The protagonist of Monster is Steve Harmon, a teenager on trial for murder. He is accused of being the lookout for a corner store robbery which ended in the death of the store owner. Steve is not accused of being the person who pulled the trigger, just the guy who signaled to the others that it was safe to enter the store, but he is still charged with murder. The story is framed as a screenplay he’s writing about his own life and his trial, […]
Good old fashioned detective work
I was very much in the mood for a good old fashioned detective novel where clues are unearthed piece by piece and slowly the mystery unfolds. Land of Shadows was the perfect read for that. Just a great detective slowly unraveling the threads of a crime to lead her back to the culprit. Elouise “Lou” Norton grew up poor in Los Angeles with her older sister and a hardworking mother. When her sister goes missing, both Lou and her mother’s lives are changed forever. When […]
Lizzie Borden took an axe?
4.5 stars. I’d been eyeing this fictionalized account of the Lizzie Borden story for a while so when it was long-listed for the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction, I snagged a copy from my library. After reading it, it’s easy to see why it was longlisted. Schmidt is not fucking around with her prose. See What I Have Done is an incredible piece of writing, especially considering that it’s Schmidt’s debut. This is definitely a work of fiction, but there are huge overlaps with actual […]
A book worth re-reading
Another contender for favorite book of the year right here. She Rides Shotgun is kind of like an urban crime thriller mashed up with an old school western. Think of True Grit meets Veronica Mars and you’ll come close to the feeling of this book. As a superfan of badass literary girls, it will surprise no one that I enjoyed this immensely. Polly, eleven years old and a bit sheltered, gets picked up from school by her ex-con father unexpectedly one day. Turns out her […]