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The Beginning Woods by Malcolm McNeill – Review
Synopsis
A MYSTERY NO ONE CAN SOLVE
The Vanishings started without warning. People disappearing into thin air – just piles of clothes left behind. Each day, thousands gone without a trace.
A BABY NO ONE WANTED
Max was abandoned in a bookshop and grows up haunted by memories of his parents. Only he can solve the mystery of the Vanishings.
A SECRET THAT COULD SAVE THE FUTURE
To find the answers, Max must leave this world and enter the Beginning Woods. A realm of magic and terror, life and death.
But can he bear the truth – or will it destroy him?
A STORY THAT WILL TAKE YOU TO ANOTHER WORLD
Greater than your dreams. Darker than your fears. Full of more wonder than you could ever desire. Welcome to the ineffable Beginning Woods…
What I Thought
When I found out about this book it sounded right up my street and I was really intrigued by the premise of vanishing people.
I feel really bad that this review is coming well after the release date but for some reason it seemed to take me a whole month to read this book, and I don’t think that’s entirely the book’s fault. Everytime I picked it up I enjoyed what I was reading – I even took it along to the beach to read a few chapters.
The language in this was so good, and I’m pretty sure there are a few more words in the world after this book, such as ‘psychomotherapractologisteopath’.
The mystery of the opening where people are vanishing and Max is trying to find out what is happening was intriguing, and the Book House setting was particularly appealing.
When the action shifted from the World to The Beginning Woods it threw me off I think, and I also got a little confused about which reality the action was taking place in at times, but I think that’s because I was reading it in bits.
Max’s search for his forever parents and his constant question ‘who am I’ didn’t resolve in quite the way I expected – which isn’t a bad thing.
My favourite relationship in the book was between Max and Martha – the ghost girl he befriends. It reminded me a little of the graphic novel Saga.
The book has been compared to Gormenghast and Labyrinth, neither of which I’ve actually read, though I have seen. I think those are fair comparisons and there is definitely an element of the surreal in The Beginning Woods.
I couldn’t decide whether to give this 3 or 3.5 stars and if you like fantasy that gets you thinking about the meaning of reality then I would recommend it. I think my brain wasn’t in the right headspace for the slightly more challenging read that this was.
I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review.
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A New Blog Header by the Superb @taratjah
I’ve been thinking about customising my blog further for a while now and have been very jealous of other book bloggers’ gorgeous headers. Although I’m fairly creative I have very little artistic talent and knew I wouldn’t be able to do justice to creating a header so I decided to commission someone to do it for me.
There are a lot of brilliant artists in the book community but I was drawn to the work of @taratjah the most. Her work on drawing Rhysand from A Court of Thorn and Roses series, especially toddler Rhysand was the style I was after. Check out all the merch I bought from her Redbubble site (along with the bookmark I purchased from @Behindthe_Pages and the Rhysand custom FunkoPop I made).
I approached Tara through her tumblr page and luckily for me she had some commission slots opening up.
This is what I asked for:
I’m thinking of a cartoony imagining of a little me (I’ll attach a picture of when I was sweet) sat amongst books, reading one with magic things coming out of it and going on around it, magical feather, spells, pens, wands – some sort of subtle nods to Harry Potter and Rhysand in there. Happy to let you go wild. It would need to have my blog name maybe at the bottom which is Books, Occupation…Magic! and maybe the letters Kirstyes floating somewhere in the magic.
Does that sound feasible?
Here was the picture – (no, I don’t know what went wrong either!!)
Tara was brilliant at communicating throughout the process and to be honest I would have been happy if she’d had stopped at the line art stage!!!
As you can see the final image doesn’t have the letters ‘kirstyes’ in it (I trusted Tara’s judgement that it would have looked odd). Instead she added some musical notes to indicate my love of Musicals. When the final image came through it was perfect and I did feel tears welling. With Tara’s permission I will be getting a canvas and maybe some bookmarks printed. I love the Stars and Mountains and Wings nods to Rhysand and the Quill, Wand, Snitch and Timeturner. And little me in my school uniform (or Hufflepuff uniform ;o) reading and writing away. Actually, I simply love it all.
You can see the image active as my header (and avatar and on my facebook pages and Twitter profile) but here it is again in all its glory. As you can probably tell I would highly recommend Tara and her rates, for when she is open to commissions, are clearly indicated on her tumblr account).
kirstyes 