I’m never sure if anyone reads my reviews here or not, but I figure, just in case someone does, I’m sorry that I’ve been so long without posting this year (something about teaching in 2014 sucked up all my energies) I thought I’d kick off with some of my first books from the year–a collection of picture books that ended up in a lot of conversations around the Caldecott Medal–my full break down and ballot can be read at my personal blog. With that, here […]
A Love triangle tale of neurotic mind vigilantes
Justine suffers from near-incapacitating hypochondriac whose mother died from a rare disease everyone refused to believe she had. Damn good reason to have health anxieties, I say. She struggles through each day as if it’s her last in case that elusive vein will explode in her brain. But living on edge is almost too much for her hunky, yet simple-minded boyfriend, Cubby. That is until she meets Packard, a mysterious Turkish restaurant owner, who says he can save her hypochondriac self-implosion. Justine (and myself!) is skeptical to say the […]
Strong Start, Weak Finish
If not for the humor in the exposition of her epistolary novel, I’d have never read, much less bought Maria Semple’s bestseller, Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2012). A satire of the Seattle-based super rich and privileged, I found myself not liking many of the characters because they typified so many of my stereotypes of the super rich: delusional, entitled, competitive, paranoid, and money/power/status obsessed. Despite my less than positive review, the novel is well-written and stylistically inventive. For these reasons, it gets three rather than two stars. Read […]
When in Rome…
Rabid fandom is one reason I’ve yet to watch Titanic and never got into Friends, Lost, among many other highly successful films and TV shows. Instead, I tend to dedicate my viewing time to the underdogs, which is to say that a lot of the shows that I do like tend to get cancelled, i.e. Arrested Development, Life, Chicago Code, Human Target, Men of a Certain Age. To date, The Good Wife is the only one of my faves to have escaped that fate. With that said, you can imagine how resistant […]
Nearly Gone
Nearly Gone is about a girl named Nearly who finds herself in a cat and mouse game with a murderer. She was just trying to win a physics scholarship, get out of the trailer park. Alas, a killer has to prey on her obsession with the classified section and leave a bunch of clues, then a bunch of bodies, that all point to Nearly as suspect number one. It’s not too bad, especially considering that there aren’t many mystery/thrillers in Teen books these days. You […]
Just writing this makes me want to go and listen to Miss Piggy singing “Five Gold Rings….ba-dum-dum-dum”
Usually, I review my 52 books and then take a break for the rest of the year. And after this review, I plan to do so. But since this is a holiday-themed book, I figured I would write something up. My True Love Gave to Me is a book of short stories, all Christmas themed. The stories are written by an all-star team of YA champions: Holly Black, Ally Carter, Matt de la Pena, Gayle Forman, Jenny Han, David Levithan, Kelly Link, Myra McEntire, Rainbow […]
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