Circe by Madeline Miller
I bought Circe last year after it won a few awards. I finally read it because a friend from work read it and recommended it to me. We were both changing jobs so I wanted to read it while we still worked together so that we could discuss it. It was fantastic. It reminded me, thematically, of Grendel by John Gardner in that the premise is the book is the POV from a character that is considered an antagonist in a different, famous story. Like […]
The Okay Witch by Emma Steinkellner
I could only praise this book is the way I would a bowl of Kraft dinner (or boxed mac and cheese for anyone that didn’t grow up with Canadians). If I really want cheesy noodles and Kraft is available, I’ll eat it. If the other options for a meal were meatloaf or fruitcake I would choose Kraft dinner, just like how I would definitely re-read The Okay Witch over other particular books. But here’s the deal: Do I actively crave or recommend Kraft dinner? NOPE. […]
The world and the characters in Love, Lies, and Hocus Pocus: Beginnings are so much fun that it really annoys me how short the stories and the book are. To some extent, the two main characters are pretty standard. Lily is bookish, socially awkward, and talented with magic; she’s a wizard. Sebastian is friendly, good looking, a troublemaker, and has little magic talent, but he is a witch. This to me is a tradition buddy mystery-solving/adventure team. What makes them fun is their dynamic and […]
Deborah Harkness knows a lot about a lot of things. Her depth and breadth of knowledge on things ranging from wine to Elizabethan England to brewing tea is certainly impressive, but the amount of detail crammed into these books sure does make for some slow going. The All Souls Trilogy is about a world in which witches, vampires, and daemons (in this case, daemons are humans who are more than us regular folk–musical prodigies, artistic savants, financial wizards, scientific geniuses–or sometimes drug addicts or mentally […]
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people. I cannot emphasize enough how much of a treat Good Omens is. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett will also tell you how much of a treat it is. They will tell you in their introduction and their afterward how much they wrote it for the love of it […]
