Who Do You Love starts with our protagonist’s heartbreak, then rewinds to her as an eight-year-old girl, meeting the boy who, spoilers, she ends up loving. Each chapter alternates viewpoints between Rachel, our eight-year-old with a heart condition, and Andy, the impoverished boy growing up with a single mother, skipping ages willy-nilly until they come together at some undisclosed later time – in their thirties, I guess? Oddly, the timeline is quite clear about aging them up until the last few chapters. The interplay is […]
“The darkest minds tend to hide behind the most unlikely faces”
It is a truth universally acknowledged that writing a review for a book you love is infinitely harder than writing one for a book you hate. I really, really liked this book. It’s one of those where after I put it down I was like “yeah, it was really good,” and then the more I think about it, the more I realize it was REALLY good. I find it so easy to rant on about things an author screws up, but it is sometimes really […]
A few recent disappointments
Let me just start off by saying that I thought, even though I saw it was only Part 1 of the story, that Tough Justice: Exposed was going to be a complete novella, and in actuality, it really only read like a 80 or so page prologue. It was an introduction to the characters and conflicts, but very little else, and it suffered for it. More than once I made a note to myself that the author was either rushing things or telling us things instead […]
Feminist Witch
This surprising gem of a book, which happens to have been the very first “Book of the Month Club” selection (1926), came to my attention through the delightful New York Times “By the Book” series. Every week, an author or other famous person is interviewed about their favorite books and authors, their least favorite, etc. About a month ago, Helen Macdonald (author of H is for Hawk) was the subject and she mentioned Lolly Willowes as a favorite book. Having never heard of it, I […]