In “Library of Souls,” the final book in the “Peculiar Children” series, I was finally, to my great joy, surprised. The characters continued to be predictable to me, but the plot took some really exciting twists and turns down some very imaginative paths that I couldn’t have seen coming, but were well-laid-down-for in the first two books. This was a satisfying and thrilling end to a series that I really enjoyed reading, even if it did also lay me low with a whole bunch of […]
Do you ever find yourself climbing into an open grave during a bombing raid and just wish you’d stayed in bed?
“Hollow City” is the second book in the “Peculiar Children” series, picking up immediately where the first book left off without much catch-up exposition. As I continued reading the series, my feelings got darker and more desperate, in line with the experience of the characters. There is very little hope or joy in Jacob Portman’s journey. He is a young man who answers the call, and then just plugs away at all the minutiae of being a hero. It’s not that it’s a chore to […]
Males lack the seriousness of temperament required of persons with such grave responsibilities.
I swore that I would read this book well in advance of the film release this fall, and then I did not do it in time, and still have not yet seen the film, despite it being way up my alley. But I have finally read the book series, and so I have fulfilled half of this pop culture obligation, and I’m now… conflicted. I was prepared to adore the series. And, if I’m being honest, I couldn’t stop reading it. It had a lot […]
A little pretentious, a lot bizarre
Hoo boy. There is a LOT going on in this one. It’s Paris, World War II. The Nazis are trying their best to occupy the city, but it’s a little difficult, because some mystical bomb went off in a café, and now there are creatures (manifestations, or ‘manifs’) from Surrealist paintings and poems walking around the city, casually eating or dismembering Parisians and Nazis alike. Tables with wolf heads, puddles in the street with carnivorous plants living in them, giant stone statues walking around bashing […]
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 […]
A Serial Killer Haunts Post-WWII Italy
Bojhalian takes us on a visit to Italy’s beautiful Tuscany during one of the most horrifying periods in that country’s history, when the German occupation had splintered the nation between the resistance, the collaborators, and the majority caught in between who mostly struggled to survive without selling their souls to the devil. But beyond a thought-provoking examination of choices and consequences under wartime conditions, Bojhalian also throws us into the middle of a hunt for a serial killer 10 years after the war’s end, a […]