Malin’s review of The Girl with all the Gifts inspired me to read it (as with many of the books from my CBR this year, because you all write such intriguing reviews). I was not disappointed by the suggestion of this book, it was such a fresh and inventive book that I think will stick with me for a bit. It was horror in the lightest sense of the word, most of the horror has already occurred…and then again, much of the horror is only […]
A Contemporary Romance with 19th Century Romance Elements
This right here is a contemporary comic Gothic romance novel. Equal parts Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Northanger Abbey, and likely other nineteenth century novels, mostly British, that I should have read while at university, Heroes Are My Weakness features a tortured hero, an innocent in over her head, schemes, machinations, a forbidding landscape, and a surprisingly unannoying plot moppet. Unemployed, impoverished, sick, and freezing, Annie has arrived on an island off the coast of Maine in January to take up temporary residence in a small […]
A Contemporary Romance Review Mostly About Furniture
Low Tide Bikini was free and yet somehow overpriced. I genuinely respect people who complete writing a book, and in this case a series, but the accomplishments of writing a book and writing a good book are two very different things. Lyla Dune’s writing is clichéd and facile, the plot and characters sophomoric. If it is the work of a teenaged writer, I commend the effort, if not, it’s unsuccessful escapism, a Lifetime movie of a novel. From Amazon: Sam Carlisle is the double bass […]
A Soap Opera Worthy of Tolstoy Continues
In the second novel of her trilogy, Ferrante continues the story of Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, two Neapolitan girls born in 1944 Italy into poor families in a working class neighborhood. When we left them in My Brilliant Friend, 16-year-old Lila had married the prosperous grocer Stefano, the son of the “ogre” Don Achille. Elena, no match for her friend in looks but a successful and hardworking student, feels that her world is falling apart. Her best friend, with whom she expected to work […]