Paranormal fiction is all the rage right now with beautiful teens falling for sexy vampires and such, but the vampire story I just finished is most definitely NOT your typical vampire story. In fact, there are no sexy vampires and not even any blood-sucking anywhere in this book. There is, however, a cute, fluffy little vampire bunny who will suck all the juice (and color) right out of your vegetables. The Editor’s Note at the beginning of the book tells you that the manuscript for […]
Ghost Bride Proves to Be a Promising First Novel
“One evening, my father asked me whether I would like to become a ghost bride,” begins Angsze Choo’s captivating novel about Li Lan, a young Chinese woman with few marital prospects in nineteenth century British Malaya. What follows is a mixture of romance, a coming-of-age story, a tale of the supernatural, and a love letter to Chinese tradition and afterlife. Li Lan comes from a respectable but bankrupt family. Her mother having died of smallpox years earlier, her father has become an opium addict […]
Mockingjay a Weak Finish to the Hunger Games Trilogy
Last year I decided to jump into the world of the Hunger Games and see what all the fuss was about. I thought the first installment was inventive and compelling (if a little light on characterization), and the second was a fantastic driving force, pushing the reader towards the inevitable climax. The third installment, Mockingjay, left me disappointed. First off, I want to be fair. This wasn’t really the book I was expecting, and that contributed largely to my disappointment. Suzanne Collins focuses on the […]
Let the Rain Wash Away All the Pain of Yesterday
“The Year of the Flood” isn’t really a sequel to “Oryx and Crake.” Instead, it tells the story of Toby and Ren, two members of the cult God’s Gardeners (GG), and how they have been able to survive in the post-apocalyptic world. It also, thankfully, fleshes out the two decades leading up to the cataclysmic plague from “Oryx and Crake” and manages to fill in the cracks from Snowman/Jimmy’s story. Toby came to the GG following the traumatic death of her parents, when she dropped […]
“We’re not meant for happiness, you and I.”
Goodreads overview: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” So the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter remembered the chilling events that led her down the turning drive past the beeched, white and naked, to the isolated gray stone manse on the windswept Cornish coast. With a husband she barely knew, the young bride arrived at this immense estate, only to be inexorably drawn into the life of the first Mrs. de Winter, the beautiful Rebecca, dead but never forgotten… her suite of rooms never touched, […]
“…the cliche you have adopted for yourself isn’t working.”
The Radleys is a vampire novel that isn’t a vampire novel. The family are vampires, to be sure, but vampirism here is a metaphor for identity in general. The novel, then, explores the consequences of denying one’s true self; the facade erected by the Radleys alienates the family members from each other, and the family unit from society at large, ironically, as the facade is constructed for the single purpose of fitting in. The Radley parents, Peter and Helen, are abstaining vampires — they don’t […]
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