Lula and Rory are basically the “Weird Girl and What’s His Name” of the title. Odd-ball teenagers in the little town of Hawthorne, North Carolina. They are best friends, sharing an interest for fantasy and sci-f, but their deepest and most abiding love is for the TV show The X-Files, being active in the online fan community and writing a joint blog where they analyse and comment on the episodes. Both have been abandoned by parents. Rory lives alone with his alcoholic mother, while Lula […]
For a legendary assassin, she spends a whole lot of time NOT killing people
3.5 stars I put off reading this for the longest time, mainly because I figured I’d have to go back and read the first one, Throne of Glass, again to remember what happened, what with having read that way back in early 2013. But then the lovely Narfna tipped me off about this website, which allowed me to quickly recap all the stuff I only vaguely remembered, and I no longer had an excuse not to read it and it fit into my Monthly Keyword […]
Five novellas smooshed together. Still not sure about this author or this series.
The Assassin’s Blade is a compilation of five interrelated novellas that take place about a year before the first book in this series, Throne of Glass. Each one can be read separately, but work best together, showing how the infamous assassin Celaena Sardothien went from being rich, spoiled and deadly, to being a slave in the salt mines of Endovier. These five novellas go a long way towards rectifying one of the main complaints I had with that first book, namely that we were shown […]
A Workout for Your Tear Ducts
This is a beautifully written YA novel that is appropriate for all ages and deals with a terrifying topic: the illness of a parent. The idea for A Monster Calls originated with writer Siobhan Dowd who died before she could write it. Author Patrick Ness was approached to create a story from Dowd’s notes, and he has produced a painfully honest and sad account of how a 13-year-old boy handles the illness of his mother. You will cry, but this story is so beautiful and […]