Let me preface this review by saying I really loved Kristin Cashore’s first trilogy, especially Graceling. I remember devouring that first book in about two days—pulled into the complex and compelling world of Katsa and the Graceling realm. When Cashore’s newest book showed up on NetGalley last fall, I leapt at the chance to read it and put in a request. However, when I actually got the book and started reading, I found myself having a hard time focusing. I put it down to a […]
Though I Look Right at Home I Still Feel Like an Exile
Years before he took on the role of Jaime Lannister on Game of Thrones, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau was in a short-lived FOX show called New Amsterdam. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible either; Coster-Waldau was easy on the eye and the show raised some interesting questions about the burdens of outliving those around you again and again. I had almost forgotten about that series until I started to read Matt Haig’s novel, How To Stop Time. The main character, Tom Hazard, is not immortal, but […]
Something Like Jojo Moyes
Though the title to this review sounds a bit snarky, I enjoyed this novel, even while recognizing the formulas at work—“magic” sick person helps healthy person learn how to live and British class boundaries “magically” disappear in the face of a terminal illness. It’s the story of an unlikely friendship between Annie and Polly. Thirty-five-year-old Annie is mired in a life she never imagined herself living—working a job she hates, sharing a cramped flat with a roommate she barely knows, and dealing with a mother […]
That, O’Malley Supposed, Was Just His Luck
A sign of a good book is that you find yourself thinking about parts of it long after you’re done reading it. Lou Berney’s The Long and Faraway Gone is just such a book and this is the second novel I’ve read in the last month that deals with the vagaries of fate (the first being Before the Fall). The writing is beautiful, and the story is haunting, and even though I finished it back in March, I’ll still chewing on it, figuratively speaking. In 1986, […]
There is Great Consolation in Simply Doing Something You Love
I would categorize the British author, Jojo Moyes, as my literary snack food. I tend to inhale each book like a bag of potato chips—not particularly nutritious but just what I’m looking for at the time. I read this book in one day during my spring vacation back in March and it was a perfectly good way to spend a long afternoon. I’ve enjoyed getting to know Louisa (Lou) Clark over three novels: Me Before You, After You, and now Still Me and truthfully, I’ve found her […]
Jack Reacher with a Soul
Though I still read the latest Lee Child every time one arrives at my local library, I’ve become just a bit uncomfortable with the faint taste of revenge porn I get every time I accompany Reacher to an isolated rural town where trouble and a body count are sure to follow. It was after reading Worth Dying For in 2011 that I let rip a Goodreads review that tried to express (and maybe exorcise) my discomfort: These are all bad, bad men but the fact that […]
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