narfna – Page 121 – Cannonball Read 17

Proof that prequels can absolutely work if you have the right story.

Concrete Rose (The Hate U Give, #0) by Angie Thomas

January 19, 2021 by narfna 3 Comments

To be quite honest with you, not only do I feel this is an excellent prequel (a rare beast in and of itself), I may actually have liked this one better than it’s predecessor, The Hate U Give. I will hold off on stating that for certain as I haven’t read that book since it was first published, so my memories of it aren’t the freshest. But this book was great! Prequels CAN be done, if you have an author that isn’t scrambling to justify […]

“The Spontaneous Anthropomorphic Event had taken place before I was born, so rabbits talking, wearing summer dresses or driving cars never seemed that unusual to me.”

The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde

January 18, 2021 by narfna 4 Comments

Say one thing for Jasper Fforde, he does what he wants. This is a quintessential 3.5 star book for me, but I was all set and ready to round this up to four stars until the ending happened and totally threw me for a loop. It’s not that I thought the ending was bad, more that I wasn’t expecting it and didn’t quite know how to process it. I may very well come back at some later date and round this up to four stars […]

Two women, one plane crash.

The Last Flight by Julie Clark

January 18, 2021 by narfna 2 Comments

Two women meet by chance in an airport, both on the run from their former lives, and decide to swap identities and plane tickets in order to further obscure their trails. One plane crashes and the other doesn’t. This book examines both the fallout from the crash in Claire’s POV (the wife of the famous son of a famous politician, who is fleeing an abusive marriage to said famous son) and the six month lead-up to the crash in Eva’s POV (I won’t spoil what […]

“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”

Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

January 18, 2021 by narfna 4 Comments

This was really interesting to read back to back with How to Be an Antiracist; they shed light on each other in weird ways. But they are also two very different books! My main takeaway from Caste is that Isabel Wilkerson is a great writer. I’m set to read her first book next month, and I’m now looking forward to it even more. She employs metaphor and other literary techniques in a way that you don’t normally see from non-fiction writers. It brings a depth […]

A small book about big ideas.

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

January 18, 2021 by narfna Leave a Comment

I now see why this has been a bestseller. I mean, I loved his first book, so I figured I would like this one, too, but his first book was a straight up history, and this one was much more of a genre mish-mash. I didn’t at all realize going in that a large portion of it would be memoir, and that turned out to be the best part of the book! I finished this book on January 6th. It is ruining my reviews, so […]

I laughed, I cried, I will re-read.

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

January 7, 2021 by narfna 10 Comments

“They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.” This is my favorite of Backman’s books (that I’ve read) by quite a large margin. I would […]

Zirza on A Gothic Classic for a ReasonIt's one of those wish-you-could-read-it-again-for-the-first-time books. I loved it.
Emmalita on “It came to something when you found yourself hoping that the footsteps you heard were ghosts.”I loved the ending! I don’t think it’s been out long enough to talk about why though.
Dixie on Track Her Down by Melinda LeighI am just starting Track Her Down and I have read them all in order till now and thought I...
Roland of Gilead on How can you give us the gift of a crazy character named Rando Thoughtful and then just as suddenly take that gift away? We need to talk, Uncle Stevie.I came across this randomly years after it was written because I was searching "Random Thoughtful. But I have the...
Emmalita on “Only you, Em, would refer to heartbreak as a distraction. I think I would have a more sympathetic response if I asked to marry a bookcase.”Oh my goodness, Gallifrey was beautiful. I’m sure her mittens were gloriously murdery.

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