Black Sea Twilight

I really enjoyed it! I was a little bit surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Reading the back I thought it sounded good but that it wasn't the sort of book which would jump out at me as a "I must read this book!" if I was browsing in a bookshop. I will definitely be looking for Domnica Radulescu's other book with a view to reading it.

This book has a lovely feel to it. It reminded me in it's style of those I've read by Mary Doria Russell, Farahad Zama and Chimanda Ngozi Adichie and those are some of my favourite writers so it definitely ranks up there. It's written in the first person which I sometimes find grates on me but this worked really well and drew me in.

This book had the added bonus of being disability positive. Nora, the main show more character has one hand (and one breast) smaller than the other. She thinks it's because her twin brother squashed her in womb. It's something she isn't overly comfortable with at the beginning of the book. However she's an artist and she comes to learn that she can use her different hands to do different things in her drawing and learns to see it as a very positive thing. At one point she is told she's lucky to have hands like that. It was very well handled and at no point was Nora labelled as disabled, it was just part of who she is.

I also thought that it wasn't predictable. Which is always good in a book. Reading the back I had preconceived ideas that "this will happen quite early in the story and then not long after that this will happen..." based on what it said happened. But the book actually followed it's own path and things happened when they happened not when I expected. I do like books like that.

I would definitely recommend this book show less