Not my favorite Christie, but fun all the same. Of note: Since I first added this book to my TBR in 2008 (thanks, Goodreads!), I have developed a rather bad fear of flying, so this book (in which one passenger is murdered by another) was like, one nightmare scenario on top of another for me. Add wasps (FUCKING WASPS USELESS DEVIL BUGS) in to the mix and why don’t you just kill me already. This is a Poirot mystery, and a later one at that. I have tried in […]
Get yourself a 24-hour lawyer.
Okay, first, I love this series. I love the characters. I love the university setting. I love how weird it is. But as a whole, this wasn’t a super great trade paperback. It covers several events that don’t really form a cohesive story arc, even if the individual components were highly amusing. This volume is basically split into three: the end of their first year at university, an incident over their summer break where the girls attend a music festival, and the beginning of their […]
Miss Marple is in this one from the beginning!
I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I prefer Poirot books to Marple ones, but this one started off really well! One of the reasons I usually like Poirot better is that he’s usually more involved in the narrative. Miss Marple usually sidles in at the last moment and mostly does her work off page. But here, she was present from page one. Unfortunately, I just lost my motivation about halfway through as the mystery itself didn’t really hold my attention. Miss Marple’s childhood […]
Boy meets girl. Boy befriends girl. Boy offers to pretend to be girl’s baby daddy. You know, the usual.
This wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but I liked it. Hannah is a pregnant fifteen year old. Aaron is the new boy in school, and through a series of circumstances that are actually more plausible than I thought they would be, he ends up volunteering to be the father of her baby, to help guard her reputation and support her while the real father is, er, out of the picture. No average teenage boy would do this, and there is a plausible reason (I […]
Love these girls. Love this series.
“Do you need to go somewhere and repeatedly fail the Bechdel test?” “Yes I do.” After a little bit of a weird slump with Vol. 3, I am back in love with this series. Susan is fresh off her break-up with McGraw (she sees moustaches everywhere!), and tries to fill the hole with various activities and other men, and nothing is working. Esther has vowed not to come back to school after the Easter holidays after messing everything up all year and in general being […]
Dear Fake Character People: An Open Letter to (most of) the Characters in Mansfield Park
This is the fourth in my series of posts wherein I get weird and write reviews for classic books in the form of letters to the characters. I’m re-reading all of Jane Austen’s books in 2016, and it has so far been lovely, even with this one. May was Mansfield Park month, and I was looking forward to it, as it has been my least favorite Austen since I first read it, and thought that might make for an interesting reading experience. In fact, until now, it’s the only one of her books I […]