Firstly, this book was excellent, and I recommend it for everyone. So if you don’t read this review further than the first sentence, you’ve already gotten the message. Columbine is a book ten years in the making. Dave Cullen was one of the first journalists on the scene the day that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold wreaked their violence, and he spent the next decade painstakingly researching the incident, determined to tell the story of what actually happened that day. This might seem like a ploy […]
These Shipmates Were a Tad Too Wordy
The Wordy Shipmates is pretty true to Sarah Vowell form: chatty historical memoir. Her style in this book reminds me of the particularly engaging 10th grade American history teacher I had in 1998: lots of enthusiasm, lots of primary texts, a few personal anecdotes and musings thrown in for good measure. She focuses on one historical point in this book, telling us all about the first American Puritans and how they got this great experiment started. Winthrop, Williams, and Cotton are well-developed characters and Vowell […]
A woman for a different time
Another day, another Courtney Milan novel. My library can be a little slow in stocking Milan’s latest novels, and then sometimes I forget about them. So, The Countess Conspiracy was published back in 2013, but I’m only getting to it now. The story involves Violet Waterfield, Countess of Cambury and Sebastian Malheur, well-known rake. Violet is a closet scientist, obsessed with plants and their genes, in a time where many dislike Darwin, dislike discussing procreation in public, and where women scientists are nonexistent. Violet’s old […]
If you go into the woods today, beware the bunnies (and all the other animals)
Nurse Letitia “Tish” Everett has only really started recovering from her very controlling, emotionally and physically abusive fiancee Jeff, when she’s drawn to a tarnished antique locket at an estate sale and actually ends up shocking herself by stealing it. After managing to force it open, she is splashed by luminous crimson liquid. Inside the locket, there is a portrait of a darkly handsome man she think of as a “naughty Mr. Darcy” and a foreign inscription of some kind. Falling asleep with the locket […]
Curtsies, corsets, tea parties and spies
Sophronia Temminnick is not all a proper young lady should be. She’d much rather be climbing trees, spying on conversations in the dumb-waiter and dismantle machinery than converse politely over tea. So her mother sends her off to boarding school, more specifically Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. Sophronia makes new friends on her way there. Miss Dimity Plumleigh-Teignmott and her brother Pillover are both being sent away to school (Pillover is to go to a boy’s academy, naturally) and discover that […]
What if the NAZIs had won?
I will admit to y’all up front that I have no idea what I’m about to say in this review. I don’t want this to become one of those roadblock reviews for me. You know, the ones where you just can’t figure out what to say because the whole book just overwhelmed you, and you can’t even figure out your own reaction, let alone how to sum up the book for other people. I have no idea what my reaction is, or how to sum […]
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