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Category: 3 Stars

Review: The Children’s Book, A. S. Byatt

Have you heard of this book? It is as long as the prime meridian. I am not even lying. It follows several families of (mostly) forward-thinking artists and businesspeople from the late 1890s to the early part of the First World War. It is eight trillion pages of thick, lush prose, and if a book blogger found, as she drew closer to the end, that she simply could not bear to wade through the war poetry of a character she never felt lived up to his full potential of interestingness, well, you can understand how that would happen. I sound…

62 Comments

The Hand that First Held Mine, Maggie O’Farrell

Family tragedy book song time! (I’m kidding. I have not composed a family tragedy book song. YET.) Maggie O’Farrell’s newest book, The Hand that First Held Mine, focuses on two sets of characters in two different times: Alexandra (Sandra, Lexie), who goes off to London to seek her fortune (in the 1950s), and Elina and Ted, who have just come through a dangerous pregnancy and are struggling to recover from it (in the present day). If you suppose there is no connection between them, I can only assume you have never read a book before. The Hand that First Held…

34 Comments

The Sirens of Baghdad, Yasmina Khadra

I checked out The Sirens of Baghdad to read it, flipped to the back cover, and saw that Yasmina Khadra is really a dude called Mohammed Moulessehoul. And I was like, Really, dude? Really? You have to write as a girl? and I made fun of him in my mind all day before starting to read his book. Because women actually legitimately have to pretend to be dudes to get their books to sell sometimes! From Charlotte Bronte to Karen Blixen to, hell, even J. K. Rowling a bit! I was paying attention to the serious issues that Khadra was…

20 Comments

Three Empires on the Nile: Egypt 1869-1899, Dominic Green

Colonial encounters fascinate me. Sometimes I think that I will abandon all my other reading and devote myself only to colonial fiction and nonfiction. In general, I like colonial encounters by colonizing country in this exact order from best to worst: British, French, Portuguese, Belgian, Italian, German, Spanish, American. I have a particular sneaky fondness for novels from the olden days where stalwart British protagonists go abroad and have stiff upper lips and unyielding codes of hono(u)r. Please don’t judge me. Three Empires on the Nile had a lot of players and a lot of new words and terms for…

20 Comments

The Fencer Trilogy, K. J. Parker

NB: I am not really back. If I were back I would be reading your posts and posting comments that are witty and insightful as my comments always are (RIGHT?), and I really miss reading y’all’s posts because I love y’all. However, I am still doing The Transition, and also while The Transition is going on, my laptop is being repaired, and sadly there is some sort of general delay on parts, so it is taking ages for my laptop to become healed, so I am borrowing my aunt’s computer and I feel guilty using it for hours like I…

35 Comments

Review: The Tapestry of Love, Rosy Thornton

Sometimes there is just a pleasing confluence of events. Litlove reviewed The Tapestry of Love a few weeks ago, and I thought it didn’t sound like the kind of thing I normally read at all, but that didn’t necessarily mean I wouldn’t like it / shouldn’t try it. So when the author emailed me to ask if I wanted to review it, of course I said yes. The Tapestry of Love is all about a divorced woman called Catherine Parkstone who decides to move to rural France and set up shop there as a decorator and seamstress. As you do.…

33 Comments

Absolutely spoiler-free review of Mockingjay

I have had Carly Simon’s “Mockingbird” stuck in my head for the past week and a half. Except instead of “bird” I keep hearing “jay”. Mock–ye-ah; ing–ye-ah; jay–ye-ah. It’s gotten kind of old. All the time I was reading Mockingjay I’ve had this song in my head, and ever since then. To my joy, I read the end of Mockingjay at the bookshop ages before I started reading the library copy for real, so it didn’t fall under no-spoilers September. This worked out nicely for me because the rest of the book is pretty intense, and I am not positive…

40 Comments

More nonfiction

More than Just Race, William Julius Wilson My library said that it had all these books by bell hooks, on whom I developed a girl crush in college, but when I went to the section of the library where bell hooks’s books were supposed to be, there were none! I should have checked to see that it was my branch of the library that has those books. But I was too excited to read about racism to just walk away, and I have heard many shiny good things about William Julius Wilson, so I checked out a few of his…

22 Comments

Suite Scarlett, Maureen Johnson

When I got home from my internship, I went to the library and basically checked out all the books Memory has read over the last year or so that sounded awesome. What can I say? The girl’s persuasive, and she’s been reading a lot of fantasy while I’ve been away, and I’ve been hungry–starved–for fantasy. I checked out Ship of Magic (which, alas, I couldn’t get into), Purple and Black (blew my mind), Jo Walton’s Farthing and Ha’Penny, and Suite Scarlett. (Okay, I guess it was not all the books Memory has read over the last year. It is just…

29 Comments

Their Finest Hour and a Half, Lissa Evans

Forgive the probable idiocy and inanity of this review. I read Their Finest Hour and a Half a few weeks ago, and now it is hard for me to remember things about it. It is a funny book–I kept saying “comic book” but that’s not really want I meant–about London during the Blitz. More or less, it centers on a propaganda film the British Ministry of Information is making. The characters are Edith, a seamstress and aspiring clothing designer who keeps getting bombed out; Ambrose, an aging film actor only interested in himself; and Catrin, an artist’s wife, newly tapped…

7 Comments