I read this book when it was first published and I was recently out of high school. It appealed, very much, to the dramatic teenager in me, who thought there was nothing more romantic than the tragic love of Moulin Rouge and whose own high school relationship was characterized by high highs and low lows. It’s not that The History of Love is, itself, histrionic, but Nicole Krauss does employ a very dreamy, lyrical style of prose that expresses romance intrinsically, bursting out from the […]
“I do not want to be anyone’s model for becoming a better person.”
I don’t want to sound overly dramatic when I say this, but I’m gonna go for it nonetheless: rape, or the possibility of rape, is such constant, persistent background noise in the life of most women that we forget the extent to which we negotiate around the threat. Even women who don’t consciously think of themselves as having ever explicitly feared rape or changed their behavior to avoid it will answer in the affirmative when you ask them more specific questions: do you and your […]
“I like flaws. I think they make things interesting.”
This is a fairly uninformed opinion, but as a casual reader of YA I feel like there has been a dearth, of late, of straightfoward, non- high concept/fantasy YA. Sarah Dessen seems like she hails from a class of YA authors from the mid to late aughts that mine realistic, if unusual, situations to examine the poignant emotional minutiae of the teen experience. The Truth About Forever is the sensitive and quietly resonant story of Macy Queen, who had been the first person of her […]
“He uses invisible radiation to turn himself into an asshole.”
The trouble with being a Courtney Milan Fan (with a capital F) is that you rate her romances on a scale that exists independently of all other romances. It would be a shifted bell curve, except that you don’t get to actually start her scale at 2 and end it in 6, so you have to pretend that it’s the same 1-5 as everyone else. What this means is that, when you’re grading on the CMS (Courtney Milan Scale) sometimes you like the book, but […]
Not much “there”, there.
The Dark Unwinding and its sequel A Spark Unseen are set in Victorian England and France, respectively, and have a vaguely steampunk theme that doesn’t go full-tilt but still includes a lot of clever era-appropriate tinkering and inventing. I review them together because while they, technically, stand alone, they are incredibly similar in tone and structure and I had similar problems with both of them. The Dark Unwinding begins when Katharine Tulman is sent from London, where she resides with her aunt and young cousin, […]
One of my favorite romances this year.
When I reviewed Cecilia Grant previously, I mentioned how she seems to delight in turning tropes on their ears. A Woman Entangled is the last book in her Blackshear Family series, and Grant’s target here is perfect. With overt nods to both Pride and Prejudice and Emma, Grant uses the romance of Kate Westbrook and Nick Blackshear to make larger points about vanity, respectability, and expectations. What I find particularly interesting about her romances is that, while her books are in company with other top-quality […]
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