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Category: 3 Stars

A Charmed Life: Growing up in Macbeth’s Castle, Liza Campbell

Recommended by: A Garden Carried in the Pocket, who always seems to read such interesting books, that lucky duck. I am very, very fond of dysfunctional family memoirs.  Or crazy people memoirs are also fine too.  Both types of memoirs make me feel grateful for my own lovely family, which is not at all dysfunctional and handles crazy extremely well.  So I enjoyed this, and it was also an interesting insight into the ways of the toffs.  (Cause I’m all lower-middle-class American South girl.)  When I started reading it, I thought that Liza Campbell didn’t compare well to people like,…

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Sisterland, Linda Newbery

Ah, Linda Newbery. I’ve been meaning to read one of her books for about a year and a half – I very vaguely remember wanting to buy it at the Foyle’s on the South Bank when I was there in January 2007 with the family. Something with clocks. Sisterland is about a girl called Hilly who has a problematic sister that’s got a crush on a racist kid (British kids are scary! I’m never raising my kids in England cause those British kids are way too frightening!), and her grandmother has got Alzheimer’s and is forever talking about someone called…

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The Interloper, Antoine Wilson

Recommended by: an adventure in reading When I say that this book reminded me of how much I love to read, I don’t want you to take that as too much of a compliment to the book. With that caveat – The Interloper really reminded me of how much I love to read. I went to the library today with a massive big list of books to get, and all the ones I wanted most, they hadn’t got (ain’t it always the way). But this was the one I was most interested to read so I sat down and read…

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Shadows Return, Lynn Flewelling

My amazing sister went and bought me a copy of this before it was supposed to come out (which was today, I guess).  Foolish Books-a-Million (not my bookstore chain of choice) put it on the shelves before its release date, and brilliant Anna bought us each a copy.  Joy! Darling Alec, darling Seregil, I support their relationship so much!  They are so much more satisfying than Ki and Tamar turned out to be (although I strongly supported that relationship also)!  And now they’ve – um.  You know.  Returned.  As the title may have implied to you. What had happened was:…

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Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris

You may have heard of this because everyone got really excited about it and wrote about it on their book blogs a while ago, but I didn’t read it until now because that’s when it got in at the library.  It’s about an ad agency at the end of that dot-com bubble thing that happened when I was young and foolish and paying no attention to anything except, you know, learning geometry proofs and swearing to one and all that I would never give myself to anyone but Carl Anderson (my first love).  Isn’t he sexy? (Even though the picture’s…

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Robin, Frances Hodgson Burnett

Robin starts – after the “previously on Robin” bit at the beginning – right where Coombe left off, with the joyous happiness of Robin and Donal’s reunion.  Good news: They still love each other.  I wasn’t surprised by that, but I have to confess I was a little unsettled by the scene directly following it, where Donal goes home to tell his mother about his evening.  I quote: Throughout his life he had taken all his joys to his closest companion and nearest intimate – his mother.  Theirs had not been a common life together.  He had not even tried…

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Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters

I liked Night Watch enough that I got all of Sarah Waters’s other books out of the library in the hopes that I would be getting a grand new favorite author.  Tipping the Velvet was evidently her first, and I didn’t like it as much as Night Watch, sadly, but I still totally enjoyed it.  So much I stayed up until three last night finishing it even though I have a paper to write today.  I’m doing that straightaway after I write this. Lots of interesting Victorian underworld in this book.  I spent a lot of this book trying to…

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Miss Spitfire, Sarah Miller

Recommended by: Book Nut I love Annie Sullivan.  Every time I think about Annie Sullivan it blows my mind.  She was twenty when she went to go teach Helen Keller, and she’d had no proper parenting, and she was twenty, and she must have been just about the most brilliant and inventive person of all time.  Annie Sullivan.  WOW.  There was a woman who knew how to parent. Anyway, I was excited to read this book about her.  I like young adult books, even though I have now become a real adult and can no longer feel smug, as I…

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Birds in Fall, Brad Kessler

She handed the open tube across the cello.What do I do with this? I asked. You write your name. You’re being dramatic. Am I? she asked. The name of the lipstick was Japanese Maple. Against her pale skin, the letters looked lurid and blotchy. The Japanese maple on our roof was slightly more purple than the lipstick. Its leaves in fall the color “of bruises” Ana once said. She would have looked good wearing that pigment. I held the glistening tube in my hand, not knowing what to write or where. I wanted to write Ana’s name, or both our…

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Sweethearts, Sara Zarr

Recommended by: God knows.  Some website.  I remember seeing it but I didn’t take note of where and now I can’t remember.  I’m cute but dumb. I actually bought this book mainly out of terror and dismay, as it sounded a lot like a story I’m in the process of drafting, and when I read about it I freaked out immediately and started having depressing dreams in which Sara Zarr (who looked a lot like Scheherazade from the TV movie of Arabian Nights, damn her) came and fussed at me for writing a lamer version of the exact same story…

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