A few years ago I tried to read this and gave up in the first 20 pages because I was just not in the mood. I’m so glad I gave this a second try because it was a delight. Once the story got going, I could not stop listening (I opted for the audiobook version). Let’s just say there were some late nights involved and I seriously considered calling in sick to work. Karou is a teenager going to art school in Prague. At least, […]
Young Adult Twist on You’ve Got Mail
Please note that I gave this book 3.5 stars. So all in all I really liked this book. It was cute, and was a great little homage to You’ve Got Mail, which was a great homage to The Shop Around the Corner. I read this for Romance Bingo 2017 and this fits my Young Adult square. Told in the first person, we have Lily, a teenage girl who has a chaotic (but loving) home life, and only has one best friend. Lily plays guitar and […]
The Book of Three: the best of old-fashioned YA fantasy
The first book I read (well, finished reading) in 2017 was one I have read countless times before. Perhaps, in that sense, it should not count. But this time was special. This time, I read it to my little sister, who was around the same age (9) I read it for the first time almost twenty years ago. She loved it, and I–who have always found a beautiful magic in this book–loved it more than I ever had before. (That’s saying something, as it was […]
A tale of wheeled cities
“It was a dark, blustery afternoon in Spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.” …And from that opening sentence on, I was hooked. In the distant future, in the aftermath of the Sixty Minute War which put paid to the world as we know it, a system called Municipal Darwinism arose. Evolving out of the need to dodge the volcanoes and earthquakes that rocked the earth following the war, mechanical cities […]