Books Archives – The Writer Muses

The Children of Hurin

Colin Parton — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 06:05:29 +0000

The Children of Hurin - J.R.R. Tolkien

This is the furthest that you can get from Tolkien’s other stories. It is a tale of woe and doom from its outset to its end.

It takes us to dark places that Tolkien has never taken us before. While there are great high points, he never lets you forget that it is a momentary thing.

Happiness or victory will always be followed by sorrow or defeat. The hero is Turin, Hurin’s son.

Turin is a very unlikable character. He is quick to anger and rude, even to his friends. His attitude could well be because of the woe he brings with him wherever he goes.

Despite all these shortcomings, Tolkien manages to get us to like him. This is no mean feat.

We get to see many new stories here that are not told elsewhere. The major battles and plot points are drawn from The Silmarillion, but in this novel the point of view is entirely human.

This is not something we get to see very often in Tolkien’s works. Without looking too deeply into it, the closest I would say we get elsewhere is Aragorn’s perspective in The Lord of the Rings.

And one could hardly call the Dunedain human. Throughout the novel, Turin causes the downfall of three kingdoms, including one he created himself.

He falls in love several times throughout the story, and others fall in love with him. But his actions destroy any possibility of love. His action also causes the end of his line.

The most trajic path that Tolkien talks us on is not for the faint of heart. The final destruction of Turin and his line is because he had never met his sister, as she was just born when he fled Dor-Lomin.

She has her mind wiped by the lord of the dragons. Many years later they are reunited and are married.

We know who they are and it is clear where we are headed. The final scenes of downfall are caused as Turin defeats the dragon in combat and Nienor recovers her memory.

They both take their own lives. It is just tragic after what would normally be a great victory – see Laketown in The Hobbit.

At the end of the day, I thought it was a refreshing look at Middle-earth in this early period from the perspective of humans and not the Eldar.

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The Sandman

Colin Parton — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 08:01:56 +0000

The Sandman - Neil Gaiman

The Wake

The Sandman’s final collection is strange. The named character died at the end of the last volume.

This is the tying up of all the loose ends. It is time for the wake and the funeral and for all the characters to have their last hurrah.

The Will Shakespeare plotline is great, and its end here is no different.

As you will see, when I add the earlier volumes here, I really enjoyed the Litharge story. Especially the secret room and its hidden importance. To see both return here is brilliant.

To see Litharge also fulfil its purpose for the Endless is spot on. Rose, Nuala and Richard return, but all their stories feel flat without Morpheus.

Rob is great as always. But I just felt sad because this is the end.

There is a section where Master Li meets the new Dream in the soft places. The story was fine, but I was not a fan of the illustration. Sad to see Dream go but it had to end somewhere.

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The Boys

Colin Parton — Sun, 17 May 2026 11:20:50 +0000

The Boys - Garth Ennis & Darick Robertson

Issues 1-6

The tone of The Boys is like nothing I’ve ever read. The writing is complex and thoughtful; you take your tentative steps into the world of the superheroes with Hughie as he is hired to become part of Butcher’s team.

The absolute depravity and awfulness of all the superheroes we meet make them very unlikable. That is apart from Butcher’s team, The Boys.

The sex, from both sides, but especially the young superheroes they are spying on, is a bit much. But it is titillating if that is what Ennis is going for; then it works.

I actually didn’t realise that Butcher and The Boys were the good guys until close to the end of Issue 6.

The heart-to-heart that he has with Hughie goes right to the core of superheroes, and it hasn’t been addressed anywhere I have seen before.

Who gives the heroes the right to do what they do? They don’t have any training. Just because they have powers doesn’t mean they should be in control. That’s where The Boys come in. They stop the heroes from running over everyone.

I love the team that Butcher is putting together. Every time we see them, I just want to learn more about them.

They are just so cool and mysterious. I actually think we should have so little backstory and, like Highie, seem to come in halfway through the story.

Butcher actually seems like a great bloke and cares about Hughie. But beyond that and the team, there aren’t heaps here to love.

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The Fortune Of War

Colin Parton — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 05:13:40 +0000

The Fortune of War - Patrick O'Brian

The opening chapter skips over the rest of the voyage to Australia and all events there. We open with Aubrey receiving his new commission, and we are quickly onboard a well-run mail ship back to England.

This novel also felt a bit like a lull in the series, sort of like we are waiting for something to happen.

Quite outside of all of the characters’ control, a fire starts on the mail ship, and it quickly sinks. This is super sad as Stephen loses all of his collections from Desolation Island and from Australia.

The cause of the fire is hinted at as being from smoking below decks by Stephen’s assistant. The use of a power outside their control is poor writing.

