of the books on the list?

Carpe Librum!

Review: Panic by Catherine Jinks

* Copy courtesy of Text Publishing *

Panic by Catherine Jinks is an Australian psychological thriller featuring a character by the name of Bronte who is escaping a serious case of cyber bullying after a drunken post went viral. Desperate for a job, Bronte accepts a live-in position offering room and board to look after dementia sufferer Nell in a large rural property near Bathurst in NSW. An exclusive spiritual retreat business is being run at the property by Nell's daughter Veda and several employees who - unbeknownst to Bronte when she applied for the position - also happen to be sovereign citizens.

Sovereign citizens take issue with authority and don't accept the rule of law or respect the government. When Bronte suspects her boss Veda is a sovereign citizen who refuses to pay tax or register her car, she dismisses her beliefs as harmless conspiracy theories. Living in a caravan removed from the house, Bronte begins caring for Nell but it isn't long before things start to go wrong.

I've never read a book set in the world of sovereign citizens or with a sovereign citizen (SovCit) as a character so this was an absolute first for me. I readily admit I have little interest in - or tolerance for - the movement, however this certainly didn't impact my engagement with Bronte's experience and the tension that quickly began to mount.

There's also a mystery in Panic to be unravelled and some tense situations to navigate which made for an action packed and exciting read. I also enjoyed the creative decision the author made to take the story beyond its natural conclusion to give us a look at what happened after the climax of the main events. And boy what a climax!

I enjoyed The Attack by Catherine Jinks back in 2022, but Panic had way more action and suspense and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Panic by Catherine Jinks is published today and I can highly recommend it!

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★