I often wonder if this whole reviewing thing isn’t a little bit futile. Not the reading books or talking about them bit. I think that’s a great part of life and something that everyone should be encouraged to do more. No, I mean arbitrarily assigning a rating to everything that I read. I never used to do it but jumped on the bandwagon a few years ago. Ratings don’t really tell you very much because they’re so personal. Everyone has an individual spectrum of greatness and it’s all very dependent on context. Take Burncoat for example. I’ve seen plenty of people say they prefer it to The Fell but I’m the opposite. The difference? They read Sarah Hall first and I didn’t. If I’d read them in a different order would I have flipped? It’s both impossible to say and pointless to speculate. On with the review.