In an alternate history Victorian London with Steampunk gadgets, werewolves, a ruling nobility known as the Echelon, where the men are all enhanced with vampire blood, Miss Honoria Todd (who certainly doesn’t in any way dress or appear anything like the burlesque streetwalker on the cover of the book) has been forced to move to the Rookeries of Whitechapel after the death of her father. She is working as an elocution coach under an assumed name to support her younger sister (who also takes in […]
This is what happens when you get overly ambitious about your science projects
I refuse to spoilertag anything in this review, because people, this book is nearly 200 years old. You’ve had ample time to read this book, if anything in my review spoils it for you, on your own head be it. Captain Robert Walton writes letters to his sister Margaret, recounting his journey to the North Pole in a quest for scientific fame. He writes of the strange and charismatic man they rescue in the wilderness, a Victor Frankenstein. Through Walton’s letters, we also get Frankenstein’s […]
The Jewish immigrant experience in a delightful memoir
Although dubbed a novel, Up From Orchard Street is a memoir in the same way Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes was—honest, poignant, often painful, but filled with the sights, smells and sounds of the immigrant experience. Widmer’s story takes place in New York’s Lower East Side in the ‘30s, where many Eastern European Jews had settled in search of a new and hopefully better future in the U.S. Manya Roth, aka Bubby, is the indulgent mother of flashy womanizing smart-alecky Jack, her only child from a […]
Demythologizing a tragedy.
Firstly, this book was excellent, and I recommend it for everyone. So if you don’t read this review further than the first sentence, you’ve already gotten the message. Columbine is a book ten years in the making. Dave Cullen was one of the first journalists on the scene the day that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold wreaked their violence, and he spent the next decade painstakingly researching the incident, determined to tell the story of what actually happened that day. This might seem like a ploy […]
These Shipmates Were a Tad Too Wordy
The Wordy Shipmates is pretty true to Sarah Vowell form: chatty historical memoir. Her style in this book reminds me of the particularly engaging 10th grade American history teacher I had in 1998: lots of enthusiasm, lots of primary texts, a few personal anecdotes and musings thrown in for good measure. She focuses on one historical point in this book, telling us all about the first American Puritans and how they got this great experiment started. Winthrop, Williams, and Cotton are well-developed characters and Vowell […]
A woman for a different time
Another day, another Courtney Milan novel. My library can be a little slow in stocking Milan’s latest novels, and then sometimes I forget about them. So, The Countess Conspiracy was published back in 2013, but I’m only getting to it now. The story involves Violet Waterfield, Countess of Cambury and Sebastian Malheur, well-known rake. Violet is a closet scientist, obsessed with plants and their genes, in a time where many dislike Darwin, dislike discussing procreation in public, and where women scientists are nonexistent. Violet’s old […]
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