This YA book is set in an alternate world where tuberculosis is once again a major threat to the population. The new strain is resistant to the drugs used as treatment and is highly contagious. As a result, patients are once again sent to sanatoriums for quarantine and treatment. In Extraordinary Means, we focus on Latham House. Teenager Lane is sent there after developing TB. He goes in a tightly-laced, straight-A, goody goody. Once on the inside, he meets Sadie and her group of misfits. […]
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman
I wish I hadn’t waited so long to write this review because now it’s harder to remember why exactly I found this book emotionally compelling (but I did). It’s an interesting trick that Anna North uses—to tell the story of a person through the eyes and experiences of people around her—and I think it works, precisely because Sophie Stark is a filmmaker, who creates stories of others’ lives so it makes sense that others should tell her story. The basic plot of Sophie’s life is […]
It’s Christmas time, so of course I’m reading about murder
I’m a couple years behind on this series, even though it’s one of my all-time favorites, but that’s mostly because I insist on re-reading before I get around to new ones, and who has time for all that? These books are number 46, 47 and 53, if you trust the In Death Wiki, and count all the short stories, which I certainly do, and I just did a re-read last year, and I didn’t have time for one this year. Plus, I prefer my books […]
The Realities of War and Family
I picked up Life After Life by Kate Atkinson despite some trepidation about the Groundhog Day premise but was ultimately impressed. When I started seeing A God in Ruins (2015) on bookshelves, I was eager to read another book by Atkinson. However, I was yet again put off by the premise. I was surprised that Atkinson chose to write about the Todd family, the same family that she’d focused on in her previous book. Specifically, she focuses on Teddy, Ursula’s younger brother and a pilot in the […]