I think part of my dislike for Brooklyn could be attributed to how much I liked Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. I read/listened to the two over the same few days, and Helen Simonson’s did such a great job with the gentle romance in this novel — set in modern times but with decidedly “old fashioned” characters — that it I think it made me dislike Eilis even more. “But I must ask you, do you really understand what it means to be in love with an unsuitable woman?” “My […]
I was lulled into liking it by the Irish accents, but quickly realized my mistake
I listened to the audio version of this, and realized about halfway through that while the Irish accents were lovely, and the writing was very pretty, that I actually totally hated the wishy washy main character — and nothing ever really happens. “She thought it was strange that the mere sensation of savouring the prospect of something could make her think for a while that is must be the prospect of home.” Eilis Lacey is a young lady living in Ireland with her mother and older […]
Yes, another Brandon Sanderson fan.
Brandon Sanderson gets a lot of love here at the CBR, and I’m glad to see that. This series is the only exposure I’ve had to his writing, however. I did buy the first book he wrote in The Wheel of Time series – but can’t bring myself to pick that series back up. His other series look interesting, but keep getting pushed further down my list. But The Reckoners….I love these books. They take place in a world where superheroes are not only real, […]
Not Atonement, But Still Great
Well damn. This book, you guys. This book will maybe haunt me. As far as war-related novels that I will remember, it ranks only behind Atonement. I appreciated that it was, I feel, a really well-told story. Others have reviewed it for CBR before, but if you aren’t familiar with it, here’s a quick synopsis. A young girl Marie-Laure is blind and lives with her father, a museum curator, in Paris before the war. They flee when Paris is invaded by Germany. Werner is a […]
Dear Fake Character People: An Open Letter to (most of) the Characters in Sense and Sensibility
A couple of years ago for CBR6, I re-read Jane Eyre, and because I was overwhelmed with the task of writing a review for such a classic book, I decided to get weird and write the review in the form of letters to the characters. Since then, with an eventual plan to re-read all of Jane Austen’s books, I’ve had it in the back of my mind that I’d do the same with as many future classic books that I could. So. This is me […]
a destiny unveiled
“All these people: they were trapped. And not merely by the wires that surrounded them. Physical barricades were nothing compared to the wires of the mind. What had truly imprisoned them was one another. Husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and companions: what they believed had given them strength in their lives had actually done the opposite…..Love had sealed their doom.” The second book in Justin Cronin’s trilogy picks up five years after the end of the last novel, to the summer of 97 AV, […]