Let’s get the rating part out of the way first. This was a 3.5 read for me that I am rounding up because the narrator is Brian d’Arcy James* and I love his voice, and what he is able to do with it while narrating the various characters, actions, and dialogue in Leonard’s version of the world. Second, while Raylan is listed as a novel, it barely qualifies. It has the length certainly (a little over six hours of audio) but the way the story […]
The Darkness Inside Us
My Heart and Other Black Holes is the debut novel from Jasmine Warga from last year. It is a YA novel that deals with two depressed protagonists in some of the truest descriptions of being a teenager with depression that I have ever read. This is a good book, but probably not for everyone. I was alerted to this book’s existence by the five star review from Annie for Cannonball Read 7. While she and I agree on some points, I only rated this book […]
In Which I Name Drop My Fellow Cannonballers
We have ellepkay to thank for bringing Act Like It to our attention at the beginning of the new year. I am somewhere near the seventh (maybe more?) person to review this one, and we’re all pretty universally in love with this debut author’s contemporary work. Nailing good contemporary romance is not easy. There are so many ways for it all to go wrong, to feel unnatural, or cliché, or any number of other possible problems. What I find myself most struck with (because trying […]
Storycraft 101
Last year’s Book Riot Read Harder challenge has been the gift that keeps on giving for me. I’ve cruised through over a dozen audiobooks after having struggled to enjoy them in the past, and I’ve broken past my own weird hang-ups about graphic novels, narratives, and memoirs. It still isn’t a seamless process for me to read these works, which probably affects my rating of them, so do take my three-and-a-half-star rating with a grain of salt. Yesknopemaybe rated this book at five stars and […]