This book felt a lot like Gaiman’s Ocean at the End of the Lane. Very quietly brooding, the horrors sneak up on your when you’re not looking. There is little dialog and the characters have no names, but that takes nothing away from the simplistic beauty of this story. A female biologist and a group of four other women are sent on an expedition to the strange and uncanny Area X, where their mission is to record data on the un-peopled area and figure out […]
I Think I Finally Love YA Again
In a nutshell, this book is what I had hoped The Mortal Instruments series would have been, and as you know from my review of City of Bones, I was less than happy with the cliches, teenage drama, and terrible love triangle. I’m happy to report that literally NONE of that exists in The Raven Boys. Even though the characters are all high schoolers, and they do believable high school things, this was a mature plot with mature characters. It tackled big issues in comprehensive ways, and even though there […]
Right In the Feels, Every Time
This book destroys me every time. Everything about it so so achingly beautiful and also so vividly terrifying. It’s a thin and unassuming little book that turns on you about 3 pages in and I love it. Gaiman perfectly captures the reminiscing of childhood and the actual child perspective in the same story as our narrator remembers a terrible event that happens when he’s seven. But Gaiman makes a remarkable craft choice in that he writes most of the narrative from the seven year-old’s point […]
What Did I Just Read?
This wasn’t a bad book. The writing was good enough that I blew through it in about 3 sittings and I wanted to keep reading, so there’s that. But I was disappointed. And I feel guilty that I was disappointed, especially since Lavalle is a talented writer and a lot of things in this story worked really, really well. But there was also a lot that didn’t, at least for me. I can’t appropriately talk about this book without spoilers, so stop reading here if […]