I just reviewed Becky Albertalli’s “Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda” and I’m not going to lie, I was reading “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” at the same time, and sometimes I had trouble telling the difference between them. And I mean that with every compliment, because, as I wrote in my “Simon” review, there’s a strong and important tradition of novels that normalize the alienation of adolescence, and the millions of forms that it can take. “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” is […]
Halbs Reads His First Romance Novel
With the “Random Acts” series, author Julia Kent has created a Marvel Cinematic Universe of sorts for “romantic comedy with an edge”. From what I can tell, characters move in and out of the books in the series and have interconnected lives. This is a pretty neat idea for a series of romance books. (Since I am not a romance reader, I have no idea if this is normal or not.) This is a review of the first book in the Random series. In Random […]