I loved this book and read it in a few days. I enthusiastically recommended it to my husband, who also enjoys YA dystopia, and was bewildered when he was not that into it. I thought it was scary and sad and funny and nuanced and infuriating. He thinks, so far, that it’s dumb and poorly written. This was turning into the book equivalent of The Dress so I turned to Goodreads to decide who was right because obviously that is a quantifiable right/wrong thing and […]
Wink wink nudge nudge, parenthood, amirite?
2.5 stars In the 2016 winner of the Most Thinly Veiled Memoir award, Greg Olear Josh Lansky spends a really long day parenting his two young kids, Roland and Maude. Yes, Maude. And Roland. There’s your first sign that this guy is going to be kind of insufferable. He lives in an extremely detailed city called New Paltz, a yuppie paradise so thoroughly described that there’s no way the author doesn’t live there. Check the dust jacket, yep. New Paltz, NY. Okay, well, that’s fine. […]
A resounding “meh.”
In Liane Moriarty’s fourth book, The Hypnotist’s Love Story, an Australian hypnotherapist named Ellen meets a bland and grumpy man named Patrick, who turns out to have a son, a dead ex wife, and a stalker – his ex, Saskia, who helped him raise his son for years after his wife’s death. Ellen is intrigued to the point of slightly obsessed with the stalker, and wrestles with an assortment of personal dilemmas: people not taking her career seriously, her mother’s unconventional choice to have her […]
Some thoughts on the zombie genre.
This book is shit. It’s not a “different people like different things” situation. If you enjoyed this book, I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. Yes, your enjoyment is wrong. The number of good reviews that this has on Goodreads and Amazon is appalling, but still not as appalling as this sorry excuse for a garbage fire of a book. I am actually offended by how bad this book is. Let’s unpack this. First, maybe you’re thinking “If it’s so bad, why did you read it?” Well, […]
The wrong time and medium for this book.
The Naked Truth is the memoir of Marvelyn Brown, a young HIV activist from Nashville, TN. She contracted HIV from a boyfriend at 19, was diagnosed extremely quickly, and shot to the top of HIV activism circles. This book started out okay. Marvelyn is funny and charismatic, and very matter of fact about the bad decisions and ways of thinking that led to her contracting HIV. But honestly, this book just did not need to be a book. It’s a pretty slim paperback as it […]
Rubin’s Vase
I normally have my review half-written in my head before I start writing it, but I just don’t even know what to say about this book. Let’s start with a necessary disclaimer: I picked this up as a married woman with one daughter, recently off an “I can’t have any more kids” health crisis (in my case it wound up resolved, but I felt the feels), and I had recently taken in a homeless woman with a baby and it was causing a lot of […]