“Others can make us vulnerable and the sooner such vulnerabilities are dealt with the better” It’s been a week since I finished Serena, and I’m still not sure how to talk about it. The basics: it’s set in the 192os; Serena and George Pemberton, recently wed, have moved to a logging camp in North Carolina to make their fortune. Right from the start, the Pembertons encounter trouble when a woman named Rachel and her father confront George at the train station: George got Rachel pregnant the last […]
Not What I Was Looking For
I work in public health emergency preparedness, so this book about the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic has been on my to-read list for a while. People rave about it; even though it’s about 450 pages of small print, I was ready to dive into it because I already have an interest in this sort of thing, I have some background in working on preparing for a pandemic, and I’ve found that histories of diseases and other medical issues (“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” “The Ghost […]
On Slavery and Body-Snatching
Nemo Johnston is an intelligent black man with a strong instinct for survival. He is also a slave in antebellum South Carolina, and is purchased by Dr. Frederick Johnston and his colleagues of the South Carolina Medical College in 1857 to serve as a janitor, a butler and, most importantly, as a body-snatcher (or “resurrectionist”) for the school’s desperate anatomy department. Nemo undertakes the job with the understanding that it is primarily black bodies he will be unearthing for the dissections, but any sense of […]
Sisters, Old English Manors, Shell Shock, and Slow-Moving Disappointment
I probably should have written my review of this book closer to finishing it, because as of right now, my reaction is pretty much just: Meh. The House at Riverton is a post-WWI gothic type novel that chronicles the life of the Hartford family through the eyes of young Grace Bradley, a servant at Riverton Manor from the age of fifteen. Grace is now ninety-nine years old and recounting the story of her time with the Hartfords (particularly with the two sisters, Hannah and Emmeline) […]
The Angel’s Game: Barcelona as You’ve Never Imagined
It was a dark and stormy night… As funny as it might seem to echo the opening sentence of Snoopy’s novel in the Peanuts cartoons, it’s an apt description of the atmosphere and ambience of Carlos Ruiz Záfon’s second novel in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, The Angel’s Game. For anyone who has ever spent time in Barcelona and remembers it as being a sunny, youthful and vibrant place, Záfon imbues his Barcelona of the 1930s as a dolorous, dark and mysterious city full of […]
This Town Should Have a Sign Which Reads: “Bad Things Happen Here”
Book Two in The Murder Squad series by Alex Grecian, The Black Country is the sequel to The Yard which I reviewed for Cannonball Read 4. As a refresher the books are set in 1890 and focus on Inspector Day of Scotland Yard, a member of the newly founded Murder Squad. The Black Country picks up a few months later with Day, Sergeant Hammersmith, and Dr. Kingsley being summoned to Blackhampton in the Midlands where three members of a family are missing and the local […]
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