Life After Life has been on my radar for over a year. It sounded intriguing – what would happen if you lived your life over and over again, and how would minute changes in your choices and actions affect that life? I was intrigued, but not drawn in. My mom read it with her book club late last year and her reaction to the work was “it was different. Not bad, but definitely different.” With that less than stellar review I pushed it further down […]
“A dark time comes. My Time. If it offends you, stop me.”
Back when I reviewed Prince of Thorns I had two complaints that kept my rating at a 3 instead of a 4. Those were: 1. World-Building. If my roommate hadn’t told me about the fact that this was supposed to be in our distant future and that we’re the builders I wouldn’t have had a clue. I love Mark Lawrence’s style, but much of this novel may well have been taking place in a setting bubble for as much as I grasped from the page. […]
Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you. Makes you predictable, makes you weak
I blame the internet. Earlier this year I was telling my roommate about a run of books I was in that were great, but sad. She’s dubbed my year as “The Depression Readings”. I mean, to a certain extent this is fair. I have read Burial Rites, The Black Country, Tell the Wolves I’m Home and The Age of Miracles in a 6 week period. That’s a lot of heavy reading, emotionally. So, at some point she decided that it was her mission to bring […]
I prefer bookstores
“There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care.” (288). It’s hard to know what to make of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. It’s a quest, it’s a mystery, it’s one man finding himself, and it’s the coalescing of a group of friends. It’s all this and more. Clocking in at fewer than 300 pages, Robin Sloan manages to craft an epic adventure for his protagonist and his merry band of players. And it’s simply delightful. The story is based […]
“…as if he knew even then that there existed under everything a universal grief”
I suppose that The Age of Miracles can be viewed as a dystopian novel. In it our narrator, Julia, tells us about the year she turned 12 and the Earth’s turning slowed down, eventually leading to weeks of daylight and weeks of darkness. It can also be said that this is a sad book, about the dying and destruction of our world. These things are true, but somehow Karen Thompson Walker prevents the novel from being as unbearably sad as the description might have you […]