Theoretically I really enjoy mysteries and thrillers. In practice, so many of the ones I start reading end up prominently featuring rape that I tend to avoid the genre. My mother assured me this one featured neither so I decided to give it a shot. The Lucky One is set on an old estate in California wine country. It’s recently been sold off to developers, despite the objections of the local community. They think the developers will rip out all the historical features of the […]
The Start of Something that Hasn’t Quite Found It’s Footing Just Yet
The Foxhole Court is the first novel of Nora Sakavic’s All for the Game, which gives an intriguing beginning for what is to come, but unfortunately does not really stand so well as a book on it’s own: it’s clearly just a buildup, and given it’s slim run of under 300 pages, I wonder if perhaps it would not have work to put the 3 instalments of the series into one novel with parts/books 1-2-3 all together? But that’s not my decision at the end […]
The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions
Hey, so did you know that Salman Rushdie doesn’t like Donald Trump? Because he doesn’t. He really, really hates him, in fact. I know this because I read the Golden House, which is ostensibly about Rene and his relationship with his neighbors, the Golden Family, but it is actually quite a bit about the fact that Donald Trump became president and Rushdie didn’t like it. This is good and bad, in some ways the device works, but in others it was a little too […]
Not starting the year off right
This is a prequel to Ella Enchanted. (The book, not the movie starring Anne Hathaway, which is very different from the source material.) Evie (Evora) is a young girl who is on her way to be a fairly talented physician when her world turns upside down. Her best friend Wormy (Warwick) decides to propose to her, and sensing a proposal, the Fairy Godmother Lucinda shows up. When Evie says “Thanks, but no thanks,” Lucinda turns her into an ogre, with a time limit of 62 days […]