What She Knew is Gilly Macmillan’s debut novel, and it reminded me a lot of Tana French (but not quite as good) or Sophie Hannah (but a little better) — rotating viewpoints, a distraught mother you can’t quite trust, and set in England. I didn’t realize until I’d finished it that I’d also read Macmillian’s follow up (The Perfect Girl), which I believe I called “perfectly unmemorable”. This, too, was a fast-paced read, but I think it’s going to stick with me a little better. “A year ago, […]
“Sometimes I think that everyone has a tragedy waiting for them…”
I downloaded The Beginning of Everything pretty much immediately after finishing Schneider’s Extraordinary Measures. About 3 chapters in, reading the banter between Ezra and his former best friend, I thought to myself: yeah, I’m going to like this one, too. Ezra Faulkner has played tennis since he could walk, sits at the popular kids table at school and dates a cheerleader. He coasts by on his grades and gets away with a lot — including attending drunken parties with his friends. Then about two weeks before the end […]
“One of the extraordinary adaptive powers of our species is its ability to transmute a stray encounter into a first chapter.”
One of things that I love about Goodreads is that it helps you discover sequels that you never knew existed. When I logged my review of Neverwhere a couple weeks ago, Goodreads called it Neverwhere (London Below, The World of Neverwhere), indicating that other stories must exist in the series! In this instance, it referred to a short story called How the Marquis Got His Coat Back. Google told me it was published in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, so…here we are! While the story of […]
“She was like milk – too pale, too pure, too simple. She was made to be spoiled.”
One of my goals for 2017 was to tackle some of the longer books on my TBR — ones I’ve maybe been avoiding in order to keep my count high in previous years! At almost 600 pages, Fingersmith definitely qualifies as long, but the writing hooks you in pretty quickly and it’s hard to put down. Unfortunately, I don’t think the novel as a whole quite held up to the magnificent plot twists — but damn, those twists were impressive. “I give myself up to darkness; and […]