This book drew me with the title alone, but when I read the blurb and discovered that it was about finding and restoring rare books, a cross-century literary mystery, Shakespeare, conspiracy, murder and mayhem, I knew this one was for me. The protagonist is a young American man named Peter Byerly, an antiquarian bookseller with an obsessive attraction to rare books and an equally obsessive aversion to social interaction. Byerly has become a virtual recluse since the death of his beloved Amanda nine months earlier, […]
Is Mankind Capable of Remaking Itself, asks Atwood
This final book in the trilogy offers a hopeful conclusion to Atwood’s frankly horrific depiction of our possible future. Maddaddam is the name of an action-oriented splitoff from the God’s Gardeners cult who—together with Crake’s bioengineered “children” who survived the so-called waterless flood that wiped most of humanity off the face of Earth—drive the action of this last book. While the Maddaddam survivors forage the ruins of their civilization for such things as tampons and flashlight batteries, they also learn how to raise a new […]
End of the World as Told by the Survivors
Unexpectedly, Atwood does not pick up in Year of the Flood where Oryx and Crake ended. Rather, she covers the same time-line as she did in her first novel, only this time she gives us a different viewpoint with which to greet the end of the world. In her first book, we learned that the world’s corporations had hired brilliant men—Crake among them—to bioengineer humanity in their own image—materialist, hedonistic, narcissistic. The profits have never been so good, the disparities between rich and poor never […]
Striking a Blow for Teenage Geekdom
A cute and well-written teen memoir for those kids—the majority of us, it would seem—who never managed to achieve popularity in school. Maya is a slightly plump, eye-glass wearing smarty to whom celebrity status, beautiful clothes, makeup and jewelry are someone else’s domain. She and her best friend Kenzie occupy the status below the school geeks and goths, according to her list which boasts the volleyball girls and football boys at the top of the heap. She is tired of being on the outs but […]
A Grisly Thriller with a Touch of Humor
The fifth in a series of thrillers about Portland Detective Archie Sheridan and his arch-nemesis and former lover Gretchen Lowell is both grisly and well-written: two crucial elements in a thriller worth the read. The essence of the plot is that horrendous murders are happening in apparently random ways, with only one linking piece of evidence that no one as yet understands. Detective Sheridan receives a summons to visit Gretchen, also known as the infamous “Beauty Killer,” a sadistic serial killer who is doing life […]
Deaver’s Skin Collector is unfortunately NOT The Bone Collector
Once again, we see Deaver at both his best and his worst. I am a long-time fan of Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme/Amelia Sachs forensic mysteries, and despite the fact that this latest novel contains Deaver’s hallmark thrills and chills and surprise twists and turns, I felt let down by the end. Perhaps it was because Deaver has such a complicated overlapping of plots that, in order to solve them all, he has our hero make 13th-hour leaps to conclusions which are simply not justified by the […]
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