It says something about this series that this heart-wrenching volume of storytelling is a relief after the last one. Oy, that last one was rough. But this was one was more bittersweet than bitter. Something that I have always appreciated about this series is its tone. Like real life, everything isn’t all bad or all good all the time. Real life is messy, and you can feel many things at once. Real life has hills and valleys, and flat plains. One of the reasons I […]
Scared, Potter?
When some people hear the genre “Young Adult Fiction,” they may assume literary fluff, sugar-coated stories lacking any real substance. Well-written young adult fiction is anything but, and explores themes that are relevant not only to adolescents, but speaks to the general human condition. As such, I’ve decided to delve deeper into the genre starting with one of my favorite authors, Rainbow Rowell. Her books Eleanor and Park and Fangirl are lovely, bittersweet odes to growing up, friendship, love and developing into the person you’re meant to […]
Seventh in the Series, One of the Best.
Cannonball Read Book #4! It’s taken me almost a week to write this because honestly, what is there to say? Here’s my honest review: “It’s Outlander. If you’ve read the first six? Keep going. If you haven’t? Don’t start here.” Hard to stretch that out over 250 words though, so here’s some random… My review reminds me of Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed… (Stay with me…) My husband and I used to listen religiously to Doug Loves Movies. (We still listen sometimes on road trips, but […]
Short and Thought-Provoking
Sum is a book that you could easily tear through in an hour or two, depending on how quickly you read and whether you take time to process what you’ve read, but I would recommend taking a little bit of time with it. I read it over the course of a few days so I could take a little time to absorb and reflect on each vignette, or at least the ones that I found most interesting or thought-provoking. Sum manages to contain a lot […]
In which Joe Hill takes one step closer to becoming the world’s greatest Stephen King impersonator.
I’ve said this before: I can’t imagine it would have taken very long for the reading public to figure out that Joe Hill was really Joe King if he hadn’t admitted it himself. And in each book of Hill’s that I read, I see more and more of his dad in the writing. In fact, if you told me that two of the four novellas in Strange Weather had actually been written by Uncle Stevie, I would just nod, and say, “of course they were.” […]
I want a daemon!
I loved His Dark Materials trilogy so I was very excited when I realized that Philip Pullman had a new novel out. I was a little bit less sure if I necessarily wanted a new novel in the same universe but was definitely willing to give it a shot. As much as I love Harry Potter, I would at this point prefer to get another murder mystery from J.K. Rowling than another tie in to Hogwarts and that universe. As a result, I wasn’t sure […]