Any time that there’s new Harry Potter, I become about 15 years younger, and squeeeeeeeeeee. So, of course, new Potter, and I’m there. Full disclosure, I work in theater. Large-scale theater. Big shows. This show is in my work realm. So reading new Potter, but in script form, it was hard to turn off my work brain. “Is that a quickchange?” “need more details about that prop” “are they going to eat that, or can it be glue?” etc. These are the notes that I […]
Magic all around.
4, 224 pages. 3 years, 3 months. And we’re done. If you’ve read my last Harry Potter review, you know that I’ve been reading the series aloud to my daughter. I decided when she was born to wait to read them until she was 8, and then we’d read them together. We started them the summer after she turned 8. We finished last night. She’s 11. Today was her first day of middle school. It would be absolutely impossible to write a review that would […]
“It is my mercy, and not yours, that matters now.”
During the decade in which the Harry Potter series was published I was a college student, a new nurse, a young bride, a new homeowner, and finally, a mother. What I was NOT was someone committed to thousands of pages of a single series. Obviously, from the tremendous buzz, I knew I was missing out. But in the hours spent in the rocking chair while reading to my new daughter, I made a decision. When she turned 8, we’d start reading it together. I wouldn’t […]
The Silkworm – Rowling gets dark
Wow, JK Rowling can go dark. Like really, seriously dark. The Silkworm, is Rowling’s follow-up to Cuckoo’s Calling, continuing the story of Cormoran Strike and his now permanent assistant Robin. When Mrs. Quine comes into the agency and asks Cormoran to looks into the whereabouts of her wandering husband, Cormoran takes the case partially to annoy a self-important client he had been meeting with, and partially because he couldn’t help but feel for the odd yet compelling woman. A novelist and serial adulterer, Mr. Quine has a pattern of leaving […]
More impressive work from Rowling
I am one of the few people who adored The Casual Vacancy, JK Rowling’s long awaited and highly criticized follow-up to the series that made her a household name. I found it to be an exceptionally smart, if slow, character study; a story that took forever to capture my attention, but that I wound up deeply invested in. The Cuckoo’s Calling, Rowling’s next attempt (under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith), was similarly paced, but seems to have more broad appeal than The Casual Vacancy. The Cuckoo’s Calling is a fantastic read, starring […]