The battle against the constitution takes this inability for the characters to be masters of their own fate to another level altogether. Aubrey can see disaster coming under the captain they are rescued by.

He says nothing because the strategy is based on everything he agrees with, and it isn’t his place to question this captain.

Because of this, they are annihilated, taken prisoner and brought back to Boston. This is where the story takes place. Stephen must use all of his wiles to free Aubrey and also get Diana out of the States.

The master manipulation is superb, but even he is almost killed twice. He confounds the French intelligence services. He plays the US intelligence services that think they are playing him.

In the end, Aubrey has to sail them out to the English blockade in a fishing boat. So everyone is involved in their escape.

We see a side of Stephen we have rarely glimpsed before. Once their lives are under threat, he coldly murders the heads of the French intelligence.

We end on a cliffhanger as the boat they were rescued by is the last in the blockade and is waiting for the Chesapeake to come out and meet her.

Stephen is about to marry Diana so that she can become an English citizen again. This feels sad as Stephen doesn’t love her anymore, but then he sees her spirit again as she starts shooting the rats in the hold, and he is keen again. This is a great bit of writing.

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The Girl With The White Flag

Colin Parton — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 05:53:34 +0000

The Girl With The White Flag - Tomiko Higa

This book tells the story of the invasion of Okinawa by the U.S. from the perspective of a young girl. This is the first non-fiction book I’ve read in a while.

The book itself was written long after the events took place by the girl in the photograph. She is drawn to tell the tale when the picture becomes famous.

One thing that I found truly amazing about this was that it really did feel like a child’s account of the war.

This is impressive given that it was written by an adult and so long after the events occurred.

There is very little time spent on the overall picture of the war itself. Just broad strokes so we have some idea where she is in relation to the fighting.

This decision to leave the big picture out is perfect. We get to see only what is directly affecting our protagonist.

It also gives the story a very surreal feeling as she wanders around the battlefield.

There is a huge emphasis on animals throughout her ordeal. All of the animals are important to the narrative and also help to explain how she just didn’t go crazy.

At the end of the book, shortly before she surrenders to the Americans, there is a very strange section.

She finds an old couple in a cave. The man has had his arms and legs amputated, and the woman is blind. She spends significant time in the cave with them.

Even now, I don’t know if they were real. They must have been.

Overall, the story was really well told, and you will find it hard to come across another war story from this perspective.

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The Enchanted Island

Colin Parton — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 06:06:54 +0000

The Enchanted Island - Ian Serraillier

This is a collection of Shakespeare’s plays, retold. In general, I hate the idea of abridged or simplified stories for younger audiences.

If the reader is too young to read it, then they should read something else. There are plenty of great stories for any age group.

This retelling is particularly heinous because so much of what makes Shakespeare great is the language used to tell the tales. Don’t get me wrong, the stories are powerful, but the language is key to their telling.

Puck from A Midsummer-Night’s Dream is one of my favourite characters. You can hear the mischief he gets up to, and it is so much more mischievous because of the language used.

“I am that merry wanderer of the night./ I jest to Oberon, and make him smile/ When I a fat bean-fed horse beguile,/ Neighing in likeness of a filly foal;” (A Midsummer-Night’s Dream 2.1. 43-47).

The lines themselves tell a story that’s humorous. But the choice of language takes it much further than that. “Merry wanderer of the night” and “Filly foal” are so evocative that they go beyond the literal meaning of the words.

At best, we are giving readers an average watered-down version of the original. At worst, we are taking from them what makes the stories brilliant in the first place.

If you’re not up to Shakespeare or he is just not your thing, that’s fine. Read something else.

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Anna Karenin

Colin Parton — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:48:29 +0000

Anna Karenin - Leo Tolstoy

This is the first Tolstoy that I have read. Anna Karenin, or Karenina, both translations are correct, is a truly unique novel.

First, it is very long. The edition that I read came in at 853 pages. The amazing thing that I found is that it didn’t feel long.

It was the first Tolstoy I had read, but not the first Russian translation that I had read. The previous was Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment.

Crime & Punishment is great, but it is very dense. I found it a bit of a slog at times. Anna Karenin is nothing of the sort.

I think that there are a few reasons for this. First, apart from a few exceptions, all the chapters are very short. So you get the story in nice little tidbits.

It is very easy to follow what is going on as we stay with a particular character for a period at a time. When we do move to one of the other characters that we haven’t been with for a while, Tolstoy catches us up.

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised with how easy a read it was.

The language was so easy to follow, apart from the French. I found it such an engaging snapshot of a few years in a few key characters as they woo each other.

