It’s hard to give a plot summary for this novel because I’m not sure there is a clear plot line. The narrator Marie gives us her life story, an ordinary life with love and loss, births and deaths, set in Brooklyn from her 1920s’ girlhood through WWII, then marriage and family. It’s about what happens to her, her neighbors, her parents and brother. These are ordinary lives but no life is really just ordinary. There’s always more to people than you realize. McDermott’s writing is […]
A girl is called to save a snow-covered magical kingdom populated by animals – no, it’s not Narnia, why do you ask?
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 […]
I Pledge Allegiants
The now standard (twice is a standard, right?) disclaimer applies: as this is review of the third book in a trilogy, I’ll probably be talking about the first two. “Divergent is the next big thing in YA fiction!” they told me. “Go read something with another kickass female protagonist once you’re done with The Hunger Games! ” they encouraged. Let’s face it, even from the beginning this was just Veronica Roth smashing The Giver into the sorting hat and calling the resulting mess a trilogy. In Divergent, we’re introduced to […]
Could the world end like this?
The Year of the Flood takes place some time in the future, some would argue not very long into the future, and humans are in deep trouble. Sea levels have risen, humans are just holding on and genetically spliced Frankenstein species roam the earth. The story is connected to Atwood’s 1993 book Oryx and Crake, coming to the same place in time, through different characters. The books’ primary character group are the Gardeners, a vegetarian green cult of sorts. Parts of the book begin with a reference […]
Yep, that’s a lot of pages…
I’m not quite sure what I was thinking when I chose a 1300+ page book as my first Cannonball Read selection.
The Secret History – except the secret’s not quite worth the effort
I’ve heard about this novel quite a few times, and have had it on my “I should get around to that” list for a while but somehow, while I knew the novel existed, my idea of what it was about was completely off. Maybe it was the title but I think I was expecting something along the lines of secret societies meet National Treasure and that the characters would use old literature and culture to discover some deep conspiracy and secret – but in a […]