I read TheShitWizard’s review and immediately bought this book, read it, and loved it. I am all about some adult-level fairy tales. This is right up my alley. Vasya is a wild child, the fifth in her family, in Northern Russia. She inherited her mother’s and grandmother’s second sight – the ability to see and interact with the invisible guardians, or chyerti. A battle is brewing, though, between the Bear and the Frost-Demon. Konstantin, a compelling and pious priest arrives in the village and introduces […]
If aliens landed, we’d still be idiots.
Reading ideas come from all sorts of places. While I’m a big sci-fi fan, I’d admittedly never heard of the Strugatsky brothers until I read an article about European dystopian games in a recent edition of Game Informer magazine. (For you cool people who don’t know about Game Informer, it’s the magazine you get an automatic subscription to when you sign up for a rewards card at GameStop stores. It’s pretty good!) I found out that the influential S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game was based on a […]
A guide on how to cram every known stereotype in one single book
When my bookclub chose a thriller taking place in Russia for the month of June, I was ecstatic. I am a big fan of crime procedurals and I love Saint Petersburg, so I was sold – until I realized it was actually written by a Brit. Now, I’m not saying people cannot write books in whichever culture they’d wish to, I was just apprehensive because when you tackle something like this, you better do a superb job of it – otherwise it will feel like […]
The Perfect Cozy Fairy Tale with a Dash of Religion, Politics and Russian History
I loved this book so much! In many ways, it was a straightforward tale, with many elements familiar with traditional fairy tales but Arden created such sympathetic character and played with history and religion so well to create something that went deeper while feeling completely true to folk tales and fairy tales. Arden does not waste time in foreshadowing the themes that will drive the story. The novel begins on a cold, hard winter night with four children gathered around the fire to listen to […]
This book is a delight.
I picked this up because it was on everyone’s to-read lists. I thought it was probably about Cold War spies, maybe something along the lines of John le Carré. This is not a book about Cold War spies. This is the story of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who has been sentenced to house arrest in the Hotel Metropole, where he is in fact already a resident, for writing a poem. (It could have been worse–it could have been a bullet to the head.) Rostov is […]
Maybe you’re trying to distract yourself.
You know when you have a long stretch of five star reviews and you start to wonder, are my standards super low? Does everything delight me? Am I some kind of a hack reader that just loves everything that passes in front of my eyes? Well, if you have these concerns, may I highly recommend The Marvelous Misadventures of Ingrid Winter to you. It will alleviate all of those suspicions, because it’s seriously the worst, and no one could possibly like it. How on earth […]
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