Goodreads overview: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” So the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter remembered the chilling events that led her down the turning drive past the beeched, white and naked, to the isolated gray stone manse on the windswept Cornish coast. With a husband she barely knew, the young bride arrived at this immense estate, only to be inexorably drawn into the life of the first Mrs. de Winter, the beautiful Rebecca, dead but never forgotten… her suite of rooms never touched, […]
“…the cliche you have adopted for yourself isn’t working.”
The Radleys is a vampire novel that isn’t a vampire novel. The family are vampires, to be sure, but vampirism here is a metaphor for identity in general. The novel, then, explores the consequences of denying one’s true self; the facade erected by the Radleys alienates the family members from each other, and the family unit from society at large, ironically, as the facade is constructed for the single purpose of fitting in. The Radley parents, Peter and Helen, are abstaining vampires — they don’t […]
Going Viral
Tory Brennen is good at science (which isn’t surprising since her aunt is Temperence Brennen, renowned forensic anthropologist), but also good at getting into trouble. When she and her friends Hi, Shelton, and Ben find an old dog tag while searching for a wolf-dog family on Loggerhead Island, an island off Charleston, SC that houses a facility for sea turtle research, Tory sets off a chain of events that not only endanger her life and the lives of her friends, but also change their genetic […]
“War has many unexpected casualties”
I almost hate to make this statement, but I like Holocaust literature. Now, I’m not talking Mein Kampf or anything that glorifies the atrocities of Hitler and his Nazi goons. I’m talking stories of heroism and survival like Night by Elie Wiesel, Ashes by Kathryn Lasky, Number the Stars by Lois Lowery, and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Now add to that list The Klipfish Code by Mary Casonova. I’m not a big history person, so it often amazes me just how many places […]
Oh Snowman, Where You Gonna Run To?
Snowman is the last man on Earth. The survivor of some extinction-level event, he spends his days on a beach, fighting the elements and watching over the Children of Crake and Oryx. These children are not like Snowman, who used to be called Jimmy before the world died. Snowman is their caretaker, of sorts, but as the days wear on and his supplies dwindle, he is forced to leave the Children behind and set off for the city in search of more food. Unfortunately, this […]
A more accurate title would have been Uninteresting
And so we reach the penultimate book in my apparently neverending Booker Prize Longlist challenge of 2013. Apparently, it’s a “much anticipated” new novel, which I’m sure is the case for those of us who have read MacLeod’s previous novels and knew this one was coming out. As it is, I was blissfully unaware of either, but the subject of this novel was very much up my alley, so to speak. Set in 1940, it focuses on a maddeningly middle class family, the Beaumonts. Geoffrey […]
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