When the seemingly dead body of a child reanimates hours after arriving at an ancient …
Review of 'Once upon a river' on 'Goodreads'
No rating
I listened to the audiobook narrated by Juliet Stevenson. If you like a long tale with stories folded into stories, you will be alternately lulled and excited by this one. The writing is solid, the characters (many!) are well-differentiated, and overall it's very well crafted. The setting is early 20th sometime, but mostly it's rather timeless.
I found this a bit slow to get to where it was obviously leading, but it is the only romance I've ever read where the heroine stops leaning into a sexual encounter because the hero has been clumsy/inattentive and she stops everything cold until a good discussion of how to receive direction can take place. So my hat's off to the author.
Review of 'Easy Crafts for the Insane' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
There are some funny bits in here and the writer has a nice turn of phrase but really, there is barely a book here. The writer has a string of terrible luck, and also a string of unfortunate relationship disasters that appear grounded in a certain naive enthusiasm and emotional excess; she gets very sad when Trump is elected, which is relatable but not accompanied by any surprising insights; she ultimately gets very depressed, is briefly hospitalized, and recovers with the help of a therapist. There are crafts accompanying every chapter.
I'm not sure who the audience is supposed to be but it just didn't deliver a book-shaped experience to me. It's a bunch of vignettes from a 2-year period and a bunch of craft instructions (on which I won't pass judgment: maybe they're amazing if you're crafty). It felt like the writer was determined to Get Something Out of …
There are some funny bits in here and the writer has a nice turn of phrase but really, there is barely a book here. The writer has a string of terrible luck, and also a string of unfortunate relationship disasters that appear grounded in a certain naive enthusiasm and emotional excess; she gets very sad when Trump is elected, which is relatable but not accompanied by any surprising insights; she ultimately gets very depressed, is briefly hospitalized, and recovers with the help of a therapist. There are crafts accompanying every chapter.
I'm not sure who the audience is supposed to be but it just didn't deliver a book-shaped experience to me. It's a bunch of vignettes from a 2-year period and a bunch of craft instructions (on which I won't pass judgment: maybe they're amazing if you're crafty). It felt like the writer was determined to Get Something Out of a Bad Time, and I guess she did.
Catherine Oliphant writes for women’s magazines and lives comfortably with anthropologist Tom Mallow—although she’s starting to wonder if they’ll ever …
As everyone else has mentioned, this is enormous fun, exactly what you want light reading to be (assuming you like feminism, time travel, and political geekery).
Fifteen-year-old Julia Beaufort-Stuart wakes up in a hospital not knowing how she was injured, and …
Review of 'The pearl thief' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
I felt like this took a long time to get going, but the last half was spectacular.
It shed a lot of interesting light on how Julie of Code Name Verity became the person she did, and the complex handling of teenage sexual awakening/sexual vulnerability/class was remarkable.
In this spine-tingling tale Ingrid Coleman writes letters to her husband, Gil, about the truth …
Review of 'Swimming lessons' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
I loved Fuller's novel Bitter Orange so much, and I loved the writing enough to stick this out but oh god, the next book about a sad marriage based on a professor knocking up his student is going straight in the bin.
Review of 'Everyone Brave Is Forgiven' on 'Goodreads'
No rating
I wanted to love this book more than I did because the writing and the dialog were dazzlingly good and had my full attention. Unlike some other readers I found the characters compelling. I was fascinated to learn of the existence of a class of evacuees who were rejected by villages and either starved or returned to London because no home would take them in. I also liked the enormous IM-perfection of Mary, who was interested in teaching these students for less than pure reasons, and did her students a lot of good while also being by modern standards somewhat cruel and dismissive.
The subplot about race did not work for me. It struck me as a risky decision for a white novelist to represent racism against Black Americans in such a direct way, and for me the risk did not pay off--I found it distractingly shocking rather than effective …
I wanted to love this book more than I did because the writing and the dialog were dazzlingly good and had my full attention. Unlike some other readers I found the characters compelling. I was fascinated to learn of the existence of a class of evacuees who were rejected by villages and either starved or returned to London because no home would take them in. I also liked the enormous IM-perfection of Mary, who was interested in teaching these students for less than pure reasons, and did her students a lot of good while also being by modern standards somewhat cruel and dismissive.
The subplot about race did not work for me. It struck me as a risky decision for a white novelist to represent racism against Black Americans in such a direct way, and for me the risk did not pay off--I found it distractingly shocking rather than effective to see certain words spelled out on the page and have them met with only mild reproof by our viewpoint character, and it was a weird decision to have the only major Black characters in the book be Americans who were there to perform in a minstrel show. (A casual google reveals there had been Caribbean Blacks in the British military since WWI.) Was this a realistic depiction of things that happened? Maybe, but it comes off all wrong in a novel.
I also found the depiction of the war's damages unrelenting. We know from contemporary diaries that most people who had terrible experiences on the home front also experienced good times and didn't see their lives as an uninterrupted slog right up to the end of the war. At a certain point I began to wonder whether the author was going to kill everyone off just to make the point that war is terrible.
But it was an alive and bristly kind of book, admirable in a lot of ways, different from most of the WWII novels I have read, so it has that going for it.
These stories have some historical interest, but they're horrifyingly committed to the romance of hypermasculine, implacable men ultimately convincing women of their true worth after unforgivable loyalty tests. The final novella is also searingly racist--the husband is forgiven for a near-murder he commits because he wants to eliminate a suitor who would have made his wife unhappy, but his near-murderous whipping of an aboriginal servant is just shrugged off as a flaw of temperament or something.
I've got a strong stomach for archaic popular fiction but I'd advise skipping this.
That's the kind of junior year Betsy Ray has planned …
Review of 'Betsy Was a Junior' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
I'm sure I'm just becoming a grinchy communist in my old age, but the amount of money that must have gone into the clothes and parties in this book (in America in 1909!) made me see the sorority plot in a different light. On the surface Betsy learns not to be exclusive, but let's face it, to keep up with the Crowd you'd need quite a lot of clothes and free time (and her parents, throwing three-day parties that surely her guests would feel the need to reciprocate), so she was already living an exclusive sort of social life. It rang kind of hollow for me.
Also, parties in books are much more fun when they happen only once or twice. I'm on Team Margaret.
Meh. There are some nice bits but I wasn't too engaged.
This started a bit slow and simplistic but picked up rapidly, and had a welcome crispness to it that's missing from a lot of both Regency and faery stories. Very good escapism, entertaining banter, and a nice social justice angle that doesn't strain credulity too much (faery balls and nonconformist heroines evading consequences are one thing, well-intentioned gentry Saving Society is just too much to swallow, and this book didn't ask me to, for which full credit).
