The Bone Orchard by Paul Doiron
cbr17bingo Free Meeting up with our old friend Mike Bowditch, game warden, it turns out that he is no longer a game warden! Except for one of his first supervisors, Sgt. Kathy Frost, none of the rest of the folks he’s worked for have been too keen on him. There is that odd predicament concerning the number of murdered people that seem to turn up in his vicinity. He had been sent to the hinterlands of Maine for awhile now, but can finally take a […]
84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
CBR 17 BINGO: Favorite (revisiting this old favorite for Bingo) BINGO: Favorite, Red, Family, Border, Green Visiting local bookshops is standard practice whenever my husband and I go on vacation. Recently in Vancouver, we wandered into a store called MacLeod’s Books, which is one of those places where you can easily get lost among the piles. Books are roughly organized into genres, but each section is overwhelmed with stacks and stacks of volumes spilling over from the shelves. This is the type of place where […]
The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
CBR Bingo: ‘B’ Horror isn’t my usual genre, but it’s October, and I really enjoyed one of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s previous novels (Mexican Gothic), so I figured I would give her latest release, The Bewitching, a try. This is a novel about witches, told over three timelines. Minerva, in 1998, is a Mexican grad student studying horror literature in New England. Her thesis is on her favourite author, Beatrice “Betty” Tremblay, who attended the same college in the 1930s. Minerva gains access to papers via a friend of […]
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
CBR 17 BINGO: “G” (for Glass) Back in 2019, I recommended Educated to my sister. After she read and enjoyed (not sure that’s the right word) it , she asked me whether I’d ever read The Glass Castle. “In some ways, it’s worse,” she told me. I finally got around to reading The Glass Castle, and I understand now where she was coming from. While Tara Westover’s parents were consistently ignorant and controlling, the parents of Jeanette Walls were people of dichotomy. Her father was […]
The Rainbow Troops by Andrea Hirata
The Rainbow Troops (Laskar Pelangi) was first published about 20 years ago in Indonesia, where it soon became an absolute bestseller. The book, very loosely based on Andrea Hirata’s own childhood, is set on Belitong Island, where the people are poor, but the surrounds are rich in tin. Most children in the region struggle to obtain an education, but the young Malay boy Ikal and his friends do have one option open to them; a small Muhammadiya (Islamic) school run by an early teacher, Pak […]
The Inheritance by Ilona Andrews
Bingo Square: I If you pay attention to the writing duo/married couple behind the pen name Ilona Andrews, you know that they every once in a while publish serialized stories on their website/blog, and often these intended short stories turn into novellas or full novels. Apparently, half of them are also aware of this while one still thinks they really could keep it to a short story. If you enjoy Ilona Andrews, you’ll see a lot of types that reoccur throughout their fiction – highly […]
