Only Killers and Thieves by Paul Howarth What if Cormac McCarthy was Australian and wrote accessible prose? The result might be quite a bit like Paul Howarth’s debut novel. Set largely in the Australian cattlelands of the 1880s, Only Killers and Thieves is a book about good and evil, innocence and experience, white and black, and the near impossibility of maintaining your ideals in a corrupted world. Tommy McBride is the younger son of a cattle rancher. Drought has rendered the family ranch nearly free […]
Maybe Don’t Bind Your Fate to First Hottie You Meet
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 […]
Slow but steady wins the race… but not always?
This book is a fictionalized account of the life of John Franklin, the famous explorer of the Arctic, who died while trying to find the legendary Northwest Passage. Nadolny seems to have researched Franklin very thoroughly and stays mostly true to the facts, except attributing one additional dominant characteristic to him, and that is “slowness”. This fictional Franklin sees the world differently than other people, because his inner clock is delayed, which means that everything happens too fast for him and he reacts too late. […]
A Severance Package at the End of the World
I love a good post apocalypse novel, even though I am totally afraid of a massive disaster, like a plague, or meteor, or worldwide economic meltdown. This is why reading these types of novels is fun for me. Severance was actually a plague based disaster novel, with a little bit of cult obsession and passive zombies added in to keep things interesting. The novel focuses on Candace, a disillusioned New Yorker who somehow manages to survive the “fever” that swept across the globe. We switch […]