When my fiance started reading for pleasure again, but before he focused on hard sci-fi, he picked books on how attractive he found the cover art. And here’s the link to my review.
Unexpectedly delightful
Like many of the books I read these days, I first heard of I Capture the Castle (1948) by Dodie Smith from a Cannonball Review (maybe Malin’s?). And I’m so glad I read it. It reminded me of a book with a big chunk of Anne of Green Gables mixed with a little Pride and Prejudice. It’s amazing that this book has just been sitting around, available, for over sixty years, and I had no idea. It’s similar to how I felt when I first […]
More love and hate and chocolate in the City of Lights
Sarah Lin hates Patrick Chevalier. She hates his golden good looks, his charming manner, the way he seems to be able to create magic with his bare hands and does absolutely everything flawlessly, without seeming to expend even the slightest bit of effort. She hates him because every time he brushes past her, or winks at her, or jokingly flirts with her, her heart beats faster and she has trouble breathing. He is her boss, and he is godlike, and he would never even look […]
Love and hate and chocolate in the City of Lights
3.5 stars Disclaimer! I was granted an ARC of this book by Kensington Books via Netgalley in return for a fair and honest review. Summer Corey hates Paris. It’s a city where she was frequently abandoned to be raised by ever changing nannies while her parents were globe trotting or negotiating international business deals, and it’s where she felt miserable, alone and outcast in boarding school from the age of thirteen. Having been forced back from her self-imposed exile, teaching on a small Pacific island, because her […]
Someone: A Novel by Alice McDermott
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 […]