Jules Jacobson, a gawky, inadvertently poodle-haired fifteen-year-old from New Jersey loses her father to cancer in the early 70’s. When she receives a scholarship to attend an artsy and vaguely hippie-ish summer camp in Massachusetts, her mother insists that she go. When she is seemingly randomly chosen to hang out in boys teepee #3 with the cool kids, lifelong friendships are forged. There is Ash Wolf, the ethereal beauty and her golden god brother Goodman, Jonah, the beautiful son of a famous folk-singer, Cathy, the […]
He warned us that he was an unreliable narrator
First off, I really enjoyed this book. Ms. French is smart and witty, with more than a little bit of gravel in her voice. Her prose is by turns clear and simple, then lyrical and dream-like. What I did not like was our narrator, Rob Ryan. What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. Yeah, he warned us early on, but that still didn’t make me like him […]
Harry just cannot catch a break
The third Harry Hole novel and the first set in his native Oslo, has the downtrodden detective working security detail when the American president comes to Norway for peace talks. He’s still shambling and barely together, but his partner Ellen refuses to let him go completely off the rails. Then an unidentified figure with an automatic weapon turns up unexpectedly on the path Ellen and Harry are monitoring. They frantically try to get it confirmed that it’s Secret Service, but the president’s motorcade is seconds […]
No sir, no relief. Violent Crimes only. Murder Squad.
Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg has been promoted to Commissaire Principal and transferred to the Brigade Criminielle attached to the 13th arrondissement. This means all murder, all the time: Their job had one name and one name only: murder. Murder ad infinitum, without a broken pane to let the healthy gust of teenage delinquency take you mind off the subject; murder ad aeternam, unrelieved by having to lend a handkerchief to the nice young lady who’d just lost her keys, her address book and a love letter. It […]
The view from Jeaneatte’s window was, frankly, shite.
I first encountered Michel Faber last year when I listened to the audiobook Under The Skin. I was mesmerized by that vaguely creepy tale of an alien in humanesque form, patrolling the Scottish highways and byways. Since then, I’ve read The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps, The Book of Strange New Things and now this book of stories. It is an incredibly varied collection, veering from that literary sci-fi, to Shirley Jackson-like horror, to modern day dystopic tales, to lovely lyrical prose right out of Granta. In […]
Hungry Like the Wolf
At first I was annoyed that this book, the second in the Commissaire Adamsberg series, spent so little time with Jean-Baptiste himself. The character of Camille, Adamsbergs petit cherie, is just a little too freaking quirky for me. A musician, composer and plumber who reads tool catalogues for fun and edification, she currently resides in a small village in the Alpes-Maritimes where she has befriended a local sheep farmer, as well as a handsome Canadian naturalist who is studying the re-introduction of wolves in a national park nearby. […]
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