I’ve read a number of books by Isabel Allende, and I’m sure I’ll read more. However, I didn’t know about The House of the Spirits (1982) until I saw it on my 50 Books Every Woman Should Read Before She Turns 40 List. As Allende’s first novel, it seems quite personal in nature. Apparently, Allende began writing it as a letter to her 100-year-old grandfather when she heard he was dying. There are some parallels with her real life. The House of the Spirits is pretty dense and comes […]
London is drowning and I live by the river
When pressed, I’ll tell people I don’t like fantasy. This claim is usually followed by a list of exceptions. I like Neil Gaiman. I like Harry Potter. I also like the Rivers of London-series by Ben Aaronovitch. The rest of the genre is, as they say, not my cup of tea. No offense to you fantasy lovers, but it just doesn’t do much for me. The suspension of disbelief required is, apparently, too big a leap. One of the reasons I do like these books, […]
“All Bette’s stories have happy endings. That’s because she knows where to stop. She’s realized the real problem with stories—if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.”
This is one of those books that come heavy with the weight of other people’s expectations. I genuinely had almost no idea what it was about, only that the people who love it LOVE IT, and I had a general idea that it was pretty weird. The only thing I knew for sure was that Death was a character, because Gaiman spun her off into her own comic at one point. I added it to my TBR when it became apparent that I would probably like it if […]
I waited to make this my first CBR11 review. It was worth the wait.
This book was the one Christmas present I asked for. I’d been dying to read it for ages because (full disclosure) I ‘know’ the author from online from way back when we were both teenagers, and I wanted to buy it to support her (and also because I couldn’t get it through my local library). Well, through the vagaries of online shopping, it only just came into my hands. Even though I live in Europe, my husband had gone for the American edition and I’m […]