The story has some of the best passages that I have ever read on fatherhood and finding faith. Tolstoy is great throughout, but in these passages, he demonstrates that he is a master of his craft.

The descent into madness for Anna is unnerving. It isn’t comforting, but you can understand her actions, even if you do not agree with them.

Having said that, it was such an easy read and enjoyable; it did take me around five months to finish, so perhaps take the advice above with a grain of salt.

I would recommend this to anyone happy to take the time to read it, as it is a beautifully written piece.

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Starship Troopers

Colin Parton — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 06:16:18 +0000

Starship Troopers - Robert A. Heinlein

This is an internal look at how a collective dictatorship remains in power through coercive control.

This story is told through the eyes of Ricco as he is trained to be a mobile infantryman for Earth.

Shortly after he joins war starts against the ‘Bugs’. We follow Ricco’s career as he moves through the ranks.

Do not be mistaken – this is not an action war novel.

The training and conflict are merely the canvas that Heinlein uses to describe the way human society is now controlled by the leaders.

But this is not a political story either. Ricco isn’t involved in politics inside or outside the military.

I would say that the key parts of the novel happen while Ricco is at training camp and then at officers’ training. There is a spattering of flashbacks to a civics-style class that is taught by veterans and is compulsory for every member of this society.

These settings allow Heilein to have his teachers give us/Ricco diatribes about the world and why it has to work in the way it does.

It shows how a society gives itself over to complete control of the ruling class without actually showing us any of that control.

We are simply told that the world is idyllic. There is little crime and little police. Punishments are severe but we only see them dealt out under military court-martials.

Because we are only given the theory of the way this society may run we just have to take Heinlein’s word for it. Fights with alien races bookend these discussions.

We follow the war through the eyes of the trooper so we have no idea what is going on. Just one combat scenario to the next.

The only time we have any idea at all is in the last battle when Ricco is first Lieutenant. Because of his rank, we get more of the picture of the battle and the state of the war.

So this is a war story with very little war. It’s a commentary on the power and control of a populace, but the theory of this only.

The thought experiments that we go through are very interesting. Some of them are very believable and some are just incorrect. Like Heinlein’s take on the Marxist definition of value.

It must have been a nightmare to market this work because if you do it as a war and combat book that crowd will be bored.

I can see how we ended up with movies that are in no way faithful to the source material because there isn’t a story here. Most certainly not in any conventional sense.

Having said all of this I loved it. Heinlein has an incredible way with words and the lectures are fascinating.

I would recommend but do not read this for its sci-fi war.

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Where The Crawdads Sing

Colin Parton — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 04:48:12 +0000

Where The Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens

I love the way this narrative is told. We are delivered small bites of chapters that you can just devour.

There are little jumps in time so you can see what you are heading towards.

Kya’s life is brutal. But in her mind is a beautiful place. She lets us see the world as extraordinary.

The court case is presented brilliantly. The book opens with the finding of Chase’s body and even after the court case you are left wanting to find out who killed him.

Kya’s love of Tate is fantastic – coloured by everything that has happened to her.

There is a combination of emotions and thoughts involved. She loves him for his kind nature and for being a great human contact.

She cannot trust him, or anyone else, because they all abandon her. Yet she still desires him and everything he represents, which is manifold.

Kya’s internal thoughts are what set this book apart. Very little happens but you inhabit the thoughts of an incredible individual.

The meaning behind the poetry is so good and the reveal at the end is truly special.

If you like the idea of living inside the mind of a unique person for a few hours I would highly recommend this book.

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The Underground Railroad

Colin Parton — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 10:42:40 +0000

The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead

Overall this is a boring story. There are very few beats to the plot. When nothing is happening with the characters nothing is happening at all.

I did enjoy the construction of the novel. The story is broken up into separate parts for the different characters.

This works especially well for Cora’s mum Mabel.

She has been immortalised and hated by the other characters in the story and it is only when we see her part towards the end that we learn the truth.

The rest of the story is broken into a few locales. The Randall farm and the escape. North Carolina and a new life. The attic and Valentine’s farm. There is minimal action and Cora isn’t interesting herself.

It isn’t exactly that though. Cora is interesting. We only get to see her real emotions a few times.

The railroad itself is disappointing. It’s an actual railroad – it left me thinking: Was that real? Amazing if so. But I’m sure it wasn’t – so what was the point? Very strange.

The story is punctuated at every turn by brutality. I am so dead to this treatment of African Americans in popular culture.

I have a seething hatred of the US because of the systemic racism that so many generations have done nothing about.

How much more racial inequality do I need to witness?

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