I’m choosy in my reading–unless of course the book is free (as this one is, for Amazon Prime members through January). The pretty flaming horse on the cover is Ireth, a powerful being from another plane that can be temporarily summoned into a human vessel. You can probably guess the requirements: good health, no piercings to mar one’s wholeness, a summoning tattoo in an extinct language, and…virginity. (Because it’s YA!) Our human vessel is eighteen year old Sandis, the favorite slave of an underworld kingpin whose gun-toting grafters […]
Her Bloody Heart Tumbled Into My Lap
Some books are so unremittingly personal that I am driven to distraction. This collection of achingly intimate essays—not quite chronological, in broken narrative, shifting between past and present tense—are addressed to “you” (me?!), which unnerved my inner WASP. TMI, dear author! Put a tourniquet on this open vein, you’re going to die and stain the carpet. Things are intense from page FOUR: The ugly truth is that I lost my son Isadore in court. The Hague Convention. The ugly of that truth is that I […]
In Rural Idaho, No One Can Hear You Scream
In the category Genres I Like to Read, memoir and horror tie for dead last. (Elizabeth Gilbert is a shameless exhibitionist. Fight me.) However, when a book makes all the “Best of the Year” lists, I feel obligated to give it the old Amazon 1-Click. In the mountains of Idaho, Tara is the last child of a devout Mormon couple—so devout that their youngest children have no birth certificates, have never been to school, and do not go to the doctor, not even for grievous […]