Eleven-year-old Lindelin “Lin” Rosenquist is mourning the death of her pet vole, Rufus, and miserable in her new home away from her best friend and childhood haunts. One dark evening, she receives a mysterious package labelled “Twistrose” with a rose-shaped key inside. She discovers that the key unlocks a strange portal in the cellar under the house, and the portal leads to the magical kingdom of Sylver, entirely populated by animals with some kind of special bond to children on Earth. The petlings are deceased […]
The one where Harry tries to catch a serial killer and fights a lot of ghouls
Chicago wizard and now a Warden of the White Council, Harry Dresden, gets called in by his friend Sgt. Karrin Murphy (she got demoted after helping Harry out in the last book) to look into a series of mysterious deaths. A lot of women have been found dead around Chicago, in what appears at first glance to be suicides, but Murphy and her team at Special Investigations can tell something is off, and Harry finds magically hidden writing that suggests the women have been killed […]
A break-neck journey into the heart of darkness
The book opens with a quote from Heart of Darkness, making the reader pretty aware that this is unlikely to be a cheerful story full of rainbows, bunnies and unicorns. Our unnamed narrator is a young Norwegian boy, not yet turned eighteen, on a rather impulsive journey to the Ivory Coast with his best friend, a former Liberian child soldier named Sam. Sam, who has lived in Norway for some years, has been told that his mother is still alive and the two boys are now […]
A beautiful way to start my reading year
What a lovely way to start my new reading year. First of all, I want to thank Jen K for this lovely book. She gave it to me as part of the Cannonball Read gift exchange, and as I was fairly sure I wasn’t going to be able to do it justice when I was hurrying through books at the end of December to finish my triple Cannonball, I decided that it would be my first book of 2014. As it turns out, due to me getting ill over […]