Listed as an honorable mention for Beverly Jenkins in NPR’s recent 100 recommended romances list, I gave Topaz a try as it covers two bases I haven’t much encountered: Westerns and African-American hero/ines. All things considered, I liked Topaz very much; though, admittedly, I found the prose to be lacking in sophistication (which is what knocks off the fifth star.) Still, Jenkins obviously has her finger on the pulse of what makes a romance successful. Katherine Love is a newspaper reporter in the late 19th […]
A short, lazy review that you shouldn’t read because you should be reading UPROOTED instead.
Uprooted was so good and I bought it immediately after returning my copy from the library. Everything about this book worked like gangbusters for me: the arc of the protagonist, the slow revelations behind the enigmatic “Dragon” character, the FEMALE FRIENDSHIP (squee!), the adventure, the homage to Slavic fairy tales and horror, the magic — everything! Here’s the teaser from Goodreads because I’m lazy: “Agnieszka loves her valley home, her quiet village, the forests and the bright shining river. But the corrupted Wood stands on […]
A great sci-fi series at peak greatness
The Expanse series has captured lightning in a bottle, and Nemesis Games is my favorite installation yet. The entire series is assertively skilled at balancing comedy, drama, suspense, and pure sci-fi adventure, all while grounding the story in character development and the interactions between them, as part of a larger picture that addresses societal concerns that are relevant to us today. Just by existing, the series critiques its contemporaries that are at a loss as to how to include and respect women and minorities. In […]
A well-intentioned mess
(2.5 stars) This was a tough book to read and will be a tough review to write. Love is the Drug is a very ambitious book that plots contemporary social issues and a story of developing one’s identity and independence against the background of a bioterrorist pandemic. Ultimately, I think Johnson just had too many ideas here and as a result several threads were underdeveloped and/or incoherent. Emily Bird, who goes by Bird, is from an affluent black family in Washington DC. Her parents are […]