Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne has packed up her children and moved from San Francisco to Europe to get away from her philandering husband. While she is in France, she meets and eventually develops a relationship with Robert Louis Stevenson, a man ten years her junior, who will become famous as the author of pieces such Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (unfortunately, that’s the only thing of his I’ve read). Their life and their relationship ends up being very determined by his […]
Surprise! We don’t all believe the same thing
I’ve been struggling with writing a review of this book for a couple of weeks. Stephen Prothero is a religious studies professor. His thesis is that all religions are are different and that their differences matter. He refutes the bromide that all religions are separate paths to the same goal and therefore we should all just get along. Religions are distinctly different, beginning with the human problems they are trying to solve. For example Christians believe the problem is original sin, for Hindus the problem […]
Ruthless people
I heard about Serena from a Buzzfeed list of books to read before they become movies; as a huge fan of Jennifer Lawrence I knew I’d be seeing the movie so the book climbed my “to read” list. Set in the wilderness of North Carolina in the 1930s, Serena is the story of a wealthy married couple in the timber business who crush anyone who gets in their way. Pemberton impregnates a 17-year old girl, Rachel, before Serena joins him at the logging site but […]
A Victorian romance with depression, theft and blackmail attempts
Disclaimer! I was granted an ARC of this from Pocket Books through NetGalley in return for a fair and honest review. I should also add that by the time I was granted the ARC, I’d already bought the book in pre-order, because with one horrible exception, she writes awesome books, and is on my automatic pre-order list. Once again, the cover image has little to nothing to do with the contents of the book, although the cover model is at least a redhead, like the heroine. I don’t think […]
An Unbelievable Story of Survival
Unbroken is one of those books that leaves you shaking your head at the atrocities that men have committed against men and women in war. There are moments in this book when I thought, how unlucky can this guy be, to go from one sadistic camp officer to another who is worse. The fact that any of the men interred in the prison camps described in this book is a testament to human resilience. The book is aptly subtitled. Unbroken is the life story of […]
Yet another Book Thief Review
Every so often you find a story that pulls you in and holds you tight in the grip of anxiety. Spoilers aside, we all know what it is we’re afraid of in any story about a German family hiding a Jewish man in their basement during World War II. We’re terrified something will happen to him, or the family hiding him. We’re terrified of concentration camps and public beatings. We’re terrified of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. We’re terrified of indoctrination and […]
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