Holland Bakker is trying to be a writer, but two years after graduating from college, still doesn’t really feel like she has anything to write about. The apartment she lives in is in part paid for by her wealthy uncles, and even her job, as a stagehand/photographer at the Broadway theatre where her uncle is the musical director is thanks to him. She’s feeling adrift and like a bit of a scrounger, and desperately wishes she could find some purpose. For more than six months, […]
Sid is a Jerk
As a person of mixed race (White mother, Black father) who loves the blues, I thought that a book like Half-Blood Blues (featuring several mixed race characters and blues) would be right up my alley. It was not. In fact, it took me nearly a week to read the first 50 pages and I was bored to death almost the whole time. On page 54 things finally (finally!) got interesting from a story standpoint, but I still had to contend with the writing, which never […]
Halbs Reads His First Romance Novel
With the “Random Acts” series, author Julia Kent has created a Marvel Cinematic Universe of sorts for “romantic comedy with an edge”. From what I can tell, characters move in and out of the books in the series and have interconnected lives. This is a pretty neat idea for a series of romance books. (Since I am not a romance reader, I have no idea if this is normal or not.) This is a review of the first book in the Random series. In Random […]
Read It and Weep
I meant to read this young adult novel before I watched the movie but I caved and watched the movie first (which I liked by the way). If you’ve seen the previews for the movie starring Chloe Grace Moretz, you know the basic plot of this novel. A young woman, Mia, is involved in a car accident while driving on a snowy road in Oregon with her mom, dad, and younger brother, Teddy. At first she doesn’t realize the severity of what has happened because […]