This one is a bit tough to review. I really liked it, but I didn’t really enjoy it. I’ve had nothing like the events in the story happen to me, and yet, I felt that the plot hit close to home. Does that make any sense? Lorelei Bird is a free spirit, to say the least. She and her husband live in a beautiful cottage somewhere in the Cotswolds with their two daughters and twin boys. Every minute of life in Lorelei’s world is to […]
Man is a Monster
Literary classics earn their designation by presenting themes that resonate throughout the ages. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is just such a literary classic. She wrote this short but brilliant tale when she was about 20, while she, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron were on holiday in Switzerland. As the poor weather prevented their outdoor adventures, the three entertained themselves with stories of the “supernatural.” Shelley’s Frankenstein has become a world renowned classic and a staple of Halloween partiers everywhere. And yet, Shelley’s scary […]
How to Survive the Unsurvivable
Reading The Shock of the Fall took me back to my early teens a little bit. Because back then, before wizard, vampires, and dystopian societies had exploded the YA market, the age-appropriate books found in my local library fell mostly into two categories: the ones with horses and the ones with problems. Sometimes the categories overlapped of course, so you’d get books with horses and problems. For a few years, after picture books and Nancy Drew, but before my brief Serious Adult Classics Only phase […]
Survival is Insufficient
Sometimes, a book comes out with a lot of hype attached to it. The writer is supposedly the next “big thing” and there’s a huge buzz for months after the book’s release. Jonathan Franzen. The Dragon Tattoo books. The Hunger Games. Gone Girl. And these books (yeah, I hated The Corrections) don’t always live up to the hype for me. I’ve read tons and tons of rave reviews about Station Eleven over the past few weeks, and I was so worried that it would fall […]