Skip to content

Category: 3 Stars

Review: Cut to the Quick, Kate Ross

The beginning: Inexplicably invited to an acquaintance’s family home for two weeks, Julian Kestrel finds himself caught in an angry, awkward mess of family feuding. The situation only gets worse from there, as Julian comes back to his room one day to find a dead girl lying on his bed. The end (skip this section if you don’t want the spoilers): Ah, there’s a last-minute tacked-on secret to be revealed. Glorious. I love it when an author does that. You thought you were done with all the mysteries, but no, there is another one to be had! Barbara Vine does…

12 Comments

Review: The Ghost of the Mary Celeste, Valerie Martin

Programming note: Because of my commitment to depicting the way I really read, this review is less focused than I might prefer. Sometimes reading the end is like that — you go to read the end and find out that you haven’t read enough of the beginning for the ending to make sense. The beginning: A husband and wife die at sea. Back at home in New England, their family grieves for them; amongst them is a woman called Sallie, who struggles to manage her spiritualism-obsessed sister Hannah, while also discovering her own love for her cousin Benjamin Briggs. The…

10 Comments

Review: Marbles, Ellen Forney

I started keeping a new TBR spreadsheet a few months back, with different tabs for pleasure reading, research reading, and forthcoming books. Maybe some weekend when I’m bored, I’ll set it up so that I can track when I read/review one of the books on the list, and it’ll make automatic pie charts of my percentages of gender, nationality, and whether the American cover was better or the British one. (Currently all that stuff is on another spreadsheet.) (Yes, I like spreadsheets. Sue me.) Anyway, Marbles, by Ellen Forney (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository), was the very first book…

9 Comments

Review: Sister Citizen, Melissa Harris-Perry

I am interested in the ways people are affected by representations of race, gender, sexuality, etc., in the media. It seems like Oscar Wilde was right all along: Life reflects art. If you watch gay people on TV you are more likely to want them to get married. And Melissa Harris-Perry is a feminist whose writing and thinking I like quite a bit. So when she writes a book about representations of black women in American culture, I’m obviously there. Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) is about the stereotypes that…

19 Comments

The Crane Wife, Patrick Ness

The beginning: A man wakes up in the middle of the night and finds a wounded crane on his front lawn. Carefully, he extracts an arrow from its wing so that it can fly away. He tells it his name, George. The next day a woman called Kumiko enters his life, and everything changes. The end (spoilers in this section only; highlight ’em if you want ’em): I predicted this correctly in my brain. I am not familiar with the story of the Crane Wife, but I feel like anyone who has ever read a fairy tale knew what was…

29 Comments

Review: Wit’s End, Karen Joy Fowler

The beginning: A woman called Rima, the last surviving member of her family, comes to live with her godmother, a famous mystery writer, in Santa Cruz. Addison was estranged from Rima’s father years ago, for reasons Rima has never known, and Rima has come to Santa Cruz partly to find out whether there was anything more than friendship between her father and her godmother. While living at Addison’s mansion (called Wit’s End), Rima becomes fascinated by Addison’s fans, whose online presence has given Addison’s fictional detective a life of his own. Damn, Wit’s End (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository)…

13 Comments

Review: The Imposter’s Daughter, Laurie Sandell

Throughout her childhood, Laurie Sandell’s father would enrapture her with stories of his brilliant, varied, and successful life: top grades at the best universities, meetings with Henry Kissinger to advise on policy, multiple awards for valor in the Vietnam War. As an adult, she spun through years of dysfunction and uncertainty before becoming an interviewer of celebrities. But Sandell also begins to learn things about her father that make it clear he isn’t, and never was, the person he claimed to be. Cover report: Same cover in England and America. I like it! To begin with the good things about…

12 Comments

Review: Lament, Maggie Stiefvater

The beginning: The beginning of Lament (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) is not promising, dear friends. A teenager called Deirdre (Dee) meets a mysterious and handsome boy called Luke at a music festival, and they play a stunning duet together. There is some mysterious magical stuff going on, and then Dee and Luke are madly in love forever. Cover report: Ooo, this one’s tough. Aesthetically I think the British cover is better, but I hate the tagline, and I think the American cover says more about the contents of the book. I’m giving it to the American cover in…

18 Comments

The River of No Return, Bee Ridgway

The beginning: I was so excited about the premise of The River of No Return that I checked it out from the library the self-same day I read Alice’s review! It is about a Guild made up of people who have the power to jump forward in time. People usually do it when they are under threat of death; and upon their arrival in the future, the Guild finds them, teaches them how to live in modern times, and sets them loose with a stipend to cover their expenses. This is the only option for people who jump forward in…

21 Comments

Review: Shadows, Robin McKinley

The beginning: Maggie can’t stand her stepfather. Although Val is good to her mother and kind to her, she has never warmed up to him. The reason is that he has too many shadows — shadows with legs and teeth. Cover report: I couldn’t find a different British cover (yet? maybe it comes out later?). This cover is fine. Not particularly exciting, but I can imagine that this would be a difficult book to put a cover to. The end (there are spoilers in this section, so skip it if you don’t want to know): I wanted to know what…

19 Comments