So apparently this book has depths and metaphors that I’m just not getting. Admittedly, I didn’t read to closely because, like, 40% of this was just awkward, graphic sex scenes and that is super not my bag. There’s also another very valid reason I didn’t like this book but I’ll do my best to push it below the fold. Okay, quickie plot. Our protagonist, whose name I’ve already forgotten, is a PhD student in Phoenix who has been stalled for years on her thesis on Sapho […]
Gonna buy it and reread it
Lord all mighty this was a dense one. I guess I’ve gotten accustomed to novelized non-fiction a la Erik Larsen because I did not anticipate the depths into which I was diving. Reading this is like reading a textbook. There’s a lot to absorb and my reading time was curtailed by its library due date (and the increasing load of loans I’ve been accumulating). It’s an incredible work of research and I’m going to reread it, it’s just a lot. Literally 25% of the book […]
YA sequel that holds up to the first
Unfortunately, it seems to have become a bit of a given in publishing that sequels are generally a let-down. Maybe it’s a function of the first being more popular than anticipated and the second being rushed, but there seems to be taken for granted a drop in quality. Fortunately, in her latest series Strange the Dreamer, Laini Taylor holds ground. Another unfortunate reality of modern publishing is that anything with a teenage protagonist becomes “young adult”. There are definitely some themes in here that are too […]
This one IS a novel
Turns out I am very bad about learning much about the book I am going to read. There have been two books so far this year that I assumed would be novels, only to learn a handful of pages in that they were in fact nonfiction. Then there’s The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, which I thought would be nonfiction and was, go figure, a novel. In my defense, it was one of two books recommended simultaneously by my mother and the other, Killers of the Flower […]