So it turns out that a) I forgot to post some links, and b) I’m crappy at writing reviews. But with the start of the school year (where the hell did summer go?), maybe I’ll get my act together. It’s impossible to review this book without spoilers, but since I think I’m the last person on Earth to read this, I’m not too worried I’m going to upset anyone. Either way, fair warning: spoilers ahead. Told in alternate voices, a technique I’m not a huge […]
Horns and Snakes, Somewhere in there is a Sir Mix-a-Lot Joke
Joe Hill’s Horns begins the morning Ig wakes up hung over and with horns growing out of his forehead. It’s about a year after his girlfriend was gruesomely killed in a “sex murder” and the whole community believes it was Ig who did it to her. Soon after discovering the growth of his horns, Ig also discovers that people can’t help but tell him their deepest, darkest secrets and desires and then listen to his suggestions to act or not on those impulses. Intrigued? To […]
Artists + Ghosts = Good Story
This is a place where people aren’t so much haunted by their pasts as they are unknowingly hurtled toward specific and inexorable destinations. And perhaps it feels like a haunting. But it’s a pull, not a push. The Hundred-Year House is the fictional story of an artists’ colony called Laurelfield, just outside Chicago near Lake Michigan. In the afterward, Makkai writes that one theme is the need artists have for community. Other themes would be the masks that people wear, hiding themselves from even those […]
I thrill when I drill a bicuspid….
So here’s the thing. I had been gagging to read Ferris’s debut novel, Then We Came To The End, since it was published to near universal acclaim a few years ago. I finally got round to starting it at the end of March this year and hated it so much that I had to give up after 100 pages as I just couldn’t face reading another word. I hated all the characters and their tiresome situations. Having now read his latest, it affirms my suspicion about why […]
Can you ever be just whelmed?
So this year, I’m not doing the whole Booker Prize Longlist. After last year’s epic slog and some disappointments of a very large magnitude, I approached this year’s list with a more discerning eye. I immediately discounted three of the titles, while noting with varying degrees of smuggery that I owned another two of the list and had already readone of them. A fourth title, this one, was also sitting on one of the bookshelves in the flat, but it didn’t belong to me. It […]
A smart and amusing look at the close ties between sibling love and rivalry, longlisted for the Man Booker.
We first meet our narrator Rose as she is arrested in the 1990’s while studying at university. She’s met a fellow student called Harlow who announces her appearance on the scene with a whirlwind explosion of noise and anarchy. Dragging Rose into her escapades, she seems to neatly fit a hole in Rose’s life left by long disappeared sister, Fern. Rose and Fern were brought up by their parents as a sort of home experiment by their psychologist father, and the repercussions of that experimentation […]
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