Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline
Well that happened. I enjoyed RP1, though I am aware of the criticism thrown its way. It was essentially a love letter to Gen X white men but dammit it was FUN and it had an underdog protagonist you could root for. Let me quickly sum up the Ready Player Two for you; take the plot of RP1, raise the stakes but take away the fun of the first book, turn your protagonist into a petty billionaire and try to cram even more eighties […]
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Yaa Gyasi’s first novel, Homegoing, was a sprawling family saga about a family whose point of origin was Ghana. Though the family in Transcendent Kingdom also hails from there, this book is nothing like its predecessor. Rather than than span though generations, this book’s main focus is on one person as she deals with the pain and loss her family deals with after coming to America in search of a better life. Gifty is a neuroscience candidate at Stanford studying reward seeking behavior in […]
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
This is a book that I wish had been made into a series. The world of The Windup Girl is strange and serpentine and by the time I was fully immersed in it and was truly in the flow of the story things were heading toward the conclusion. There are other stories in the “windup universe” but no other full length novels. Nonetheless this biopunk environmental cautionary tale contains dynamic characters, political intrigue and lots of fascinating moving parts that lead the reader to a […]
Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear
Maisie Dobbs was part of my early effort to read lighter fare in order to forget the pandemic (I read this back at the end of March) and it was more or less successful. Over all I liked the book and the main character and I’ll definitely read the next in the series. Though I admit the pacing of this first book is a bit off which happens frequently when you’re dealing with the initial book in the series. Setting the stage and giving the […]
The Frangipani Tree Mystery by Ovidia Yu
This book is what I call a “cozy-ish mystery.” It’s not an examination of the darkest parts of humanity, nor does it take place entirely in a knitting shop in a cozy New England hamlet. It’s just about the perfect thing for me when I’m feeling overwhelmed by the world or my previous read or both. The murder still feels important to the story without getting you bogged down in misery. This is the first in the Crown Colony series and I’ve added the […]
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
Reading this book in early/mid-March 2020 was a huge error in judgement on my part. I guess I thought immersing myself in a plague story would lessen my anxieties about the real world. It…didn’t work. Having said this, Year of Wonders was truly a captivating read with a dynamic heroine who faces the horrors of the plague on and comes out on the other side deeply changed. Anna Frith is a somewhat timid young widow in a small English village who is making ends […]
