I became interested in American Dervish because I wanted to read something from a different perspective: in this case, a novel by a Pakistani author reflecting on a young American Muslim boy’s experience. The story opens with Hayat Shah when he is college-aged, as he attends an Islamic Studies class. The professor, with whom Hayat is friendly, makes statements that are blasphemous to some of the other Muslim students in attendance, but Hayat himself has a somewhat blasé attitude toward his professor’s claims. Afterward, a friend […]
Contains music, sex, and musical euphemisms for sex.
The Stage Dive series by Kylie Scott is two books deep, and by the end it is likely that each member of the fictional world-famous rock band Stage Dive will end up with his one and only. I saw Malin’s review of Play, the second book in the series, and thought it sounded like fun. I don’t read a lot of straight-up contemporary romance, possibly because it’s easier for me to process these happily-ever-after stories in worlds that don’t exist or that I don’t have context […]
The Dumbest Kiss
This book. Don’t read it. It was a Vaginal Fantasy pick, but an awful one. The plot was uninteresting, the pacing jarring, the writing juvenile and uninspired, and the characters flat and insipid. Here’s the rub: Lucien is one of the Lords of the Underworld, punished for opening Pandora’s Box by having the demon of Death coupled to his soul. He and Death are one; they cannot be separated. He has to perform Reaper-like tasks and escort souls to their final resting places (these are boringly […]
“No matter how we’re eventually raised, all of our stories begin the exact same way. They all end the same, too.”
An infrequent reader of comics and graphic novels, I was intrigued by the Saga series, mainly because of the glowing reviews from Malin. It promised several of the most fun genre conventions: epic war, forbidden romance between opposite sides of battle lines, mercenary assassins, imaginative new alien species, and MAGIC! Our narrator is Hazel, child of Alana and Marko, the forbidden lovers. So far, the narration has been retrospective, but still not completely linear. We enter in the middle of Alana and Marko on the […]
“I want everyone to meet you. You’re my favorite person of all time.”
I want everyone to read you, Eleanor & Park! I have so spoiled myself over the past few weeks, reading brilliant wordsmiths like Rainbow Rowell and Laini Taylor whose emotive descriptions are devastatingly apt. This book is ADORABLE. It seems like almost everyone I knew in high school fell in love exactly like this; teenagers have a way of each feeling uniquely disenfranchised, and meeting someone else who complements your weird and loneliness feels like finally the universe has done you a solid. Eleanor and […]
Dreams of more Laini Taylor to read
Though not really reflected in my earlier (rather superficial, in retrospect) review, I have had a whirlwind of emotions with this series. I wrote said prior review as one piece for both of the preceding novels, Daughter of Smoke and Bone and Days of Blood and Starlight probably to avoid spoilers but also because I read them literally back-to-back: I finished Smoke and Bone and began Blood and Starlight with the same breath. As such, it became difficult to separate them for the purposes of thematic or ‘first impression’ review […]
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