Lucy Wood’s 2015 debut novel Weathering is stunning and homely; it simultaneously feels like a chilly walk in the rain and a cup of tea by a fireside. It’s a non-scary story about ghosts, and a scary story about loneliness and memory; it’s a story about rivers and birds and photographs and family. Ada is a single mother with a bright but complicated small daughter called Pepper and an even more difficult relationship with her own mother Pearl, recently deceased but not gone. (This isn’t […]
She Has a Blow Hole!
I picked up this snappily titled free book fully expecting to hate-read it, but I found that I didn’t actually hate it. I even posted the blurb on fb and dared people to read it (all smug like). But no one took me up on my jerky offer so I had to do it myself. And you know what? It offered everything the title said: I got love, I got lattes, and I was introduced to a mutant (in the form of a dolphgirl–yup, half […]
I Got On This Train Too
This review is for the audiobook version of The Girl On The Train. I’ve had mixed feelings about this book. I had to stop listening to it because the narrators were getting on my nerves, but then picked it back up to try again. They still bothered me, but the story got better, and the end was somehow both exciting and predictable simultaneously. As others have noted, the narrators are all unreliable, as are the accounts we get from those they interact with. This novel […]
Satire with a heart
3.5 stars. This is a strange little book. I know a lot of cannonballers have read this and it was so popular that most people will have at least heard of it. It’s been on my TBR for ages and ages honestly. I might not have read it if I’d known it was satire. My preferred satire delivery method is via the screen not the printed word. It makes me uncomfortable to devote several hours to it. Luckily, Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a cross […]
Pointillism in the Form of a Novel
Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic is extraordinary. I’ve read nothing quite like it. It’s a novel that reads like a short history (130 pages) and a free-form poem. The characters are not particular individuals, but rather the Japanese American community and white America. The time frame is from the turn of the century until 1943, when Japanese Americans were rounded up and sent to internment camps. In all my years as a reader, I can think of only two novels made me truly […]
Good, Could’ve Been Great
About 130 pages into Among the Ten Thousand Things, the author, Julia Pierpont, starts a new section of her book with the title “That Year and Those That Followed.” In the following chapter Pierpont’s story jumps forward many years. Up to this point she had carefully unveiled her characters and plot. It was detailed and purposeful. And then, all of a sudden, it jumps forward years. And from that point forward I lost interest in the book. It’s as if she didn’t know what to say when […]
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