I’m afraid I may never be able enjoy another book. These Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante are pure perfection and set way too high a bar for anything I may read from now on. I’m reviewing them as a set because I gobbled up all four in under three weeks and they are so cohesive. Although the books were released one by one, each September since 2012, it’s easy to imagine Elena Ferrante (a pseudonym) sitting down and writing all 2,000 or so pages in […]
Lost and Found
This review was originally published at Women Write About Comics. Have you ever picked up a book just because you had a good feeling about it? You’ve never heard of it, don’t recognize the author, and don’t even know what it’s about? This began as one of those books. It also happened to be one of the rare instances when an impulse buy not only met, but exceeded my expectations. When I got home from the bookstore and finally bothered to read the blurb, […]
A double cannonball to contemplate
What a subtle, poignant, sad book. In post-WWII England, Stevens, a butler of a formerly great aristocratic house takes a road trip through the country and has the opportunity to reflect on his tenure of servitude. Through these memories — many with another employee, Miss Kenton — Stevens sketches a life left rather unlived through the endless pursuit of dignity, that intangible, elite quality embodied by the foremost butlers. What is dignity? No one can put it into words, not even Stevens, but based on […]
A really good read, but I don’t get all the fuss.
This was a really good book on a lot of levels: 1. Good as historical fiction. Excellent particularly because we get POV characters on both sides of the conflict. 2. Good as literary fiction (at least, according to my standards). I prefer my lit-fic to be on the accessible side, and not to focus exclusively on middle-aged white man problems. But it’s also got extra levels if you want to go digging. 3. Good as writing, in the sense that the sentences strung one after […]
My skepticism comes first
Disclaimer: I received this ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I believe many people are familiar with the meme (courtesy of South Park) that more or less goes: Step One ??? Profit! Well, the minds behind Consilience/Positron in this book have adopted that mantra as a lifestyle and business model. The proposal is this: crime is bad, and in a recession — particularly an extended one as has befallen the world — crime rises, and the jails become overpopulated and create an […]
Surprise, bitch. I bet you thought you’d seen the last of me.
To be honest, I’m still not totally sure what to make of this book. I really, really wanted to like it more than I actually did. It started out slow with glimmers of interesting plot threads, but ultimately The Robber Bride just kept stringing me along. Every time I started to get into the plot, the story would move in another direction. Atwood’s inspiration came from a Brothers Grimm tale in which a villainous man devours three women after luring them into his lair. In […]