Never Let Me Go is one of the strangest books I have read this year and in order to try to make sense of it, I’m afraid I’m going to be engaging in some plot spoiling. Actually, this may not be overly spoiler-y, as the reader figures out most of what I’m going to reveal early on in the novel. Ishiguro wants it that way, I think, because his characters experience the same thing. They know what is going to happen to them, and yet…. […]
Men Being Dinks, Women Dealing With the Fallout
Alice is abandoned by her husband on their Honeymoon. Abandoned as in she wakes up one morning and he’s gone with just a note stating that he’s bouncing on the whole marriage, no further explanation. When she gets home she calls his mom and his office and quickly realizes no one in his life has any more idea what’s going on that she does. With no idea really what to do, Alice goes back to work at the gallery she manages and tries to act […]
Can a story about the fall of a Soviet regime stand up 25 years later?
When The Porcupine was published in 1992, the world was still absorbing the dramatic events of the anti-Communist revolutions that started in the late 1980s, culminating in the reunification of Germany in 1990 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Influenced by these events, Barnes spun this tale that takes place in a fictional Soviet satellite country that some critics will swear is based on Bulgaria, while others will insist it’s obviously inspired by Romania. In this unnamed nation, the Communist Party has […]
I can’t rate this book, but my IRL book club got great discussion out of it.
Just a warning: This review will spoil a main plot point of the novel, because I don’t know how to talk about it at all without mentioning it, even though said plot point doesn’t occur until about halfway through. If you don’t want to be spoiled (and really, in this case, I think you should be so you know what you’re getting into), here is a brief summary of my feelings on this book, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things: Extremely well written. Puts you […]
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 […]
Deserving of Its Newberry Honor
Last year my daughter read and did an oral presentation on The Book of Three, first volume of The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander. To help her with the project I re-read it and reviewed it for Cannonball 8. I read aloud to her at bedtime and her most recent choice was book two of The Prydain Chronicles, The Black Cauldron. Re-reading these books as an adult has been an eye opener to the craft of Alexander’s writing. Previously unnoticed seeds are planted in this book that don’t […]
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