Book Two in The Murder Squad series by Alex Grecian, The Black Country is the sequel to The Yard which I reviewed for Cannonball Read 4. As a refresher the books are set in 1890 and focus on Inspector Day of Scotland Yard, a member of the newly founded Murder Squad. The Black Country picks up a few months later with Day, Sergeant Hammersmith, and Dr. Kingsley being summoned to Blackhampton in the Midlands where three members of a family are missing and the local […]
I’m not sure I’d want the Wolves to know where to find me
I normally do pretty spoiler free reviews, but I cannot think of how to talk about my reactions to this book without spoiling the heck out of it, so if that’s a thing you want to avoid then you probably need to click right along to another review. Go ahead, I won’t judge. Promise. Anyway, now that we have that done, let’s talk about Tell the Wolves I’m Home. Our protagonist is June, age 14. She is telling us about the death of her Uncle […]
Dark Love Letter
“To know what a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things.” I have had a bit of luck with first time authors of late, and Hannah Kent is no exception. Her debut work, Burial Rites, is a gripping novel- all mood and emotion. It’s a story gaining speed like a stone rolling downhill, for there is only one way to go. Ms. Kent writes in Burial Rites about the last instance of capital punishment in Iceland. But I […]
Well, there really wasn’t anything about diabetes, and I was hoping for more owls.
I am a fan of David Sedaris’s view of the world. I have read every book he has written, starting with Me Talk Pretty One Day shortly after its publication in 2000 and as I am want to do, I then began working immediately through his catalogue. And I have loved them. But something is happening, and I do not know if it’s me, or if it’s him, or if perhaps we are just in a rough spot in our relationship. I laughed fewer times […]
I prefer bookstores
“There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care.” (288). It’s hard to know what to make of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. It’s a quest, it’s a mystery, it’s one man finding himself, and it’s the coalescing of a group of friends. It’s all this and more. Clocking in at fewer than 300 pages, Robin Sloan manages to craft an epic adventure for his protagonist and his merry band of players. And it’s simply delightful. The story is based […]
“…as if he knew even then that there existed under everything a universal grief”
I suppose that The Age of Miracles can be viewed as a dystopian novel. In it our narrator, Julia, tells us about the year she turned 12 and the Earth’s turning slowed down, eventually leading to weeks of daylight and weeks of darkness. It can also be said that this is a sad book, about the dying and destruction of our world. These things are true, but somehow Karen Thompson Walker prevents the novel from being as unbearably sad as the description might have you […]