(Several words of warning: There are very mild spoilers for the book down toward the end, but nothing an astute reader couldn’t figure out from the description and the genre.) I figured that, as it’s a whole new year and all, that it was time to pay a third visit to Lil Littlepage-Eller, Boris, and the rest of the free-form asylum also known as Crazy, VA. So far, the Lil & Boris series has been a nice series of comfort nibbles with inhabitants I’ve always described […]
Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel Would Rate It Two Meth Teeth out of Five
Normally, I don’t break my one cardinal rule of reading – never ever ever get something from the Barnes and Noble bargain bin. But my eyes saw the magical words “Edgar Award” and I decided Edgar Award surely could trump the stench of bad bargain books. I was so so wrong. I stopped reading and went into “shut up and take my money” mode right after Edgar Award, so I didn’t notice the few qualifiers that came with Edgar Award – namely, “from the Edgar Award […]
The first half is wonderful, the second made me want to throw things.
I hate books like this. Ones that start out so promising, and then crap out halfway through. Like they get lost in the swirl of it all and then just flush themselves down the toilet in despair. At it’s most basic, The Patron Saint of Liars is about leaving. The blurb on the back cover of the novel is misleading. It makes it seem like Rose is the main character, when in fact, we lose touch with her halfway through, when she becomes a shadow […]
Historical fiction that bites, whimpers, howls, and won’t let go
This is my first Cannonball read and I can’t believe I picked a book–sort of at random, I admit–that I love this much. It’s a story of the Northwest frontier at the turn of the twentieth century so lumberjacks, railroad laborers, miscreants, drunks, and a few coyotes and wolves are par for the course. But there’s also a (maybe real/maybe an apparition) wolf-girl and a sort of carnival side-show version of a wolf-boy. In a book that’s just 125 pages long. I’ve never read anything by Denis Johnson […]
The not-real tale of a musical-loving, book-reading, clever fat virgin who just wants to fit in
“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 […]
They keep throwing the same fish around
Last year I read the first book in the Magic 2.0 series, Off to be the Wizard and I loved it. It was clever, funny, snarky, full of nerdy, geeky jokes and references, and time travellers being confused by other time travellers. It was a lot of fun and even though I never got around to writing a CBR6 review for it, I remember recommending it to some people. With good memories of the previous book, I picked this one up and saved it for […]
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