I was really looking forward to reading Hard Times when I pulled it off the shelf. I’m a Dickens fan. A Tale of Two Cities is one of my all-time favorites, and Bleak House is right up there, too. And I have to say this was the most Dickensian novel that Dickens ever Dickensed. Unfortunately, that’s not a good thing. It lacked a lot of my favorite things about Dickens. There wasn’t much of a mystery. There weren’t many great lines. And there weren’t any […]
Confessions of a recovering literary fiction snob
I loved reading fantasy and horror and suspense as a kid, and I loved the literary fiction we read in school. As an adult, I started taking myself and my choice of reading materials far too seriously, staying away from anything too genre, making rare exceptions for Atwood’s Madd Addam series or Tolkien. [I know. Insert eye roll <<here>>] And then about six years ago, I read and loved Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, and I started looking into his other books and found that […]
Like lickin’ honey off a thorn tree
When MsWas sent out the email offering free copies of The Sasquatch Murder, I knew I had to have one. About six months ago, a new coffee shop opened about a block from my house. It’s called Coffee for Sasquatch. I had visions of reading the book under the giant wall sculpture of Sasquatch, as if she’s reading over my shoulder. That didn’t quite happen, but I am writing this review while drinking coffee and glancing up at Big Sassy herself. I’m not quite sure […]
The Wrong Girl?
Ellies Oneill’s The Right Girl reads like a fairly standard chick-lit novel, its frivilous, whimsical and a little fluffy. BUT, it has the most fascinating under current – it raises interesting questions about our digital identities and our relationship with privacy. Two years prior Freya, our protagonaist, was a waitress with little or no direction in life, no hope of a partner and no money in the bank. Freya then signed up for the lifestyle app BBest – designed to streamline her life. She surrendered […]