Two Excellent Reads

So I started this post the other day, and then accidentally hit post instead of save draft. Those of you who use feed readers may have got the bare bones of this post. So here it is in all it's glory.

I wanted to share these two excellent books I read recently. Both published this year.

Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier
You may know Tracy Chevalier from her famous book, Girl with a Pearl Earring. She has also written a few other books that have not been as popular.

Remarkable Creatures is the story of two "real life" women living in the mid-1800s on the coast of South-East England. It is a fascinating story of the discovery of some of the first dinosaur fossils in England and how these two unlikely women (a middle-class spinster, and an uneducated, working-class young woman) were involved in their discovery. It also covers the issues of the time with religion vs. science.

I found the book very readable with a good mix of human drama set in the larger picture of the history of England. I highly recommend picking it up.

The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw

This is Ali Shaw's debut novel.

The Girl with Glass feet is harder to recommend to people. It will definitely not suit everybody's tastes. It is the story of Midas and Ida, two young people who meet unexceptionally enough, on St. Hauda's Land, an island probably somewhere in the Atlantic and probably a part of England. This, however, is no normal island. Strange things can happen there. Midas has lived on the island his whole life and after his father committed suicide several years before, he struggles to make emotional bonds with people. Adventure loving Ida has returned to the island after a previous vacation the summer before to hopefully find the answer to why her feet have started to turn to glass. The story weaves, past and present together and the people in Midas and Ida's lives that have affected them the most. There are very tragic things in this novel, but overall has a note of hope. A very interesting read.