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 CommentsCategory: 3 Stars
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 CommentsThroughout 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 CommentsThe 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
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…
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