Blast. I wrote a nice, thoughtful review of this book, and then it somehow got lost when I reviewed Death: The High Cost of Living. Bother bother bother. Suffice it to say – The Queen of Spells is a retelling of “Tam Lin”, which is such a great story that I have checked out or reserved five different adaptations of it, to decide which one is best (apart from, obviously, Fire and Hemlock). The Queen of Spells is not best. The sequence where Janet is hanging onto Tom as he turns into all sorts of things is trippy and nifty…
2 CommentsAuthor: Jenny Hamilton
Oh, steampunk, why do you keep breaking my heart? I want to love you, I do. What’s not to love about steampunk? In theory it should be everything good: Victorians, and flying machines, and (usually) fantasy elements too. How can it be that I have never read a steampunk book and really loved it? The Court of the Air is about two plucky orphans who are being chased by assassins, and they’re not sure why. I got bored about 150 pages in and didn’t finish it. There were several reasons for this. First of all, there were dangling participles all…
3 CommentsI read about Baltimore on Jenclair’s blog untold ages ago, and I put it on my list, but I didn’t leave myself a little note explaining what it was about. This is something I do now, but I didn’t always, and so when I would be at the library looking at my list of books, I never checked out Baltimore because I had forgotten anything I ever read about its plot. Fortunately I was incredibly bored recently and took the time to go back through my book list, look up the reviews, and leave myself teeny little plot synopses. Baltimore…
5 Comments(Finally getting around to reading some of the books I got at the book fair in early March. Stupid library, distracting me.) Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a Ewing’s sarcoma at the age of nine – at one point she reads about it and discovers it has a 5% survival rate. After ages and ages having this sorted out, she is left with part of her jaw missing. Later on she receives numerous grafts to sort this out, and these work for a while and then keep getting reabsorbed. (I believe that’s how it worked – I’m fuzzy on medical…
Leave a CommentI got this book out of the library because I put Martin Millar’s name into the Literature-Map website, and Caitlin Kiernan’s name was close to his. This is one of those things that I should know straight away isn’t going to work out for me: every time I do this, I find that the closest authors to the name I’ve entered are people I either haven’t heard of or don’t like, whereas the names of authors I do like are farther out to the perimeter. Douglas Coupland, Neil Gaiman, T.S. Eliot, and Alexandre Dumas are all well out at the…
Leave a CommentDon’t you love it when you re-encounter a book you’d completely forgotten about? I found Well Wished at the book fair, and as soon as I opened it I felt like I had been flashed straight back to second grade. I read Well Wished for the first time in the library of my elementary school, one afternoon when I was stuck there for what felt like forever. I don’t remember why I felt stuck – I like the library – or why I was there at all after school hours, but I remember this book. Well Wished is about a…
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