Holy crap, this is an amazing book. I kinda feel like it’s been done—family at the outbreak of society’s collapse/civil war, or stream of consciousness, or modern family in dystopian times—but it also has not been done. For one, the maternal perspective in Prophet Song by Paul Lynch is pitch perfect, intimate, and novel (hard…
I like Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It’s a great classic and in many ways, it is right up my alley: gentle, warm, deep, encouraging, historical, full of three-dimensional characters and relationships, and challenging ideas. It is a little vignette-y for me, but I forgive it because it feels right for the time and…
Oh boy. I might catch it for even reviewing (or reading) this series. And I might catch it for what I have to say about it, by a completely different readership. I probably shouldn’t have even bothered and avoided both forms of angry customers, but I have read and I have judged accordingly and there’s…
I kinda wish The Truth About Horses by Christy Cashman wasn’t titled The Truth About Horses. And I also wish the cover were different. Though it almost looks self-pubbed and the title is lackluster and maybe even cheesy, the book is pretty solid. Despite some rather specific things I will find to complain about, overall…
I am such a Harry Potter fan that I am almost always disappointed by J. K. Rowling’s other works, simply because they are not Hogwarts in the 90s. So let’s just take this children’s chapter book for what it is: a magical, Christmas journey into the Land of the Lost by one little boy and…
I had super-high expectations when it came to reading The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. I was loving the creepy, Victorian/Gothic vibes as well as the idea that a painting was aging while the model remained ageless. (Hope I didn’t spoil anything, but at this point I feel like everyone knows at least…
In the end, I loved this book. During the book, I was hooked and couldn’t put it down. Is it a literary giant? Certainly not. It’s YA romance (or rom-com) of the typical (for now) type. Within those parameters, I thought it was perfect. So, if you like YA romance, or even just romance, then…
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…
the starving artist 