Or, at the very least, they are the future in M.R. Carey’s book, The Girl With All the Gifts. The book is about Melanie, zombie child extraordinaire. She’s being held, along with several other (albeit less extraordinary) zombie children, at a research facility in England. At the facility, they attend classes, eat grubs and occasionally get dissected, all in the name of science. Dr. Caldwell does the dissecting, and Helen Justineau does the teaching. Below is a song I “wrote” about their adventures (please to […]
There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
My friend M. found the beginning of this book to be quite pretentious. And it is. It’s pretentious AF for the first 60 or so pages. And it’s hard to read pretention too. The first few pages, especially, seem to drag and serve no purpose other than to make you re-think your decision to read it. But, I’m here to tell you that, while the first part of The Marriage Plot is definitely pretentious, it’s pretentious for a reason. The pretention of Madeline and her […]
Happy African Feminist
I have been meaning to read We Should All Be Feminists for some time and then finally, today, on International Women’s Day of all days, my sister lent me her copy. And, because it’s only 52 pages including the Introduction and the About the Author section, I read it with my morning granola. And it is brilliant. I will say that one of the personal reasons it appealed to me is that my fiancé is African. Not from Nigeria, but from a small, West African […]
The Repercussions of Drugging Unwitting Children (And Other Things)
This book was one of those that I liked, but I also didn’t much like it, or at least I didn’t really like or understand the characters in it. Yes, that’s it exactly. I didn’t understand a single one of the many characters in this book. And that’s not entirely my fault. In Commonwealth, one of the children of a blended family falls in love with a much older writer and ends up telling him stories about her childhood. And he ends up writing […]
Terrifically Beguiling
I picked this book up on a whim while at a local thrift store. I had never heard of the author, Colin Cotterill, and I had never heard of the series, featuring Dr. Siri Paiboun. But, pick it up I did, and, when I needed something to cheer me up after the slog that was the last book I read/reviewed, Half-Blood Blues, this book did the trick. The Merry Misogynist is a mystery set in Laos in 1978. It features Dr. Siri Paiboun, a seventy-three-year-old […]
Sid is a Jerk
As a person of mixed race (White mother, Black father) who loves the blues, I thought that a book like Half-Blood Blues (featuring several mixed race characters and blues) would be right up my alley. It was not. In fact, it took me nearly a week to read the first 50 pages and I was bored to death almost the whole time. On page 54 things finally (finally!) got interesting from a story standpoint, but I still had to contend with the writing, which never […]