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Tag: boarding schools

Review: Blue Is for Nightmares and White Is for Magic, Laurie faria Stolarz

Well. This is not what I expected. Amanda reviewed this series, of which Blue Is for Nightmares and White Is for Magic are the first two, earlier this year, and they are boarding school books and the series is a bunch of books that are matching and color-coded. Y’all know I had to get some of that. How, you inquire, did I manage to resist for eight months? By my home library always having them checked out, that’s how! But I got the first two at Mid-Manhattan when I came into the city last weekend to see the statues at…

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Review: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E. Lockhart

Have y’all ever seen the film Serendipity? I mean it’s not that great. I’m fond of Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack, and I still recognize that this film just isn’t that great. The premise is, they meet once, they have a great date, but Kate Beckinsale wants to leave it to chance whether they meet again. Chance doesn’t work out for them. A few years later, John Cusack’s about to get married or something, and he goes on a mission to track down Kate Beckinsale because she’s the one that got away. He really wants to find her but they…

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Old School, Tobias Wolff

I am going to say my worst thing first. Stand by for enthusiastic praise. Tobias Wolff is a short story writer, and in Old School, his first novel, you can tell. It is less like a novel, and more like a collection of short stories about the same characters on the same theme. Mostly this was fine, but the last two chapters felt weird and abrupt, in a way they wouldn’t have done if this were a collection of short stories. Only if it had been a collection of short stories, I’d probably never have read it. That would have…

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I will never catch up on reviews

…if I don’t do a bunch of short ones all at once. Thus: The Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon I checked this out on Gavin’s recommendation and because I love Alexander the Great. Your claims that he was a psychotic alcoholic have no effect on me because in my mind he is exactly the way Mary Renault writes him in Fire from Heaven and The Persian Boy. The Golden Mean is about Aristotle when he comes to Macedon to tutor young Alexander. Though Lyon was clearly influenced by Mary Renault’s books, she gives a more nuanced picture of Alexander, showing a…

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The Dragonfly Pool, Eva Ibbotson

Lovely Darla at Books and Other Thoughts reviewed this book a while ago, and I was thrilled to find Eva Ibbotson had written a new book – I love her, and actually, I like her non-fantasy books best.  Still I didn’t read it for ages, and then at Charing Cross Road the other day, I almost didn’t buy it.  I’m glad I bought it!  It was wonderful! Tally is a determined little girl who gets sent off to a boarding school called Delderton as Hitler’s growing power brings the threat of war to London, where she lives with her father. …

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Three books about dumb kids

Just finished reading three books I’d been looking forward to, and none of them wholly pleased me. What I Was, Meg Rosoff – All about a boy called Hilary (bless) who goes to a British boarding school and becomes a bit obsessed with another young boy called Finn, who lives by himself in a little hut that can only be reached during low tide.  I thought the revelation about Finn at the end was a bit of a let-down, since the rest of the book didn’t at all seem a revelation-type book.  Besides which I do not appreciate stories in…

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Year of the Griffin, Diana Wynne Jones

I didn’t exactly mean to read this.  I am still intending to read all of Shakespeare’s plays, which I had forgotten about until just now.  I am in the middle of rereading the entire Sandman.  I have a whole bunch of books out of the library about sexual ethics and other interesting things – art controversies, STDs, Bohemians – and instead of reading any of those things, I’ve been reading Diana Wynne Jones.  Once I read The Dark Lord of Derkholm I yearned and yearned for Year of the Griffin and couldn’t concentrate on anything else. In Year of the…

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Gentlemen and Players, Joanne Harris

Recommended by actually a number of book blogs – A Reader’s Journal and the other Jenny Claire from my lovely home state both reviewed it well.  I’ve been putting off reading this because I didn’t like Chocolat at all – I thought the film was better.  A terrifying and rare thing for me to say, and I generally only say it about The Princess Bride and Cold Comfort Farm; my opinion swayed in the latter case by how adorable I think Kate Beckinsale is, and how all the jokes surprised me in the film but not in the book, which…

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The Chatham School Affair, Thomas H. Cook

Meh. Everyone kept comparing other books to The Chatham School Affair with favorable-sounding opinions, so I picked it up at the library a little while ago and started reading it, and I have to confess that I found it somewhat trying.  I couldn’t get into the story because of all the frantic foreshadowing.  It kept being all Little did we know when first we beheld that peaceful landscape how much BLOOD AND DEATH AND MISERY there would be there later on, and I only read a little bit of it, but I just got fed up with the way Mr.…

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