First up is NAUGHTY CINDERELLA.  Cinderella works as a prostitute to bring money into her family so her stepsisters and her stepmother can live the life they feel they deserve.  When the prince comes to the town square to announce a ball, they laugh when Cinderella says she wants to attend.  Though she found a beautiful gown, they destroy it and go to the ball without her.  She sits in a tub knowing her life will end.  Her fairy godmother appears and gives Cinderella all she needs to go to the ball including crystal slippers with the admonition to return home by midnight.  Will she?  Will she amaze the prince?  Will he marry her?

I enjoyed this tale.  It follows a lot of the CINDERELLA fairy tale with a few differences.  Her stepsisters may be beautiful on the outside, but they are ugly on the inside.  She is the most beautiful woman at the ball and the prince knows it.  As he says, “it’s in the eyes.”  When midnight comes Cinderella runs out.  She manages to make it home but just barely.  I liked the differences.  I liked how the prince could identify her.  I also liked the secret he shared on their wedding night.  I hope nothing but good comes to them.

Next is RIDING RED HOOD.  Red is running through the woods trying to outrun cannibals.  Suddenly the cannibals are attacked and killed by a beast-like creature.  The next morning Red is in her own bed.  But how did she get there?  She has no memory when her fiancée asks her as the Chief Protector.  He sends her to his detectives for questioning.  They question her story.  She gets angry especially when she learns attacks had been happening for some time.  Her fiancée and his men set out to find and kill the beast.  Red decides to find him first.  Who will find the creature?  What is the creature?  Why is Red so interested in him?

I liked this story.  It’s a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood but a lot more grown up and without the woodsman to kill the big bad wolf.  I liked Red and Kull, the creature.  There was more passion between them then between Red and her fiancée.  He was a jerk!  I was not crazy about the ending, but I liked it rather than how it could have ended with Red and her fiancée.  An interesting story.

Last is BEAUTH AND THE BEAST WITH TWO BACKS.  Belle’s father goes off with his mistress to the Beast’s castle.  There he picks a black rose for his mistress.  The Beast catches him and in exchange, Belle’s father offers her up.  Belle comes and stays while her father and his mistress leave along with their retinue.  Belle tries to keep her distance from the Beast but gradually spends more time with him and develops a friendship with him.  Her father sends word that he wants to see her before he dies.  Will the Beast let her leave?  If he does, will she come back?  If she comes back, what will she find?

I enjoyed this story.  It follows THE BEAUTY AND THE BEAST more than the other stories followed their fairy tales.  I liked Belle and Beast.  They had to learn to trust each other.  I liked the trust Beast placed in Belle.  Belle learned a lot from Beast.  She finally learned not to not accept bad behavior and to stand up for herself.  It is an interesting end.  Not one I was expecting.  I wonder what does happen when the tale is finished.

Beast - Erin Bedford

Anna May comes to visit her grandmother in the nursing home. Isaac sees her and can't stop looking at her. He goes into her grandmother's room when Anna May's grandmother freaks out. Isaac leaves but Anna May runs into him later. She apologizes and asks him on a date. What caused Anna May's grandmother to freak out? Will Isaac and Anna May get together?

While I enjoyed this story, it was entirely too short to get into before it was over. Isaac and Anna May could have a fun story, but this just introduces you to them. The story is a series of vignettes with Isaac and Anna May starring in them. I hope this author expands these characters and this story.

Author: Fizza Younis

Release Date: 31st Oct, 2020

Available for Pre-Order: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08L9NTQ8K

Add to Goodreads Shelf: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55709081-somewhere-in-time

Bookbub link: https://www.bookbub.com/books/somewhere-in-time-by-fizza-younis

Synopsis

When one was dead and the other slumbered in peace...

Would the two ever meet?

Somewhere in Time is a retelling of the classic fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty. The story is set between the twentieth and the twenty-first century. With a much darker paranormal twist and no happily ever-after within sight, it follows the journey of our beloved characters; Aurora and Prince Phillip. What the future holds for them is yet to be determined, so read on to find out how their story unfolds this time around.

Why did it take me so long to finish Nostromo? First of all, life. I don’t know about you guys and girls, but my past weeks, even months were busy and crazy af. Secondly, for various reasons, 6 other books squeezed themselves in between since I started Nostromo in April, which – in hindsight – was not helping the reading experience, because this is a very complex novel.
Therefore the already confusing political circumstances became even more confusing for me, because after a long break from Nostromo, during which I might have read two or three different books, I often forgot or confused some of the characters and hence was a bit lost plotwise. But hey, that’s what times filled with revolutions and counter-revolutions are all about – chaos and confusion. So in this regard, I guess I got the full experience.

Nostromo is set in Costaguana, a fictitious republic somewhere in South America. The novel moves quite slowly at the beginning, so initially you have a lot of time to get acquainted with the main characters, the setting and some early events along the storyline. The slow pace is a good thing though, because honestly this novel takes some time to get used to, but the more I progressed, the more it grew on me. With the exception of the last few chapters which are slower again, Conrad really picks up the speed in approximately the last third of his novel – stuff is happening left, right and centre, the perspective is shifting within the chapters, time jumps back and forth and as mentioned before, after taking a long break and reading something else in between, I admit that I struggled quite a bit to pick up where I left, but there is only myself to blame for that.

This is a very political and very complex novel (well, it is written by Conrad after all) about revolutions, counter-revolutions, political scheming, speculation, exploitation, colonization, morals, individual monomaniacal ideas, and everything in between. Even if you read Nostromo without taking crazy long breaks, it is easy to loose focus and I somehow have the feeling that even Conrad himself was on the verge of getting lost in the events of his own novel from time to time.

Somehow Nostromo reminded me a lot of For Whom the Bell Tolls, especially regarding the South American way of revolting and not really caring at the same time. Yet the political relativism expressed by Conrad surpasses Hemingway by miles! Conrad challenges the whole notion of linear historical progress by presenting a cyclical repetition of events that ultimately renders every decision and action basically irrelevant. One of my favourite sentences from the novel’s preface, that sums up this point really well, is: „Nostromo’s narrative structure generates a similar chaos by blurring cause and effect.“ I couldn’t have said it any better.

As I mentioned in one of my first Nostromo posts, the character Nostromo appears very scarcely (similar to Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame), even though there is a sheer mountain of  secondary literature dealing solely with Nostromo, his motives and/or his psychology. Personally, I didn’t much care for him, and neither did Conrad apparently (as expressed in one of his letters): „I don’t defend Nostromo himself. Fact is he does not take my fancy either.“

One more thing editing-wise. The editor added quite a number of notes and annotations to the text, most of which is helpful background info about historical events, literary sources or just a general help for some of the strange sounding expressions for which Conrad used a one-to-one translation of a Gallicism into English. But if I ever meet the editor (which is highly unlikely), I will personally punch her in the face for one of the notes in which she completely spoilers the death of a character without any warning! This particular character just got introduced in the very chapter in which said annotation is placed and it happens to be the one character I immediately fell in love with and really cared about.

But to finally wrap this up: the 3,5 out of 5 stars reflect my personal reading experience (which was a rather rugged one) rather than the actual quality of Nostromo. Because to do such a novel justice, I would have to re-read while being more focused which I will do at some point in the future.