recovering Victorianist, tech worker, fan of giant books. Portland, OR.
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I suppose someone might have found this touching, and the writing was lulling and mildly comic, but it reads a bit like warmed-over Wes Anderson. Unlikeable rich characters behaving quirkily. Not my thing.
Teenager Faris Nallaneen, heir to the small northern dukedom of Galazon, is still too young …
I think people are picking this up and expecting something it isn't. The magical school is more like Harriet Vane's Oxford than Hogwarts, and in any case is incidental to the political intrigue that takes up most of the book. I found it a very fine balance between coming of age, comedy of manners, Ruritanian palace intrigue, and magicks. And the writing's very good. More for adults than Stevermer's later books. There's a lot of literary allusion and conversations that imply rather than explain, so you have to piece things together. Lacks the tedious overexplanation of which most fantasy is now guilty, which apparently some people love!
When the seemingly dead body of a child reanimates hours after arriving at an ancient …
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.
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.
For twenty-eight years, things have been tripping along nicely for Cannie Shapiro. Sure, her mother …
I like a nice fluffy romance from time to time, but I didn't enjoy spending time with the self-absorbed, angry narrator of this book.
Catherine Oliphant writes for women’s magazines and lives comfortably with anthropologist Tom Mallow—although she’s starting to wonder if they’ll ever …
It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en …
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 …
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 …
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.
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.
