Sigh. I know she’s better than this. Ms. Picoult is an excellent writer. She does good dialogue, her characters are generally consistent, the little kids are really good little kids. In each case where I have begun reading a book of hers, I have stayed up way past my bedtime finishing it. (In the case of Vanishing Acts, I was already up thoroughly late because I was introducing my friend Teacher to Firefly and I didn’t want to let her leave until she totally liked it and had stopped saying snide things about Kaylee. Victory!) So I will not suggest…
3 CommentsAuthor: Gin Jenny
The fact that I stopped reading All Families Are Psychotic and started reading this is just further proof that I think an enormous lot of thoughts in my brain, and many of them are rather irrational. In this case, my thinking was that if I was going to be disappointed in Douglas Coupland I’d rather be disappointed sooner than later. So instead of reading All Families are Psychotic, which Nymeth said was pretty good, I read Miss Wyoming, which I’d heard wasn’t very good at all. And then I shall read JPod because it looks strange, and then I shall…
Leave a CommentRecommended by my mother. Of course. This is a book about a girl in 1920s New Orleans who dies prematurely, before anything about her life gets properly decided, particularly before she makes a decision about her boyfriend Andrew, a fact that proves troublesome to her after she dies. She is called Razi, and she haunts a Baton Rouge couple, Amy and Scott, who are dealing with the fallout from a loss of their own. The story flips back and forth between their story and Razi’s life as a – for lack of a better word – ghost, over the years,…
2 CommentsOn reflection, I believe I am glad I didn’t buy this in my recent spate of bookbuying, because I have still not decided whether I want to own it forever. It’s very good – a graphic novel memoir about first love and losing faith – and I enjoyed it both times I read it, and I am looking forward to Craig Thompson’s next, whenever that may be. I don’t have anything bad to say about it, actually. The drawings are black and white, line drawings, and Mr. Thompson makes excellent use of the whole graphic novel form to do things…
2 CommentsOn with the reading of books by Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine to decide what I indeed think of her! Adam and Eve and Pinch Me – of whose title, incidentally, I simply cannot approve – is all about a caddish man called Jeffrey John Leach, who is wickedly assuming false names and seducing women so that they will give him money, and then he ups and vanishes, leaving them a bit in the lurch. He has done just this to two of the three central characters here – crazy Minty Knox who has OCD and hears voices, and opportunist Zillah Leach…
Leave a Comment“Did someone die in here or what?” …. “Yes,” she told Andy, “somebody die die in here but I have, of course, since changed the sheets.” I read about this book here, and felt smugly certain that I would not be, as Powell’s review suggested some would be, “deaf to this novel’s considerable charm”, thus would not have “wandered away long before those scenes [the ones with plot in them] arrive.” They said it was like Jane Austen, and I suppose I thought that meant gently satirical and not very exciting in a Scarlet Pimpernel way, but nevertheless containing various…
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