I feel a little bad rating this only three stars, but I rate on enjoyment, and Alias Grace took me two months of slogging to finish. Even though it’s a good book and under different circumstances I might have liked it more (and perhaps I will re-read?), I just was not in the mood for reading it. At all. So, three stars. I mean, seriously, it’s not the book’s fault that most serious fiction makes me anxious right now. Or that all I want to do half the […]
Triple Cannonballing with Tana French
It’s almost ridiculous how easy she makes it look, writing a book this good. I don’t even know what to say anymore about her books. They are all just so, so good. And the way she jumps from character to character each book gives her room to play around with different structures and themes, and yet still stay within the framework of a murder mystery novel. I love murder mystery novels, but I don’t love these books because of the mysteries (although I don’t think […]
This time-spanning lit-fic didn’t really work for me.
So apparently this book is kind of like Cloud Atlas because it takes place over different time periods with different characters, and those time periods and characters are all connected somehow by recurring images and themes. But honestly, I wish I would have read Cloud Atlas instead because that’s supposed to be amazing, and while this was interesting, and I think my book club is going to get a good discussion out of it, I wouldn’t say that it works as a story. I feel […]
“If I’ve learned one thing today, it’s that teenage girls make Moriarty look like a babe in the woods.”
Well, there goes my last Tana French book. When is the next one??? (Seriously. When. I need it.) Like the previous four Tana French books (all part of the Dublin Murder Squad series), this book follows a detective from the Murder Squad as they investigate a murder, all the while it gets sneakily personal and deep. Also like previous Tana French books, it is secretly obsessed with friendship, how connections between people are formed and broken. This one she breaks the mold a little, though. […]
Not my fave Tana French, but still great.
“‘I’m the least fanciful guy around, but on nights when I wonder whether there was any point to my day, I think about this: the first thing we ever did, when we started turning into humans, was draw a line across the cave door and say: Wild stays out. What I do is what the first men did. They built walls to keep back the sea. They fought the wolves for the hearth fire.’” “Just about everything in this life is treacherous, ready to twist […]
Tana French is an evil sorceress. Her words are her magical weapons.
It’s not entirely hyperbole when I say that Tana French is magic. When I’m reading her books, more than with any other author I’ve ever read, I feel ensorcelled. Like, I’m being pulled in to the book with ropes that have been tied around my emotions, and it’s entirely not in my control how much I’m allowed to be inside the story. Her books are wrenching. So much humanity in there. Joy and suffering and pain and longing and regret. All at the same time. Plus […]