A spring evening in 1985, nineteen-year-old Frank Mackie is waiting impatiently outside for his girlfriend Rosie Daly, as they plan to elope and move to London, making a new life for themselves away from the hard life of the Dublin working poor. When she doesn’t show, Frank goes looking for her in the abandoned house a few door down, and finds a note that suggests she’s gone off without him. As Frank’s father is a violent drunk, his mother is neurotic and shrewish and his […]
Pretty Forgettable
It’s so hard to review books that are just okay. I didn’t hate The Turner House, and I didn’t love it. It left very little impression on me at all. I feel like maybe I was missing something, because it’s certainly won a lot of awards. I just didn’t feel much connection to the plot or the characters. I had to force myself to finish it, because I knew if I didn’t there was no way I could squeeze out a review. The Turner House […]
Bonus review: Happy New Year!
I know I said yesterday that number 134 was going to be my last review of the year, but that was before I remembered that there was a Rainbow Rowell short story out there in the world that I hadn’t read. Also, it has it’s own entry on Goodreads, so even though it’s part of a bigger anthology, My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories (eleven of which I have yet to read), I don’t feel reviewing it is cheating. 135 is a […]
Just in time for the TV series
This was an absolutely perfect book to read last Saturday when I was home alone all day and got to curl up under a blanket and forget about the rest of the world. Basically everything is perfectly executed in Big Little Lies: — The mystery is compelling and surprising, concealing not only the killer but the deceased. — The characters and the world they inhabit are easy fodder for stereotypes and dismissal as frivolity, but Moriarty humanizes them and gives them dimension. I found myself […]
“Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably”
Beatrice “Trixie” Watson has two goals for her senior year. She wants to save enough money to buy the collectible Doctor Who figurines at the local comics shop and she intends to knock her nemesis, Benedict “Ben” West down to fourth place in their fancy prep school ranking. The two have always had a tense and antagonistic relationship, going all the way back to when Ben caused Trixie to break her arm on the monkey bars during first grade. This year, she is determined to […]
Cerebral and unapologetically feminist.
Taking myself as a reader out of the “ratings game” for a moment, The Blazing World deserves five stars for its ambition, passion, ferocity, and intelligence. It’s a complex book about a complex woman who is consistently undermined and undervalued (probably because she is a woman, and certainly because she’s an older one), and who vows to expose to the world the bias and hypocrisy of those who do so. It’s told after her death through a series of her journal entries, along with written […]
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