Jacques Tardi’s World War I opus, Goddamn This War!, is a hard beast to categorize, at least when using English terminology. It’s not a comic book, and for a graphic novel it’s not very novelistic. But call it what you will, it’s hard to deny its power. This is a harrowing masterpiece of one unnamed soldier’s experiences in the Great War that so wholly failed to be the war to end all wars. Things the reader won’t find in Goddamn This War! include plot and dialogue. Does […]
Connie Willis writes books for book lovers
I’m a little sad that I only heard of Connie Willis this year, of course from all the glowing CBR6 reviews of To Say Nothing of the Dog, which might be my new favorite book. After reading two more by Connie Willis, she is definitely my new favorite author. Connie Willis writes books that acknowledge and build on the wealth of information that already exists in the world. She writes about scholars, researchers, scientists, and historians. She writes about people who read extensively, people who know their librarians by their […]
Are you more heroic if you sacrifice yourself for people who shun and fear you?
Disclaimer! This was granted to me by Open Road Integrated Media through NetGalley in return for a fair and unbiased review. Aerin is the lonely, ostracized daughter of the ruler of Damar. She has pale skin and fiery red hair amongst a people who are bronzed with dark hair. She cannot even remember who first told her the story, but she has known for as long as she can remember that her mother was a commoner witch-woman who came from the North, who ensorcelled the […]
Curtsies, corsets, tea parties and spies
Sophronia Temminnick is not all a proper young lady should be. She’d much rather be climbing trees, spying on conversations in the dumb-waiter and dismantle machinery than converse politely over tea. So her mother sends her off to boarding school, more specifically Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. Sophronia makes new friends on her way there. Miss Dimity Plumleigh-Teignmott and her brother Pillover are both being sent away to school (Pillover is to go to a boy’s academy, naturally) and discover that […]
A romp through the bayou in pursuit of a mad axeman with a rogues’ gallery of investigators.
Based on the real life murders in New Orleans during 1918-1919, The Axeman’s Jazz is a pulpy slice of true crime that rattles along at a brisk pace, neatly filling in the gaps between facts with entertaining and believable scenes. Celestin populates the city with a motley crew of people that wouldn’t feel out of place in 1950’s noir. There’s the weary cop with the hidden secret, the mobster with dreams of getting out, the journalist with an addiction, the plucky young agent in search of meaning […]
Never Trust a Man Called Gaston
My grandmother loved Victoria Holt, and I must have read my fair share of these historical romances from her stash when spending summers at her place, back in the day. The only one I can actively remember is The India Fan, but there must have been others. How else would you explain the fact that I could predict much of the plot of Seven for a Secret by the end of the first chapter? Holt has her patterns, her beloved tropes, and she turns to them […]