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Tag: gothic

Review: White is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi

Published 6 Mar 2010 by Gin Jenny

In White is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi has done the thing I was afraid she wasn’t going to manage, which is to become EVEN BETTER YET in her third book than she was in her second.  She can’t keep this up much longer, right?  I mean she has to plateau at some point, right?  Helen Oyeyemi!  What will you do to stagger and amaze us next? White is for Witching is about a set of twins, Eliot and Miranda, who live in a haunted house.  Miranda has pica, and the house hates foreigners.  As the book goes on, we come…

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Two books by Elizabeth Peters

Published 23 Jun 2009 by Gin Jenny

Elizabeth Peters – under this pseudonym as well as her other one, Barbara Michaels – is one of my most favorite authors of all the authors.  I like her because she writes the kind of book I like, but she does it (usually) tongue-in-cheek, and furthermore she has read all the same books I have read.  Not just, like, Little Women, which everyone has read, but you know, Rafael Sabatini and The Sheik and trashy things like that.  I appreciate this from Elizabeth Peters. The Love Talker and Devil-May-Care, both of which I read in the last few days, are…

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My Cousin Rachel, Daphne du Maurier

Published 21 Jun 2009 by Gin Jenny

Verdict: Not as good as Rebecca. Philip, the protagonist of My Cousin Rachel, has been raised by his bachelor cousin Ambrose.  Ambrose goes away to Italy, marries there, and a few years later sends a letter to Philip intimating that he is in danger, and asking Philip to come to Italy straight away.  When Philip gets there, Ambrose has died, and Rachel is gone.  He conceives a hatred for her, believing that she was responsible for Ambrose’s death; but when she comes to stay with him in England, he falls for her straight away.  Is she evil?  Did she poison…

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Blackbriar, William Sleator

Published 17 May 2009 by Gin Jenny

I like it when it rains on a weekend that I don’t have any outside plans.  This weekend, I curled up in my comfy chair and read Blackbriar.  (Originally I opened up my blinds, too, so that I could see the rain, but there was THE HUGEST BUG EVER on the outside of my window, seriously, it was as big as a grown hummingbird, and it wouldn’t go away when I rapped on the window, so I closed the blinds again and just enjoyed the sounds of the rain.)  Ella was right.  It is indeed extremely Gothic. Fifteen-year-old Danny and…

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