In Curtsies & Conspiracies, the second of Gail Carriger’s Finishing School series, we join Sophronia Temminnick for her next stint at Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. Sophronia is fifteen now (we somehow missed her birthday) and she is up for her six-month review. She has learned her lessons perhaps too well, as she is now shunned by her classmates. Although disappointed, this does not stop her from continuing her adventures! And an adventure it now is, for not only are we […]
Merely Respectable
The height of literary comedy? I don’t know. A Confederacy of Dunces follows the day-to-day lives of a cast of characters that all ultimately end up at the same place at the same time due to the ridiculous antics and poor choices of the main character, Ignatius. Ignatius is a 30 year old hyper educated, egotistical and out-of-touch bum living on the good will of his retired mother in New Orleans in the early ‘60s. After his incessant back seat driving gets her into an […]
Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History
If I could press any book into the hands of my teenaged self, it would likely be The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart. The novel is funny, thoughtful, well-written, and most of all, feminist as fuck. It’s the kind of book you want to buy multiple copies of and disseminate to everyone you know. The Disreputable History details Frankie’s journey from quiet freshman to criminal mastermind sophomore at Alabaster Preparatory Academy, a private boarding school in northern Massachusetts. At the beginning of […]
The Origins of Sassy Detective
B is for Burglar and C is for Corpse, books two and three in the Alphabet mystery series by Sue Grafton. I must say Kinsey Millhone is growing on me. Or at least the writer’s style. These books remind me of the Evanovich series starting Stephanie Plum, which may have been loosely inspired by this series, wink wink. Spoiler alerts for 30 year old books. You are warned. In book two, B is for Burglar, Stephanie, er uhm, Kinsey is hired by a woman who […]
The Haunting and the Haunted
Sethe, a former slave, is raising her last child left in the lonely, two story house at 124. Well, they aren’t completely alone. There is the spiteful spirit that bedevils the house, scaring away Sethe’s two sons and turning her mother-in-law infirm. The arrival of Paul D, another former slave that worked on the same farm as Seth, brings a short period of relief from the haunting. Until a few days later, when a young woman shows up on their porch, with no memory, who […]
Bad in Baltimore – A Fitting Name
Full disclosure: I’ve written a novel set in Baltimore. When I found this one I was a little excited to see how someone else would see Baltimore. It was fun seeing references to street names I knew and places I could kinda guess the locations of. I played “what place were they actually thinking of when they talked about this place”. That was nice. I really wanted to like this book. There were some problems with pacing and some plot devices that I was uncomfortable […]
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