Rating: 3.5/5 Summary: Gemma Toombs is a sixteen year old with wealthy parents who like the travel. While in Bangkok airport, Gemma meets Ty who at first glance seems oddly familiar. Ty kidnaps Gemma and takes her to the middle of nowhere in one of Australia’s deserts. Gemma launches multiple escape attempts, but she can’t ever seem to escape Ty and his desert home. I think what most surprised me about this book was how much I actually enjoyed it. I picked up this […]
The Wide Brown Land
“This is a country that is at once staggeringly empty and yet packed with stuff. Interesting stuff, ancient stuff, stuff not readily explained. Stuff yet to be found.” Every time I read this book it reawakens in me a longing to visit Australia. I want to see literally every place Bill Bryson visits. I can’t get enough information about the animals and plants (whenever I reread it, my Google search history is full of tingle trees, potoroos, cassowaries, and box jellyfish). What is it like to ride […]
“That’s what bravery is. Standing by the consequences of your mistakes.”
On a desolate island miles from civilization, a man finds himself faced with an impossible choice. The man is Tom, a stoic, principled veteran, recently returned to Australia after serving in World War I. He’s damaged goods, carrying a heavy load of guilt for being one of the few to actually make it home from the war, alive and physically unscathed. He finds a job that speaks to his solitary tendencies as a lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, an isolated island about half a day’s […]
To sleep, perchance to dream
Night Beach (4.5 stars) is about a one very simple thing. A girl surfer-slash-artist has a crush on a boy surfer who sees her — sometimes. But it’s also about a few other very complicated, possibly unreal things, which make this book overall very hard to define. Abbie likes Kane; this much is clear. In fact, she’s obsessed with him, in that painfully teenage way that grovels for the tiniest morsel of acknowledgement and acceptance. This kid, Kane, is a few years older, stays in […]
The Not So Honorable Phryne Fisher
Reviews #12 through 16. Flying Too High (#2), Murder on the Ballarat Train (#3), Death at Victoria Dock (#4), The Green Mill Murder (#5), and Blood and Circuses (#6). The link for this post is for a collection of the first three stories featuring Miss Fisher. The first one (Cocaine Blues) I read last year, so it’s not included in this review. The official blurb for this book is thus: Meet Phryne Fisher, the 1920s’ most elegant and irrepressible sleuth, in her first three adventures […]
This book almost turned me into a rabid frothmonster.
I’m not usually one for books about mommies and gossip and the plight of the suburban housewife, but I am highly susceptible to books everyone seems to love. So I gave in (like I always do). Actually, let’s not even play around and call it “giving in.” I’m a curious bastard. If you get me curious, I’m gonna follow through. And I’m so glad I was curious about this book, because I really ended up loving it. Here is where I would normally give you […]