It’s a terrible feeling to hear praise heaped upon a new book, read it yourself and…not get it. Your mind starts playing games with itself: Everyone else liked this book, what’s wrong with you? Do you just not understand it? Is that it, you idiot? You focus on the book a little harder, maybe if you squint at the freaking book, all of this praise will make sense. But still…it’s just not there for you. That was my experience with Kelly Link’s collection of short […]
“I don’t want to go on the cart! I feel fine. I think I’ll to go for a walk!”
3.5 stars Kivrin Engle is a young history student at Oxford University, whose dream it is to time travel back in time to the Middle Ages. You see, in the 2050s, historians have the option to travel back in time as a research tool, to truly discover what the past was like. Most historians travel back to the early to mid 20th Century, and there are certain periods that are deemed far too dangerous. The Middle Ages has generally been deemed one of them, due […]
A bit like The Shining Girls. But not awful.
Few writers are as adept as Tim Powers at telling stories about really difficult to understand concepts by making them palatable and compelling. In this novella, Powers tells the story of Richard Blanzac, a rare books dealer, who is caught in a time loop after coming in to possession of a box of writings from a long forgotten beat poet named Sadie Greenwald. Salvage & Demolition is a short book and to say any more would give away too much of the fun. I’ve been […]
When I say “Nazis,” you say “No thank you!”
It’s 1962. The Allies lost World War II. Slavery is legal. The United States has been divided by its conquerors, with the Japanese ruling the West, and the Germans in the East, with a small No Man’s Land in the Rocky Mountains. The Nazis have exterminated Africans, drained the Mediterranean to make space for farmland, and developed and used the hydrogen bomb. Not content to only take over the world, they’ve started colonizing space. Meanwhile, there’s a book. It’s not banned, but it’s […]
When we finally learn to time travel, it will probably be just as boring as this
On paper, this book is the complete package for me: time travel, a mysterious epidemic, a spunky female protagonist, academia, Christmas. I should have loved it. But it was a little… um…. super duper incredibly boring. I’m really looking forward to the Book Club conversation about this, because it would be nice to put my finger on why I didn’t just totally love it. There’s plenty of action, but it’s very repetitive, and never feels like it’s going anywhere. No build, just introduction of characters, […]
No Sparkly Vampires or Helpless Females here.
I wasn’t going to read this book. I have already declared a moratorium on post-apocalyptic trilogies starring plucky youngsters sprinkled in fairy dust that are the saviors of the entire world. Especially since this is one of those series that is self-published on Amazon and included in the free Kindle library. But the other day I was looking for something fast paced and interesting and this one was free so I gave it a shot. It’s fairly obvious that the heroine, Penryn is modeled after […]
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