Laini. LAINI. What are you doing to me? I want to cry, right now, writing this review, thinking about Strange the Dreamer. It’s too much. It’s too beautiful, too peculiar, too visceral, too magical. What is in your imagination? How do you do this? Fantasy is such a stalwart genre for me because of how it truly takes me out of the every day and into a new place, sometimes a completely different place. Good fantasy has that quality of evoking wonder and provoking the […]
Romance among resistance
Courtney Milan has been a vocal fan of Alyssa Cole for awhile now, and I’m a vocal fan of Courtney Milan, so I have been harboring guilt for waiting until now to read Cole. Something about the blurbs for her previous series weren’t setting me on fire, but An Extraordinary Union sounded unique and daring — a black woman (Elle) undercover as a slave during the Civil War who falls for a white man (Malcolm) undercover as a Confederate soldier? Wow. I’m not trying to […]
A classic that deserves the honor
Okay, so. Will it amuse you if I admit that I somehow did not know that this book is famously long? I’m over here trying to do these reading challenges and had finished my last audiobook, and so saw that this was available on Overdrive and thought “Neat! I’ll just slot that one right in there.” When I saw that the audiobook was over thirty hours long, I realized my mistake. Anyway, man. What an undertaking to read, and now, an undertaking to review. I […]
Was it the husband?
The Dry is a competent and engaging mystery thriller that’s set in a small farming community in Australia. It’s one of those books where the setting is as much of a character as the human characters, as the oppressive heat and dust provoke malevolent despair in the residents, which in turn breeds violence. The climate was also quite evocative for me as the reader, especially being here in California, where we have experienced a bit of drought ourselves. Goodreads summary: “After getting a note demanding […]
One review, extra salty
Well, Pajiba beat me to it with the review, but I also read Tender Wings of Desire and can confirm there is no sex of any bestial double entendre in this book. And honestly, we should all count ourselves grateful, because in the age of 4chan, I think the greatest Mother’s Day gift we can all give is a world that continues to be free of the canonical sexploits of Antebellum Creepy Uncle. So, without feather ado, here’s the rest of the “review”: The “plot,” […]
You could do worse than this fictionalized primer on the War of the Roses
3.5 stars Philippa Gregory is a giant in her corner of historical fiction, which seems essentially “Aristocrats and Nobles of 15th and 16th century Britain (particularly Women).” Even though I had never read her books, I had a detached respect for her as a well-researched author whose fictionalizations garnered generalized interest for the history her books cover. That impression holds true, and I still appreciate her doing her thing. I get that because she’s working from a record of stuff that actually happened, she can […]
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