The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
CBR14 BINGO: Adapt, because it was adapted into the wonderful 1993 film of the same name “I’m telling you, sir, you’ll be sorry if you don’t take a walk up there. And you never know. A couple more years and it might be too late.” This advice from a stranger on a country road to the novel’s protagonist is meant to encourage the traveler to walk up a hill and enjoy a beautiful view, but it may as well be an observation about the protagonist’s […]
A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark
CBR 14 BINGO: Rec’d. MsWas recommended this one to me, and I will be recommending it to others. I also saw this recommended on NPR’s list of best sci-fi and fantasy books of the last decade. In 1912 Cairo, collector of antiquities, lover of the exotic, and all around British-colonial caricature Lord Worthington meets with his Brotherhood of al-Jahiz, a group whose noble purpose is to “recover the most sacred wisdom of the ancients, to create a greater tomorrow.” Worthington’s group has taken to collecting […]
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
CBR 14 BINGO: Shadow, because it deals with shedding light on the truth, which is not always what it seems Code Name Verity has been sitting patiently on my TBR for close to 10 years (having first been published in 2012). I snatched it out of a Little Free Library and thought it would be the perfect entry for the Shadow category in this year’s bingo. Reviewing this novel without giving away any spoilers is a little difficult, but not impossible if I focus on […]
The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley
CBR 14 BINGO: Time, because there is a watch on the cover, and a watch in the title, and it deals with the way a person’s possible futures can shift through time Note: I’ve included spoilers to explain what it was that I didn’t like about this novel. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street has all the ingredients required to create something I should love: interesting characters, a non-linear interpretation of time, steampunk-esque mechanics, a beautiful cover, a dash of feminism, and an anthropomorphic clockwork octopus. […]
Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
CBR BINGO 14: Verse, because it’s a collection of classic children’s poetry My father likes to send me little Brain Teaser quizzes, and recently we had one about matching the covers of classic books to their titles. I told him I got all of them correct, but I had read only 7 out of 10. I jokingly blamed him for my never having read Where the Sidewalk Ends, because for some reason I never owned that book as a child. A few days later, I […]
Mozart's Starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt
CBR BINGO 14: Bird, because there is a bird on the cover and it tells the story of a bird (two, in fact!) Although the bird didn’t appear in the movie Amadeus, Mozart owned a starling during three of the most productive years of his life, the time period when he wrote The Marriage of Figaro, eight piano concertos, and three symphonies. To be able to tell the story of Mozart’s Starling effectively, author Lyanda Lynn Haupt adopted a starling of her own. This book is a […]
