I’ve made no secret of my dismissal of the romance genre. It’s not that I don’t enjoy romance, or am indifferent to love, it’s that I’ve found the heaving bosoms and overflowing adoration to be blindly fantastical and willfully dismissive of actual romance. I’ve generally avoided the genre because I’ve never thought of it as even adequately representing real world love. I know that bodice rippers aren’t all the genre has to offer, but I have never encounter romance that spoke to me. Until Rainbow […]
The Happiest Dystopia
I was born and grew up in the 1980s. I was not a gamer, and was not much into pop culture. Even so, I had a lot of fun with Ready Player One. Set 18 years from now, the world is basically lived in a virtual setting known as OASIS. When the company founder, James Halliday, dies, he leaves a challenge, basically a treasure hunt through OASIS based on 80s trivia (the era of his youth). Naturally a culture of studying everything 80s from the […]
Just in case I needed another reason to dislike camping
Peggy Hillcoat is the daughter of a famous German concert pianist and an English survivalist, who despite the disapproval of his wife keeps stockpiling supplies in a shelter in their garden and preparing for the worst. Only eight years old, she doesn’t question what is happening when her father takes her away from their big house in London while her mother is away on tour. He takes her to the German countryside, to a delapitated cabin remote in the mountains, explaining that this is their […]
1980s + Real Characters = Young Adult Perfection
Now we are talking! This was the book club pick for the month of May, and after the letdown (created by moi) over one of Elmore Leonard’s not so good novels Djibouti, I was hoping for a winner. Luckily someone else had a great suggestion waiting in the wings, as they had just finished reading Eleanor & Park. And how fitting, that I finished this book at the tail end of #IReadYAWeek – bonus! This is a book about love, and heartache, and growing up, […]