Charles McCarry meets the kind of Goldilocks/middlebrow standard I look for in spy novels: not too complex, not too simple, not too jingoistic, not too cynical. Juuuuust right. This is the third I’ve read of his Paul Christopher series and like the last two, the plot gripped me. It’s a deep plot but not so convoluted that it loses the reader. Every scene has a purpose; there are few red herrings. It hurtles its way towards its sad, surprising end, tying in perfectly with the […]
You Expect Me to Believe Everything You Say, Well, Okay
I wasn’t planning to review any of these books. I’ve read them all so many times, and they are all hopelessly outdated, especially Neither Here Nor There and The Lost Continent. These are books that I read and adored when I was younger, that helped me dream about a world outside of the small town I grew up in, and that even led to an aborted solo road trip when I was 21. Reading them after many years away brought back sweet memories, but there’s […]
Stick With This One, It’s Worth It
This is my first ever experience reading a book before print, and it took a little while for me to get into this one, but once I was in, the payoff was worth it. Never Anyone But You follows Suzanne and Claude (Luci) from falling in love as teenagers in the early 1900s through the many different Paris art movements post World War I, onto their Nazi resistance during World War II, and their final years on the small isle of Jersey. In truth, the first […]
Just because you can write a 1000 page book doesn’t mean you have to…
El laberinto de los espíritus (literally, The Labyrinth of the Spirits) is the fourth book in the saga of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. This saga started in 2001 with The Shadow of the Wind, followed by The Angel’s Game and The Prisoner of Heaven. All three books take place in Barcelona, in the aftermath of the Civil War. If you are not familiar with them, I recommend you get your hands on a copy of The Shadow of the Wind […]
The reward of true service, surely, is to be asked for more.
At long last, we reach the end of the “Temeraire” series. Hot dang, it’s been 9 books… where would our heroes travel? how would they encounter Napoleon? would Laurence have complicated feelings about women in the military? would Temeraire rake his giant claws into the ground in distress over something? where would they settle down for retirement? all these questions had to be answered, and more! It’s no secret that I’ve adored this series, even though it became deeply repetitive and predictable. And in a surprising […]
Never get involved in a land war in Asia
I will admit, I thought I might be out-smarting these books, with the formula all figured out, but this one, the third in the “Temeraire” series, totally took me on a ride. Delightful, surprising, and exciting. Well played, Novik. Black Powder War bothers with barely any passage of time after Throne of Jade. The company is still in China, preparing for travel back to England, when natural disaster and politics coincide and intervene, causing Laurence and Temeraire to take their scrappy crew of aviators overland […]
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