SALLY FLINT
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Taking a break from Head of Libraries Sally is passionate about reading and education. Sally blogs about books, education and life as a fifty something mum, wife and Porsche lover.
SALLY FLINT
1y ago
Fictionalising real life is turning actual events from the past into a fictional story. While these stories often use elements of real-life events, aspects are changed to create a unique story. Both video games and books do this through their respective mediums, and it's a fascinating topic as it allows for creating some truly iconic stories.
Exploring Similar Themes and Ideas in Games and Books
Whilst they are vastly different mediums, at the end of the day, both video games and books are conduits for telling stories. Therefore, seeing them both explore similar themes in their content is no ..read more
SALLY FLINT
1y ago
Book Review of Liane Moriarty's Apples Never Fall
In Apples Never Fall, Liane Moriarty shows great insight into family dynamics.
Moriarty's latest release, Apples Never Fall, is a family drama in which various plot twists slowly but surely unfold. The story centers around the Delaney family, a seemingly perfect family living in Sydney. Joy and Stan, the parents, run a successful tennis school and are admired by many in the community. However, when Joy goes missing and a mysterious stranger, Savannah, enters the picture, their family dynamic is turned upside down. The Delaney children, Amy, L ..read more
SALLY FLINT
1y ago
Book Review of Neil Shusterman's Scythe and Thunderhead
The Thunderhead has never been more relevant than it is right now. I'd love to know what Neil Shusterman thinks about the developments in AI.
Neal Shusterman's Scythe and Thunderhead are two must-read novels for fans of dystopian fiction. Set in a world where death has been conquered and society is ruled by a group of "Scythes" who are responsible for keeping the population under control, these books follow the story of two young apprentices as they navigate the complex and dangerous world of the Scythedom. The Scythes are the ..read more
SALLY FLINT
1y ago
The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley is a claustrophobic thrilling page-turner.
Book Review of The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley
The Paris Apartment is a well-named psychological thriller - the focus of the action is almost entirely within a single apartment inhabited by the dysfunctional Meunier family. The reader is introduced to them when Jess turns up to meet her brother Ben, only to find that he has gone missing.
The story is part who-dunnit and part why-did-they-dunnit with the various twists and turns of plot, that you'd expect of a thriller. The reader is invited into a world of ..read more
SALLY FLINT
1y ago
Book Review of The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri
Christy Lefteri has spent her career learning about the situation of refugees and migrants.
Christy Lefteri's The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a powerful account of the lives of a young couple who lived a simple, but comfortable life in Aleppo, Syria, surrounded by friends and family. Afra was an artist who painted in the mornings, while Nuri went to work, as a beekeeper, with his cousin Mustafa in the mountains.
We quickly learn of the traumas both families undergo in war-torn Syria and after the deaths of the sons of Nuri and Musta ..read more
SALLY FLINT
1y ago
Book Review on Bram Stoker's Dracula
Have you ever come across a more suspenseful opening than Johnathan Harker's journey to Transylvania?!
Dracula begins with Jonathan Harker, a young English lawyer, recounting his journey to Transylvania on a work assignment. En route, frequent travellers, hoteliers and peasants warn him from going but he pays no heed. Jonathan is relieved to find that upon arrival Dracula is both well-educated and hospitable, but he soon learns that things are not as they seem and he discovers he has become a prisoner in the castle.
Harker realises that the co ..read more
SALLY FLINT
1y ago
Book Review on Matthew Perry's Friends, Lovers, and the Terrible Big Thing
The title of Matthew Perry's autobiography, is a little deceving as the focus on his friends and the show Friends doesn't dominate - rather, it takes second stage to Perry's honest and frank sharing of his addiction to drugs and alcohol. Perry leaves no stone unturned and doesn't shirk away from the truth, when he describes he really has no right to be alive.
Numerous stints in rehab centers, and life threatening surgery, have failed to cure Perry's addiciton. He claims the only reason he doesn't drink and ..read more
SALLY FLINT
2y ago
Book Review on JoJo Moyes' The Giver of Stars
What a dreamy environment for a librarian to work in! I would love to be the recipient and Giver of Stars!
Set in the Appalachian Mountains, Alice Wright leaves behind the humdrum of small town life in England by marrying handsome Bennet Van Cleve and moving to Baileyville, Kentucky. Life is quick to disappoint, and Alice seems as trapped as she'd ever been.
Bennett seems content to share their honeymoon cabin, with his ever-present vile father, and once at home becomes distant and aloof, unable or unchoosing of intimacy. The 'special book ..read more
SALLY FLINT
2y ago
Book Review on Martin Amis' London Fields
Martin Amis' book, London Fields, set in the 1990s and written in the 1980s is a tour de force. Set in Amis' home town London, it traverses class, wealth, status and profession, as the femme fatale Nicola Six, manipulates the men in the story.
Something of a soothsayer, Nicola has predicted her death will find her, upon her turning thirty.
The narrator tells us this at the outset of the novel and describes how the story is about a murderee; this murderee is Nicola. The three men with whom Nicola flirts and engages in affairs are the likely suspects ..read more
SALLY FLINT
2y ago
Lisa Jewell's The Family Upstairs is a great read with more twists and turns than a remote country lane.
I hadn't come across Lisa Jewell’s fiction until I read Then She Was Gone, for which I had a grudging admiration. Psychological thrillers are a genre about which I know little; they've never been my thing. That is, until now. The Family Upstairs is an engrossing page turner that gripped me from beginning to end.
The Family Upstairs tells the story of the Lamb family. Mr. Lamb, a coarse and brutish figure, and his socialite German wife seem to have it all. Ensconced in their Chelsea ..read more