This mystery is part of the Inspector Lynley series, featuring the inspector and his sergeant Barbara Havers. I haven’t read the others in the series, and I’m happy to report that it doesn’t seem to matter. Elizabeth George’s work was recommended by a friend and it was a good recommendation. The tale moved along at a quick pace and featured morally complex characters, which all added up to more than just a clever whodunnit. What I liked most about this story was the inclusion of […]
This is Madness!
Antoinette Cosway, the main character of this novel, is the crazy woman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Rhys imagines the life of Rochester’s first wife and the events that drove her to madness, demonstrating her knowledge and understanding of Jamaican/West Indies history and culture as well as the powerful socio-economic forces that influenced post-Emancipation development there. As Francis Wyndham writes in the introduction, …Rhys knew about the mad Creole heiresses in the early nineteenth century, whose dowries were only an additional burden […]
Life Imitates Art
This graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, perhaps knowns to some as the creator of the Bechdel test, to others as the creator of the comic Dykes to Watch Out For, has won critical acclaim and is currently featured as The Atlantic’s 1book140 selection for LGBTQ month. I found to to be a truly engaging read both for its art and for its written content. The art is done in black, white and blue tones. Bechdel mixes up her own comic illustrations of her family with […]
Meh
This novel is not just a stream but rather a flood of consciousness, narrated by a woman who needs the help of mental health professionals. While I appreciate that the narrator reveals her state of mind to us with her endless, run-on rumination, as a reader, I just found it wearying after a while. And in the end, I’m not sure what to make of the odyssey of Elyria, a 28-year-old woman, writer for soap operas, unhappily married, trying to lose herself. Elyria has been […]