“My biggest secret of all—the one I would rather die than tell, the one I wouldn’t even put in my diary—is that I really, truly, in my heart, want to be beautiful. I want to be beautiful so much—because it will keep my safe, and keep me lucky, and it’s too exhausting not to be.” This is my first CBR year and my first attempt at a book review, so be kind, and only throw the softest and freshest of vegetables my way. Fortunately, I made […]
Patience is a virtue. . . .
I’ve read most of the other “Diary” books by Ms. Grange – Henry Tilney, Edmund Bertram, Captain Wentworth. . . . She has a way of capturing the story behind the story that is fun to read without monkeying with the original. Here, we get to see the behind the scenes and into the thoughts of James Brandon, the Colonel of our dreams, if not (at least initially) Marianne Dashwood’s dreams. The book starts with the young Brandon coming home from school to Delaford, which […]
Chaos, Confusion, Twain and Tesla
The Five Fists of Science, by Matt Fraction (Art by Steven Sanders) is one of those books. I really wanted to like it, and it has a promising premise, but in the end it’s more a fun concept than a good story. Is it a graphic novelette? Yes. Is it steampunk? Sort of. Is it a superhero comic? Maybe? Lovecraftian? Yes, that. Is it an Alternate History with Famous Personages? Yes, also that. Plus, I think there was some influence from Godzilla and also possibly […]
Sisters Doin’ It For Themselves
Into the Forest was a late holiday gift, and I blazed through it in a day. It’s a very quick read and author Jean Hegland’s style is equal parts Margaret Atwood and Barbara Kingsolver, though she’s not quite as deft in her prose as either of those writers. There are also echoes of the back-to-the-land resourcefulness Katniss Everdeen displays in The Hunger Games, and the book is easily as addictive as the first book in that series. The book unfolds its exposition of a near-future […]
The life of a pop star: burnt out at 11.
Let me preface this review by saying, get off my lawn. I am not a fan of Justin Bieber, nor the whole “boy band” thing, in general. I don’t really understand how people can become YouTube or Vine personalities to the extent that they are suddenly making huge amounts of money and touring around the country (to a predominantly young audience) as instant celebrities. Auto-tune? No thanks. I miss record stores and the experience of listening to an entire record, as opposed to just downloading […]
Chasing Ghosts
What once appeared to be a simple legacy — a grandfather who escaped, who created a better life away from the European killing fields — became a story of a world upended, a life set aside, a narrative rerouted. This non-fiction work by journalist Sarah Wildman is not the usual account of the Holocaust. After her grandfather’s death, she found a trove of letters written to him from the girlfriend he left behind in Austria after the 1938 Anschluss. Her grandfather Karl Wildman, as the […]