Long Division by Kiese Laymon
I’m going to be really honest with y’all. I picked this book up for cover and description of hte structure alone. But I mean, come on. That’s an intriguing and beautiful cover. And as for the structure: this novel is told in two books. Book 1 is read like a normal book, from the front to about halfway through. To read Book 2, the reader has to turn the book over to the back and read from the back cover as if it’s the front. […]
Literally by Lucy Keating
“Sorry,” I stutter. “It’s just that…she’s describing my life.” In response to this statement, Lucy watched me coolly, her head slightly tilted to one side. It made me uncomfortable. Annabelle likes things to be ordered. Like color coded calendar ordered. So when her parents announce that they are separating the selling the family home, Annabelle’s perfectly ordered life becomes decidedly disordered. To make matters worse, Annabelle discovers that her entire life, ordered and disordered is actually just a character plot written and controlled by […]
The Last Final Girl by Stephen Graham Jones
Take the meta-horror-commentary of Scream and dial it up to eleven; there at the top of the stairs, silhouetted in moonlight and brandishing a rusty machete, you will find The Last Final Girl. Stephen Graham Jones is leaning hard into the tropes of teen slasher movies, and if you aren’t in on the joke it will fly over your freshly-severed-by-garage-door-head. The story is presented almost as a film treatment; close ups, pans, POVS, and audience responses are all written in and used with cheeky abandon. […]
The Sentence is Death (Hawthorne, #2) by Anthony Horowitz
Overall thoughts: *I read this really fast, and it was a fun read, what with “Anthony” being so frustrated at being behind Hawthorne in figuring out what was going on, and in his capacity as a real-life writer where we get fun glimpses into the behind the scenes life of someone who makes art and rubs shoulders with famous people but isn’t really all that famous himself. *I am still puzzled by Horowitz’s fictional but supposedly real detective. What is his deal? By that I […]
The Word is Murder (Hawthorne, #1) by Anthony Horowitz
It’s been almost three months since I finished this and I still don’t know what I want to say about this weird little book. This is a very meta murder mystery, in which Anthony Horowitz becomes a character in his own writing. (It is left up to you to decide how much of his “real life” that we see in the book is like his own real life, but I’m just going to presume background and biographical details are all true, though presumably if he […]
Goblin Quest (Jig the Goblin, #1) by Jim C. Hines
Somehow I’ve ended up reading all of Jim C. Hines’s series in reverse publication order. Jig the Goblin is the last series of his I have to read, and the first published. It’s definitely not as polished or witty as I found his later books, and perhaps I’m missing something because I don’t play Dungeons & Dragons, but it was a fun time anyway. Having read a shit ton of fantasy in my day, I felt I could still appreciate it. Plus, I get to […]
