Are You Sleeping Little One by Hans-Christian Schmidt & Cynthia Vance – An adorable bedtime board book to add to your toddler’s collection: The illustrations are cheerful, sweet & simple – even the snake is cute! The baby animals are all given appropriate names (joey, owlet), so there’s some sneaky learning involved, and (because I am the literal worst when it comes to rhyme schemes and needing the meter to be ab.so.lute.ly perfect, and “flamingo” is pushing it a bit too far syllable-wise,) 9/10 points […]
Immortals, Gangsters, and Bootlegging but no Capone
Baccano!: The Rolling Bootlegs is as the title suggests (‘baccano’ supposedly means ‘commotion’) a crazy story with a lot of characters and a lot of action. I have to admit, I’d seen the anime of this story already (I’m pretty sure there’s a manga too but I haven’t seen that), so I kind of knew who was who, but the novel version actually includes a lot of things that made more sense to me in this format, including the identity of the demon who provides […]
Arrested Development, No Bluths. No, strike that, I refuse to be flippant about this gorgeous novel.
When I read Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” over a decade ago, it stuck with me for quite some time. I think “The Goldfinch” is going to haunt me even longer. I don’t know how she does it, but Tartt’s writing style is, for me at least, the literary version of an earworm that has no burn factor. I could not stop thinking about this book every time I put it down. I kept bringing it up with people at work. My dreams were screwed up. […]
Pygmalion meets Jane the Ripper — a fascinating bit of fictionalized history
This is a lengthy, historically detailed and excitingly written mash-up of Pygmalion meets Jane the Ripper, with a high density of fascinating issues woven into the fabric of the story. Savage Girl takes place in 1875, and begins in Virginia City, Nevada, where a supremely wealthy New York family is visiting by private train. The father, Freddy Delegate, is a collector of human oddities and is intrigued by a supposedly genuine “feral child,” a young woman who is the star of a freak show and […]