This week in the Romance readers back channel one of the many tropes that drives us nuts came up: “this whole manufactured conflict of a couple hundred pages could have been solved by a SINGLE DAMN CONVERSATION.” (h/t kdm). In some ways, that describes the entirety of My Dearest Enemy by Connie Brockway. At the very core of Romance novels, there is often a single fundamental misunderstanding, and in this one it’s the placing of the two main characters as antagonists to each other by […]
This is how you do young adult fiction.
Dammit, I knew I should have written this review when I first finished the book, but I decided to push it off because it seemed too hard to try and sum up all my feeeeelings, but joke’s on me, now it’s even harder! Sherman Alexie has been one of my favorite writers since I was in college and one of my English comp teachers made us watch Smoke Signals, which is based off Alexie’s short story, “This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” and […]
Terrible half-baked review of a really good book.
I think I’ve really done this book an injustice by waiting so long to review it. (Thanks a lot, Mansfield Park!) I remember being ridiculously entertained by it, and reading it at a pretty fast pace, even for me. But I’ve forgotten most of why I found it so entertaining in the two and a half months since finishing it. This is one of those sci-fi books just waiting to break into the mainstream, because it’s written in a way that will appeal to people who […]
Books, Books, and More Books
I kept seeing this book pop up on bookish friend’s lists and recommendations. It’s very, very short so I decided to give it a go. It was a lovely little book, but I’m not sure it deserves the level of fawning and adulation I’ve heard some people give it. Still, at 97 pages, you don’t have much to lose by trying it. The book documents the decades long love affair between an American woman (Helene Hanff) and a British bookshop (Marks & Co.). The story […]