Miss Cecily Hale is at a country house with a number of friends, and they are trying to keep themselves entertained with stories and diversions. Cecily really wants nothing more than to catch the attention of Luke Trenton, Viscount Merritt, the man she has pined for since he kissed her four years ago, on the eve of going to war. The war is over, but it changed Luke irrevocably. His memories of Cecily kept him company on the battlefield, but he has returned from the […]
What the hell did I get up to last night?
3.5 stars Rachel, trying to drown the sorrows of her recent divorce in alcohol and denial travels to London on the train every morning and back to the suburb where she shares a flat with an old friend in the evenings. As she passes the area where she used to live, she observes a seemingly golden couple and makes up a fantasy narrative about their life to comfort herself in her loneliness. She’s named them Jess and Jason and believes them to have a perfect […]
Both Sides Now
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Sympathizer is a confession written by a nameless narrator to a nameless commandant. The narrator suffers from the ability to see both sides of events and of people. Through his confession, he reveals his life story, which is tied up with the history of his country, Vietnam, and foreign intervention there. Given his sympathetic nature, the narrator is able to see at times the good intentions but especially the bad of all those involved in his life […]
And the moral of the story is, never doubt Andrew Smith.
Longtime Cannonballers know of my obsession with all things Andrew Smith. From the moment that I first read Grasshopper Jungle I was obsessed with reading as much of this work as I could, as quickly as possible. When I finished his books, I started reading the books that he tweets about and books by friends of his. I discovered AS King and We Are the Ants. So when I saw that the highly lauded Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda actually had a blurb from Smith on the cover, really, I […]
I loved the first third of this so much that the rest doesn’t even really matter.
I’ve read an awful lot of zombie stories over the past 10 years. I’m really not sure why, as zombies aren’t really my thing. I don’t watch The Walking Dead and I’m not an aficionado of George Romero movies. I think its just ended up that a lot of authors that I like have tried a zombie story, so I’ve gone along with it. Some have been great, like World War Z or This Year’s Class Picture. Some have been less wonderful…like Pride and Prejudice […]
Pretty Fly for an Antiquated Gay Stereotype
A couple of points to start off with: 1. I never saw the 1999 film with Matt Damon and Jude Law 2. We’re going to ignore the “homosexual villain” trope used in this book. It was an unfortunate thing in the 1950s and 1960s but Tom Ripley is a fascinating character beyond that. Tom Ripley is a small time con-artist and forger eking (and gay man, even though it’s not said explicitly) out a living in New York City when the father of Dickie […]
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