A spring evening in 1985, nineteen-year-old Frank Mackie is waiting impatiently outside for his girlfriend Rosie Daly, as they plan to elope and move to London, making a new life for themselves away from the hard life of the Dublin working poor. When she doesn’t show, Frank goes looking for her in the abandoned house a few door down, and finds a note that suggests she’s gone off without him. As Frank’s father is a violent drunk, his mother is neurotic and shrewish and his […]
And it was all going so well…
This is a short story/YA book written by Neil Gaiman, and performed by a full cast in the audiobook. I suppose we get a full cast in exchange for the illustrations we do not get to see. It is an extended and alternate take on Sleeping Beauty, as you may have guessed. And if you know Neil Gaiman, you may have also guessed that nothing is straightforward here. The story seems straightforward enough – the sleeping curse on the kingdom is spreading, and Snow White, the queen […]
Stockholm syndromed by a crappy book.
It’s hard for me to know exactly what I’m reviewing when I review this book. It was my first audiobook, and the narrator was awful. Am I really reviewing the concept of audiobooks, new to me after 24 years as an avid reader? Am I reviewing the narrator, kind of? Or the book? One thing is certain: the latter two things were terrible. So I guess it really doesn’t matter. Dr. Mike Scanlon is a podiatrist serving in the Army, repairing feet blown up by […]
The problem with my life was that it was someone else’s idea.
4.5 stars Aristotle “Ari” is a conflicted teenager growing up in El Paso in the late 1980s. He’s sixteen and a loner, but doesn’t really mind his lack of friends. He’s very close to his mother, whose a high school teacher (not at Ari’s school), but wishes he could talk to his dad, a Vietnam vet about, well, anything really. The youngest of his family, Ari’s twin sisters are much older than him and his brother is in prison, never spoken about by anyone in […]
I’ve Perhaps Gone Gif Crazy.
Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling psuedonym), narrated by Robert Glenister
*Note: This review was completed in 2017 before the author’s views towards our trans siblings began to be widely known. My reading experience was what it was and these reviews will remain up, but it should be noted that I find her TERF values abhorrent, which have only become more clear over time, and her doubling down in Summer 2020 has made the decision to walk away from her as a creative force the only acceptable choice for me. I will no longer be supporting […]
“It’s sort of like glowing in your own dark.”
In honor of the late Carrie Fisher, I picked up her audiobook of Wishful Drinking. This was written/performed about 8 years ago after Ms. Fisher went through electroconvulsive therapy, with a side effect of the therapy affecting her memories. So she wrote the show/book to help her remember. I highly recommend the audiobook version, as Carrie reads/performs her own work. We tend to skip around in time a lot, which I suppose is understandable given her condition. Before I picked this up I really had […]
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