Indie Review Club

Welcome to the page for real reviews by real customers for our indie authors.

It’s easy to join – buy a book by our indie authors, send us the review. We’ll let them know and post it here. You get rewarded too – for every purchase you’ll get two stamps added to your loyalty card regardless of purchase price (usually 1 stamp for every £10 spent).

Pauline Potterill : Twelve Months of Much Meddling
Review by Barbara Masullo (Nov 2025)

This is a perfect book for people that are looking for short reads, it flows effortlessly and is an easy read. I loved going through each month but my favourites were the ones written by the reporter which made me chuckle every time. My favourite line of the book is “, and the world has yet one more child traumatised by a clown”.

The double meaning of Much Meddling and the gentle nod to an amateur detective going by the name of Miss Carpal – really keeps you smiling throughout.

I would say it’s ideal for this time of year and I would encourage anyone to give it a go, it might lead you to read the Much Meddling novels.

Leena Batchelor : Space and Shadows
Review by Neil Leadbetter (Mar 2024)

Set in the heart of historic Worcester, England, The Commandery is most famous for being the Royalist Headquarters during the deciding battle of the English Civil War – the Battle of Worcester 1651. No one knows for sure what the name ‘Commandery’ means but some consider that it was originally associated with the Knights of the Crusades and that it was the name given to the Commander’s residence.

Built on the site of an early medieval chapel, The Commandery has been a monastic hospital, family home, Royalist Civil War headquarters, a college for the blind, and a print works. It is now a museum with multimedia exhibits and interactive displays presenting significant stories of Worcester’s history. All these aspects are explored by Batchelor in poems that are accompanied by photographs of the interior and exterior of the building. Thirty of the poems and photographs were displayed in an installation during Easter 2022 specially created for The Commandery. A time chart detailing The Commandery and Worcester’s place in history from c500 to 1985 is included as an appendix. In her introduction, Batchelor writes ‘Every building has its sacred space, that place where ghosts push back and senses heighten, become awake and aware…in creating this collection, I have explored witches’ marks with my fingertips, heard echoes in the shadows, and walked with ghosts and shades’.

She ends her introduction with this line: ‘Imagination is the tool by which you shape your world.’ Batchelor’s imagination is heightened by many things: river ripples that carry sunlight on their currents, the reflection of light from a stained glass door, nineteenth century wallpaper in an upstairs cupboard, Georgian costumes, Cromwell’s death mask and witches’ marks which were carved into buildings to protect them from evil spirits.

As Batchelor reminds us in ‘Permanence’, while ‘the wash of old buildings fade’ they and their inhabitants are very much ‘with us still’. In ‘Bruised Oak’ her subject is an old staircase made out of oak where she imagines children running up and down the treads, ‘tiny hands polishing the oak rail bruised with time and echoes’ and reflects ‘on the grain of the once living tree’. A glance at the long corridor in the Tudor wing sets her thinking about the many footsteps that have walked along its floorboards, Tudor, Royalist soldiers and children running to and fro from lessons during the building’s time as a school for the blind. In similar vein she contemplates on the number of people who have sat in one of the window embrasures along that corridor, gazing down on the garden below.

For me, one of the finest poems in the book relates to a button dating from the Civil War era, found during an archaeological dig at The Commandery. In the poem she imagines the button unravelling and falling to the ground at the moment when its owner is carried from the battlefield, mortally wounded:
‘…A life ebbing in ruby rivers, the button closing the jacket catches on the threads of his life and the door to the next opens. / “Trink”…the sound of the thread snapping as I fall between the cracks. / Inconsequential. / A metaphoric non sequitur reflected on today’s garb, / Both fallen and saved.’

One of the more unusual poems in the book, ‘Recipe for memory’ is a ‘found poem’ arising from some medieval recipes that Batchelor uncovered from the building. As she says in another poem ‘Moondrop Rising’ there is no doubt that ‘history lies sleeping’ here. I mentioned earlier in this review that The Commandery had at one time been the location for a printing factory. The printers, Littlebury’s, were responsible in the 1950s for various publications including train timetables, travel guides and books of local interest. Inspired by the Littlebury Room, Batchelor’s poem ‘Tracing Paper’ traces ‘a story drawn in pencil-thin lines upon creamy vellum, seen through and copied in tracings of recollected shapes / and directions; rivulets of happenings netted in pencil and smudged with the eraser of aged memory’. As a metaphor for life, it is waiting in the shadows ‘to be retraced in the repetition of history’.

Throughout the pages of this book, Batchelor lets slip some fascinating facts. One such example relates to the printing industry where we learn that Worcester is known for being home to the world’s oldest surviving newspaper – Berrows Worcester Journal (in circulation since 1690) while another relates to the visits of senators John Adams and Thomas Jefferson to Worcester following the War of Independence. In this collection, Batchelor captures the past in atmospheric poetry and photographs that together tell the story of this remarkable building.