I’ve been recommending Golden Boy to everyone lately but I’ve had a tough time coming up with a review that can do justice to the book. Here goes…. Golden Boy is about Max, an intersex teenager in present day England. When Max is taken advantage of by a childhood friend, he begins to question who he is and what intersexuality actually means for him. In addition, his parents, both trying to do the best for Max, weigh in with opposing opinions. There’s also Max’s love […]
Great vampire premise, bad vampire execution
This was the second selection of my brunch book club, not my usual fair, but I was excited to read a bit of Young Adult fiction because my life as of late has been busy so at least I could get another book read under my belt. I’m a big vampire fan so I went into this cautiously optimistic. So many vampire tales have let me down tremendously (I’m looking at you, Twilight) so I didn’t get my hopes up, but went into this looking […]
Mrs. Dalloway
I’m on a quest this year to read 50 books by 50 women writers (in honor of my impending 50th birthday and #ReadWomen2014), and as I’ve never read anything by Virginia Woolf, this felt like the right time to get to it. Mrs. Dalloway is a short novel by Woolf that covers the span of one day, marked by the hourly tolling of the bells. I would characterize it as having stream-of-consciousness narration, with the narrators switching from one to the next as they encounter […]
A treasure chest for those who like conspiracy theories
Seventeenth book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge. What could one want from a historical yet fictional novel? That it be accurate when it is talking of history and that it be filled with spectacular fictional tales. In Foucalt’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco delivers on both counts. This is a book that is full of historical facts and some amazing conspiracy theories. There are so many of them, that every other line has a reference to some obscure cult or secret organization with events that […]
So British, you can’t open the book unless the kettle is on
The Dark is Rising sequence is the story of four children, the three Drew children – Barney, Jane, & Simon, and Will Stanton. Will is important because he is an Old One, a member of a race of beings who have magical powers and can move through time. The Drew children are important precisely because they are not magical beings. They are ordinary human children. The sequence is five books long: Over Sea, Under Stone, The Dark is Rising, Greenwitch, The Grey King, and Silver […]
The Curious Incident of the Brilliant Book
So it turns out that I have a soft spot for the unconventional amateur sleuth. Miss Marple, Jessica Fletcher, Flavia de Luce, Agatha Raisin, the list goes on. It’s a miracle I haven’t read the Shardlake series, really. One amateur sleuth to which Bauer and her excellent novel owe something of a debt is Christopher Boone. The narrator of Mark Haddon’s groundbreaking Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time was never noted as specifically having Asperger’s and was investigating who killed his neighbour’s dog, which […]
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