This is my Backlog book. I have been meaning to read this book for a while now. Once I started it, I realized I was rereading it. Which, I will say, fits this because I had forgotten about this gem called Chained by Lynne Kelly. To work off a debt, Hastin leaves his village in India to work as an elephant keeper for a man who wants to restart his circus. Innocent Hastin only sees a way to help his mother and ill sister, not […]
Randal the Elephant
Randal the Elephant is a curious Otter. What? Okay, let me back track. Randal is an otter. An otter that thinks elephants are majestic and amazing and his dream is to become on. Some of his friends encourage his dream. Others think otters are better. Yet, Randal goes off to become an elephant. And even though his letters home seems to say he is having a great time, the pictures show the reader that this might be less than the truth. This is a modern […]
The hunt for penicillin, and the kidnapping of Laurence
Onward with Temeraire, this time into the depths of the African continent! Today I’m writing four reviews, covering Books 4-7, so it’s all a little overlap-y, but one of the wonderful thing about what Naomi Novik is doing with this series is that she’s truly writing stand-alone books that also happen to build on each other. So, this one, Empire of Ivory, which is Book 4 of currently 8 in the series, takes our heroes, Will Laurence the human and Temeraire the wonderful dragon on […]
“That’s when I decide that shoveling elephant shit would be better than this.”
So the key to good fiction is that it feels real, yes? That whatever you’re reading – from some space alien wandering the galaxies afraid of the unending space, to a little boy with a purple crayon that can create his own moon if he chooses to – seems as real to as you are, sitting in your chair, or stretching out across your bed turning pages, or running for the bus, listening to the words in your headphones. That’s all I’m ever looking for, […]