A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson is a fun, fresh read for someone of any age (above 13) who enjoys crime, murder mystery or thrillers, even if they don’t read them regularly. It is YA, and the MC (main character) is having a coming-of-age moment as she does her amateur sleuthing, but…
I read Androne by Dwain Worrel as an ARC but not really an ARC. It was a copy sent to me by the publisher, but it is not advanced (as in it is not not-yet-published). It came out on September 1st. So almost. The second book of the series, Alliance, is expected in 2024. I…
Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book—sometimes titled The Jungle Books—is perhaps not what you think it is. It is a collection of short stories. Not all of them are about the jungle. They are all about animals, but some from a human perspective. They are mostly about children, but one is about an adult. Except for…
It took me a year to read Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I started it last October and got really bored and then the season passed. This year, I finished it, but not without some pushing. Dracula is a classic of Gothic horror, an original in many senses and the bulwark of the vampire genre. I thought…
If you like easy, breezy reading in a specific genre that includes monster mash-ups and mysteries, then look no further than Christian Klaver and his The Classified Dossier series. Filled with characters from Victorian, gothic literature/classic horror stories, the novel is both a throw-back to old-style mysteries and a very modern style of storytelling that…
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline arced brilliantly over the book world when it was published in 2010, not long after Cline’s first screenplay, Fanboys, went to screen. Ready Player One was full of fresh and exciting concepts, was as close to home as sci-fi gets, and was saturated with geeky references to 1980s pop…
Did you know that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (technically Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) is a short story? A novella, at best? The version I read (a trade paperback volume by Signet Classics containing an introduction by Stephen King and also Dracula and Frankenstein) runs to 75 pages. Which makes this…
I do not prefer the epistolary form, and I am wary about having two authors on a book cover, as well, so The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Anne Barrows had two knocks against it from the beginning. But I had liked the movie. So one knock for.…
Finally, a Neil Gaiman book that really agrees with me. Everyone else seems to admire his work so assiduously, but me… it either wasn’t my flavor (American Gods) or I thought it was not very good (The Ocean at the End of the Lane). While I had no idea what was coming to me with…
This is a book for writers. I suppose it could also be a book for readers, especially those in the academic, literary criticism vein. At any rate, it had been zinging across my path like a ping pong ball, for something like a year, as every writer around me read it and talked about it…
I went into Shadow and Bone with very high expectations. Written after Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows series but meant to be a prequel of sorts (though including none of the same characters), I figured this would be at least as good as Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom (the duology). I was a little…
Never Let Me Go is science fiction, British, and YA (even though it is frequently also read and enjoyed by grow-ups). It is also written by a widely lauded author (Kazuo Ishiguro) and seems to always be around, “your next read.” But while I expected to like this book as much as, say, The Perks…
Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry was pretty popular, for a little time anyhow: another book floating down the stream of famous people memoir/exposes that rose to the top for one reason or another. Since Friends was one of the most popular TV series of all time and Perry’s battles with…
While catching up with reviews, I am surprised that this is still in queue; I feel like I wrote and posted it already. But from my notes and memory, I will let you know that while Colleen Hoover and It Ends with Us is gracing the window dressing of bookstores across America, I was not…
I read a lot of literary stuff, but as I get older I also read a bit of fluff. When I am on vacation, I reach for at least one fluffy book, and Emily Henry has become a staple for those moments (though she only has four adult, romance books at this time, so I’ll…
I’m sure to catch it for this review, but I was not at all impressed or even very entertained by the Percy Jackson & the Olympians book series. In the original five books that put the otherwise-teacher and -father Rick Riordan on the map, his famous Percy Jackson goes from age twelve to age fifteen…
As with many of the other books I’ve read lately, I am divided in my opinion about Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (2017) by Gail Honeyman. It has been a popular book and its Goodreads rating is at 4.25—which is very impressive—but I both liked it and didn’t like it. Eleanor is engaging, one hundred…
A Monster Calls (2011) by Patrick Ness is a sad, somewhat difficult YA book that borders on a novella and, in the end, is rewarding. It is also magical, but avoids the obnoxiousness of overly-fable-y books to drive home some very real points about coming of age, death, and guilt, while the backstory about this…
I Speak Boy by Jessica Brody (2021) is a solid read for middle grades readers, especially if they are interested in a little romance. With a fun premise and modern lessons, there are plenty of twists and turns and memorable characters in this loose retelling if Jane Austen’s Emma. Emmy is obsessed—and not in a…
I have decided that from now on, I am going to give a brief synopsis of my review right off the bat, then a synopsis of the book. Only then will I take forever telling you about it. Good idea? To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2014) by Jenny Han is YA to the…
the starving artist 