Book Review: shine your icy crown by Amanda Lovelace (you are your own fairy tale #2)

I’ve now read AND listened to this one, and can honestly say both have their benefits and both are equally enjoyable albeit in different ways.

Here’s my review of the written version:
I’m a long-time fan of Amanda Lovelace. Her ability to relate complex, difficult, emotional issues through prose is phenomenal. I love the truth and depth of her voice and am always impressed at the way she manages to turn horrible experiences into moving lessons with positive messages of hope…

This was another wonderful collection – although I found it to feel a bit more disjointed between parts than her previous works. This one felt like two books put together in one binding, whereas the others (the other in this series and her “Women are Some Kind of Magic” and “Things that H(a)unt” series) felt a little more cohesive to me. I still enjoyed her writings and thoughts immensely, so it didn’t matter. But it did feel a little less like a narrative told through prose and more like a series of pieces that moved in complementary directions…

As for the audio, suffice to say that listening to a poet read their own words is always a moving experience to my mind, because you have the added benefit of knowing where the words come from… Lovelace doesn’t read like a professional voice actor – she reads like a woman telling you her story. And the decision to use her voice to relate her story(ies) is a powerful and brilliant one because they ring true in a way that no actor could quite manage, no matter how talented.

I will say that I find listening to her books to be easier once I’ve read one of the books in the series. She has a rhythm and flow to the arrangement of her pieces that I imagine might not be immediately grasped if one only listened, but because I’d read this one first, I knew the difference between the interludes, the story pieces, the “Says” bits and the “cited” descriptions. It’s a call-and-response type format that I found helpful to visualize before I listened.

I’m a long-time fan of Amanda Lovelace. Her ability to relate complex, difficult, emotional issues through prose is phenomenal. I love the truth and depth of her voice and am always impressed at the way she manages to turn horrible experiences into moving lessons with positive messages of hope…

This was another wonderful collection – although I found it to feel a bit more disjointed between parts than her previous works. This one felt like two books put together in one binding, whereas the others (the other in this series and her “Women are Some Kind of Magic” and “Things that H(a)unt” series) felt a little more cohesive to me. I still enjoyed her writings and thoughts immensely, so it didn’t matter. But it did feel a little less like a narrative told through prose and more like a series of pieces that moved in complementary directions…

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my obligation-free review copy.