I’m late coming to Madeleine L’Engle’s The Time Quartet. I’ve heard about since college, but never was interested in reading the series. This year, the book club decided to do a Science Fiction read and needed some help selecting a title. This was one proposed by several of the members and ultimately won as the choice for November. This pushed me to jump and see what A Wrinkle in Time was all about. I had a mixed read of the novel. On one hand it […]
Atwood’s writing is the elegance of despair
Damn. Look, we all love reading. And it’s probably also true that most of us want to, at some point, write a book, right? That’s not just me? Well, this book covers a lot of ground the ground that I had cleared for a book I’ve been playing around with. And though I’ll probably never write a book, that’s still disheartening. So this disappointment kind of hovers over this entire review, like a black cloud of self-doubt and broken dreams. Also, I approached this book […]
Dr Who Meets The Rook with Game of Thrones-level Dysfunction
I picked up Just One Damned Thing After Another because I had been considering it and because I had a coupon for a local bookstore, and I don’t say no to those often. I usually don’t like first person narrative and I still don’t, but there was enough story and character here to over-ride that instinct. This story can’t quite decide if it wants to be action-adventure, character driven, sci-fi, or romance-drama. While it’s not a total success, overall the blend works pretty well. The problem […]
The one with the skunks.
So Cassie is the killjoy Animorph, apparently? I wasn’t a part of the fandom back in the day, and I’m still not, so I really have zero idea what other Animorphs fans think of plots and characters. I just know what I think, and I always liked her when I was a kid, perhaps because I have a permanent streak of killjoy in me myself. I was always the first kid asleep at slumber parties by several hours (if I didn’t call my mom to […]
What would you do, if you could do it all over again?
Like many of the books I read for my book club, I had not heard of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014) by Claire North, and I probably would not have chosen it on my own. It didn’t help that the Amazon page said this book was for eight to twelve year-old kids. Fortunately, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August turned out to be a thought-provoking and entertaining book. Harry August is a special kind of person, which he discovers in his second life. He […]
The effects of reading 4 before 1
I accidentally read book 4 of this series (The Secret of Abdu El Yezadi) before book 1, The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, so my perspective here may be a little out of whack, but oh well. I think a lot of things meant to be surprises or reveals were not because I’d already seen the results. Burton complains briefly of feeling disconnected, and the reason for that gets fully disclosed in the 4th book, so I guess I missed wondering about that too, […]
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