I read the first book in this series, The Name of the Star, and liked it more than I expected to.  This one’s pretty good, too, though it didn’t seem as smooth.  Rory has gone back to her London boarding school after her big old ghostly encounter in the last book, and more spooky shit happens.  There’s a creepy cult, Rory is pretty powerful, we get a little more in terms of back story and current details of the Shades, and once again the ending seems […]

I’d give this 3.5 stars if that were an option. If you care. I think I read this about 30 years ago, when my mom picked it up. I read it again now out of curiosity — I remembered liking it SO MUCH and wondered if it would hold up. It does and it doesn’t. It’s full of super cool details about the diamond industry. There’s a stone, not a diamond, but an unidentifiable stone, which appears to have healing powers. Naturally, if word got […]

My title comes from one of this book’s outstanding exchanges, one of many, actually. Presumably in a “Why her?” or at least “Why someone other than me?” context, the wife asks, “Taller? Thinner? Quieter?” and the husband answers, “Easier.” So here you have an intense artist person, from whom a second novel was expected but never appeared, and a guy, one who seems pretty great and engaged and whatnot but who’s much more straightforward, mostly, and perhaps would be better off with less intensity. I read […]

Oh, wow. This is such a lovely, difficult book. The first things we learn are that Lydia’s missing, and that it’s not like her to be missing. From there unfolds a story which is also a lesson in how not to raise your child, though it’s taught by proxy through parents who wanted nothing but success and happiness for their daughter. Lydia is slowly collapsing under the pressure from both her parents to live out their unfulfilled dreams; unfortunately, they’re wildly different people, so that’s […]

***mild non-ruining spoiler, 2nd paragraph*** Rory is off to a British boarding school and almost immediately there’s a murder nearby. Alarmingly, it’s very Jack the Ripper-esque, and in fact was committed on the same date as one of the 1888 murders. More alarming: there’s another one, and the M.O. and date line up again. Even more alarming, Rory seems to be the only one who saw the suspect. It turns out she’s the only one who saw the suspect because she was the only one […]