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Category: 3 Stars

Review: The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy (NYRB Classics)

Someone I love: Joan Wyndham Someone I hate: Ernest Hemingway Combine them and you get: Elaine Dundy As you can imagine, I had a strange combination of feelings about The Dud Avocado.  It’s a semi-autobiographical novel about a young expatriate American party girl and her relationship with an American man called Larry, whom she runs across in Paris.  When she runs into Larry, she’s involved with a married Italian, but she immediately fancies herself in love with Larry and becomes involved in a theatre production that he’s directing.  Along the way she has various romantic entanglements and – well, okay,…

49 Comments

Review: If You Come Softly, Jacqueline Woodson

Meh. I HATE TO SAY MEH. I particularly hate to say meh when it’s a young-adult book to which I am saying it, because I feel like if I say meh to a young-adult book, I am becoming one of those people who turn up their noses at young adult books and do not pay any attention to YA rock stars like Laurie Halse Anderson and Patrick Ness and, well, and Jacqueline Woodson.  I am not one of those people!  Except that I have only read one of Jacqueline Woodson’s books after hearing about her all over the place, and…

23 Comments

Review: Wise Children, Angela Carter

Claire of Paperback Reader has selected April as the month to make everybody read Angela Carter, her favorite ever author.  Her enthusiasm is contagious!  And so even though I got tired of Angela Carter’s fairy tales when I tried to read The Bloody Chamber (I can’t be doing with too many short stories at once), and even though I gave up on Nights at the Circus a while ago (it fell due and I was reading other books), I decided to try again.  I am the master of trying again. By the way, I do not like it that “master…

18 Comments

Review: The Wee Free Men, Terry Pratchett

You know how sometimes you really, really want to like a book?  Because maybe people have suggested it to you with great enthusiasm, and you think they are lovely people, and you don’t want to hurt their feelings by disliking their book?  And also it is a book by a British author full of British humo(u)r, and when you were in England maybe several different people told you that Americans have bad senses of humo(u)r and don’t understand irony, and even though you know those people were absurd and Alanis Morrisette is Canadian, there is still a tiny portion of…

33 Comments

Review: Weight, Jeanette Winterson

I feel like all the Kage Baker books I’m reading should qualify for the Once Upon a Time Challenge, because they do feel more like fantasy than science fiction.  However, despite their genre-bending qualities, they have cyborgs, and the time travel is done with machines.  So Jeanette Winterson’s Weight, a retelling of the myth of Atlas and Hercules, is my first read for the Once Upon a Time Challenge, in which I am pretending I am not really taking part. Weight is a book about looking for new ways to tell stories.  That is a theme that I love.  It’s…

31 Comments

Review: Sky Coyote and Mendoza in Hollywood, Kage Baker

I was going to review Kelly Corrigan’s memoir The Middle Place, but then I realized that there is no particular value in reviewing things in the order you read them, especially when you are devouring a series like a wascally wabbit devours carrots, and each review you write that is not dedicated to the series in question is going to put you further and further behind on reviews.  So here we are.  My contention that Kelly Corrigan is mistaken in her book’s central claim will have to wait. Speaking of sound effects, Kage Baker’s books are now giving me the…

22 Comments

Better than Running at Night, Hilary Frank (not properly reviewed because I have news!)

This YA novel, which the lovely trapunto recommended me, is all about going off and doing a new thing (art school), and meeting new people (art people), and growing up.  It explores that opening-up of choices that happens when you leave home, when your world gets bigger in good ways and in bad, and because it is bigger it is hard to navigate.  Growing up into adulthood has turned out to be way more difficult than I anticipated as a kid.  Because I remember when I was little, and grown-ups would go on and on about how I didn’t know…

51 Comments

Review: Breath, Eyes, Memory, Edwidge Danticat

Note: Edwidge Danticat has the best name in all the land.  I shall say it as often as possible in this review because it is a superb name.  Edwidge Danticat. Breath, Eyes, Memory is a goes-off-to-live-with book.  (Written by Edwidge Danticat.)  I love a goes-off-to-live-with book, although now that I am a grown-up, such books are increasingly likely to involve severe trauma at the original home or the place where the character goes off to live.  Sophie (the protagonist invented by Edwidge Danticat) has spent all of her twelve years with her Tante Atie, but suddenly she must leave her…

27 Comments

Review: Remembrance, Theresa Breslin

Once again I am extremely behind on reviews.  I can tell that I am because when I finish a book before going to sleep at night, I chuck it over the side of my bed (carefully, so it lands flat), and right now there are four books piled up next to my bed, and it would be five if I hadn’t returned Remembrance to the library yesterday.  Eek.  But can I just say before I say anything about Remembrance that y’all are awesome and have given me many lovely ideas for fantasy books to read.  And now onward. This book…

6 Comments

Review: Quiverfull, Kathryn Joyce

Eurgh.  Recommended by Stephanie of Open Mind, Insert Book, Quiverfull is all about the Christian patriarchy movement, where women embrace “complementarian” gender roles and submit to their husbands/fathers in everything.  Apparently it is very liberating not to have to bother about making decisions; unless, of course, the decision-maker for your household (your husband or father) has decided to hit you, in which case your spiritual community will assure you it is your fault that he’s behaving that way. From my (strongly feminist, semi-lapsed Catholic) perspective, Joyce manages to steer clear of judgment calls about this to a remarkable degree, though…

21 Comments