Recommended by: A Garden Carried in the Pocket, who always seems to read such interesting books, that lucky duck. I am very, very fond of dysfunctional family memoirs. Or crazy people memoirs are also fine too. Both types of memoirs make me feel grateful for my own lovely family, which is not at all dysfunctional and handles crazy extremely well. So I enjoyed this, and it was also an interesting insight into the ways of the toffs. (Cause I’m all lower-middle-class American South girl.) When I started reading it, I thought that Liza Campbell didn’t compare well to people like,…
3 CommentsCategory: 3 Stars
Ah, Linda Newbery. I’ve been meaning to read one of her books for about a year and a half – I very vaguely remember wanting to buy it at the Foyle’s on the South Bank when I was there in January 2007 with the family. Something with clocks. Sisterland is about a girl called Hilly who has a problematic sister that’s got a crush on a racist kid (British kids are scary! I’m never raising my kids in England cause those British kids are way too frightening!), and her grandmother has got Alzheimer’s and is forever talking about someone called…
2 CommentsYou may have heard of this because everyone got really excited about it and wrote about it on their book blogs a while ago, but I didn’t read it until now because that’s when it got in at the library. It’s about an ad agency at the end of that dot-com bubble thing that happened when I was young and foolish and paying no attention to anything except, you know, learning geometry proofs and swearing to one and all that I would never give myself to anyone but Carl Anderson (my first love). Isn’t he sexy? (Even though the picture’s…
Leave a CommentRobin starts – after the “previously on Robin” bit at the beginning – right where Coombe left off, with the joyous happiness of Robin and Donal’s reunion. Good news: They still love each other. I wasn’t surprised by that, but I have to confess I was a little unsettled by the scene directly following it, where Donal goes home to tell his mother about his evening. I quote: Throughout his life he had taken all his joys to his closest companion and nearest intimate – his mother. Theirs had not been a common life together. He had not even tried…
4 CommentsRecommended by: Book Nut I love Annie Sullivan. Every time I think about Annie Sullivan it blows my mind. She was twenty when she went to go teach Helen Keller, and she’d had no proper parenting, and she was twenty, and she must have been just about the most brilliant and inventive person of all time. Annie Sullivan. WOW. There was a woman who knew how to parent. Anyway, I was excited to read this book about her. I like young adult books, even though I have now become a real adult and can no longer feel smug, as I…
Leave a CommentRecommended by: God knows. Some website. I remember seeing it but I didn’t take note of where and now I can’t remember. I’m cute but dumb. I actually bought this book mainly out of terror and dismay, as it sounded a lot like a story I’m in the process of drafting, and when I read about it I freaked out immediately and started having depressing dreams in which Sara Zarr (who looked a lot like Scheherazade from the TV movie of Arabian Nights, damn her) came and fussed at me for writing a lamer version of the exact same story…
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