The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories is a collection of short stories by Ken Liu. I highly, HIGHLY enjoyed this book and even the stories that were less successful were still really enjoyable. There are 15 stories in this collection, and there was only one that I didn’t really enjoy. That’s a pretty astonishing for a collection of short stories. But most successfully, this has made me extremely excited for Liu’s novel The Grace of Kings. I’m having a hard time picking out a favorite […]
Some of us Will Like this Book
Buddha in the Attic is an experimental novel about the immigrant women who came to the US from Japan in the 1920s and 1930s. How well this novel works for you will depend mostly on how much you like the experimental style the novel is written in. I was less fond of it, so while I found the novel to be worth reading and interesting, it didn’t really move me in anyway and I didn’t find it particularly memorable. Otsuka tells her story in the […]
All the World’s a Stage and Quentin only a Squire.
Full of Briars is a novella set in the world of October Daye featuring Toby’s squire Quentin Sollys. It’s a quick, fun, light peak into the world building that McGuire has done for these novels and for that I appreciate it. However, there’s not much to it beyond that. This short novella is set between Chimes at Midnight and The Winter Long (books 7 and 8 of the series) and thus will contain spoilers for just about everything previous. It concerns the revelation of Quentin’s parentage […]
Victorian Moralizing and Some Sisterly Snark
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is Anne Bronte’s novel about the depredations of alcohol. It is essentially a primer for the temperance movement, and yet it’s also wildly feminist for it’s time and rather snarky in some places. I wouldn’t say I loved the novel, but I enjoyed it. The novel is two stories, one about Gilbert Markham and one (the far more interesting, and lengthy story) about Helen Huntingdon. Gilbert is a young wealthy farmer, going about his wealthy farmer business when a young widow moves […]