Maybe years of reading young adult books, including plenty of dystopian fiction (always trilogies, because nothing is ever allowed to just be one damn book in YA world), has made me unfairly picky about what I consider good young adult dystopian fiction. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for this particular story. But I spent the entire time reading this book being unsure what I really thought of it, and by the end could only conclude that this meant it was just mediocre. Which […]
I NEEDED This Book
As I mentioned in my last review, I’m a sober person who does Alcoholics Anonymous. Part of the steps is making amends, and the way my sponsorship network starts that process is by starting a list of resentments and working through our reasons for them and (when applicable) finding where our part of things lies. As a side note, I really appreciate my sponsor because she does not expect us to find fault in cases where we are victimized: she believes (correctly, I think) that […]
Painfully True
So, I’m an alcoholic with about three and a half years sober as I write this. I’ve been sober and in the program long enough to have done a ton of self-reflection about my drinking years (25-33 were pretty bad) and to be removed enough from those bad times to not flinch too much every time I think about them. I’m one of those people sober folks and newbies at meetings are sometimes shocked by, because I tell horrible stories of things that I did […]
Still One of the Best Horror Books of All Time
I’m a huge horror fan, but am very picky about horror books. There are lots of great horror movies out there, but I always think there are far fewer great horror novels. Horror seems to work better as a short story or novella when written, for some reason, perhaps just because it’s hard to build and maintain tension for the entirety of a novel. But King? He tends to know what he’s doing when it comes to writing horror, even if he is often bad […]