The Girl with All the Gifts breathes life into its genre with a fresh angle on the pathology of an outbreak and an ending that I truly did not expect. The story opens at a noticeably unconventional school/dormitory, where the pupils are carefully monitored and restrained when they are not locked in their individual cells. Our primary protagonist, Melanie, is one such pupil, a bright girl of about ten who loves learning, particularly math and stories of Greek mythology. Her favorite teacher, Miss Justineau, encourages […]
Lord give me patience
I recently said that I have a lot more patience for historical rogues than I do for contemporary assholes in romance. This is still true, but Sebastian Ballister, Marquess of Dain really tested my strength. Owing to not being loved enough as a child, he’s belligerently awful to everyone, even those who consider themselves friends. He doesn’t like anyone, but he’s especially contemptuous of “females.” In a fun bit of head-scratching irony, he sneers both at whores and ladies for perfectly opposing and complementary reasons: […]
“The best way to know someone is to have a conversation with them.”
Neal Stephenson’s writing process must be insane. This is my third book of his and I am continually astounded by the level of obsessive technical detail present for whichever field happens to be the critical science du jour in each book. Snow Crash took great liberties with neurolinguistics, but it was still clear that Stephenson had done his homework and there was a foundation of knowledge there. Jumping straight to his most recent novel, I found Seveneves stunning, not just because of, again, the amount […]
Enter at your own risk.
I struggled with this rating and review. House of Leaves is different things to different people: for many (many, many, MANY) people it is mind-blowing, complex, and a richly rewarding treat if you take the time to completely parse it. This is not a small undertaking. Entire sections are printed like this — or this — and the visual impact of coming across pages like that — intended, obviously, to draw the reader into the mindset of the characters — is daunting. There are oodles […]
“You make a very handsome dead eel, my husband”
Radiance is an extremely clever romance, and the good-natured ribbing between the two leads, whose species find each other unforgivably ugly, is hilarious. It’s also a very thoughtful and reasoned take on societal beauty standards, and how remarkably different perceptions can be between two groups who aren’t all that dissimilar, but project and amplify their differences into something grotesque. Ildiko is a regular human noblewoman who enters a diplomatic marriage with Prince Brishen of the Kai. Neither is dragged kicking and screaming into it, because […]
Two great books and one where I could not.
The Wild Seasons series is centered around a group of lifelong friends and their post-college graduation trip to Vegas, where they end up drunkenly married to a matched group of men. The individual books dive into the aftermath of these hasty weddings and untangle the authenticity of the pairs’ feelings for each other. The books all follow the same obvious pattern: 1) Couple gets together. Couple has The Best Sex In The World. 2) Couple has blow-out argument and ambiguously break up. Female buddies get […]
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