If you’re looking for heist drama, Ocean’s 11-style genre fiction, I’d recommend The Rogues of the Republic over this first entry in The Gentlemen Bastards series. The Lies of Locke Lamora was an enjoyable read, but not the masterpiece the author clearly thinks he wrote. Mostly it just made me want to reread the aforementioned Rogues. One thing I am a sucker for is worlds that toss you in and don’t immediately (or ever) answer all your questions. Camorr is one such world with the ghosts of a previous […]
Has he ever met a person?
I kind of get why the movie fell flat–the source material wasn’t much to pull from. There’s an intriguing concept here. Imagine all digital connection (social media, searches, communication, commerce, streaming) was conducted through a single entity, here called The Circle. It started as an idea to dissuade trolls (forcing everyone to use their real, verified identity online) and has quickly evolved into a for-profit company that has a near monopoly on the internet. With your real identity, you can access everything you need to […]
Hard pass
Reader beware of “popular” library books that don’t have a hold list: the good-to-trash ratio is not in your favor. The Queen of the Night fell solidly in the latter category and to add insult to injury, it was looooong. But I was overseas and struggling to download books so I hunkered down and powered through. Ugh. This book is a first-person perspective of a woman adrift mostly in Paris in the 1860s and 1870s. She’s orphaned in America, crosses the Atlantic with the circus with […]
Not as exciting as I expected
The book’s summary made it sound like there was going to be a lot more intrigue and many more characters. It talks about how one incident impacts generations of these two families but, really, it’s just the parents at their children. So from the get-go, this is not a “generational novel” (like Salt Houses which, yes, I am still going on about). It’s just a drama. It is set in Virginia but it starts in California so it’s completely okay if you’re confused on that at […]
Utterly addicting
I blew through this book in less than a day (a WORK DAY) because oh my god I could not put it down. It is addicting, like, Big Little Lies addicting, in the good way. They’re making this into a movie with Cate Blanchett in the lead and oh. my. god. I cannot wait. This is another one where the premise sounds utterly inane. The titular Bernadette is a woman with high anxiety (along with a host of other issues), living in suburban Seattle with her […]
I need to go back to school
One of the most wonderful things about the public library is the deliciously broad catalog it offers. There are so many books I would never have encountered, and I would be less for it. I tend to prefer genre fiction (sci fi and fantasy) and prefer the welcoming ease of young adult over challenging myself in my “me” time. But the library? I have to wait so long and then they’re only available for a short time and that creates this awesome urgency that means […]