Martine Leavitt is still my new BFF, and great respect to her for raising seven kids and still managing to write books, but I didn’t like Heck Superhero as much as The Dollmage and Keturah. I think that writing in the present time may just not be her thing, and it may actually be necessary for her to set her stories in strange, alternate versions of England from back in the day. Heck Superhero is about a kid whose mother goes MIA, and as a result of some pretty spectacular magic thinking (he’s only a kid, so this is permissible),…
1 CommentCategory: 3 Stars
First my father (who was buying it for my very-difficult-to-get-presents-for mother), and then my mother told me about this book, so I heard about it from them; and in the first place it was picked up at random by my father, who knows that my very-difficult-to-get-presents-for mother enjoys reading memoirs written by neurotic people with a sense of humor. I waited until down here to put an excerpt, mainly because I wanted to defend my choice of excerpt. I am quoting this bit not because it is perfectly representative of the book at large (not that it isn’t – it’s…
2 CommentsCarlos was a minor character in the story [I was writing], a juvenile delinquent with a terminal illness. Although I had given Carlos tattoos and a bald head, he failed to impress my editor. She thought he needed a personality. And “please please please,” she urged in one of her notes, “give him a different name.” Los Angeles is the youth gang capital of the world, so I figured Duane must have had to write about them at some point. I asked if he could recommend any good books about juvenile delinquents that I could use for research. He thought…
Leave a CommentDon’t call me a fairy. We don’t like to be called fairies anymore….I am a changeling – a word that describes within its own name what we are bound and intended to do. We kidnap a human child and replace him or her with one of our own. The hobgoblin becomes the child, and the child becomes a hobgoblin. Not any boy or girl will do, but only those rare souls baffled by their young lives or attuned to the weeping troubles of this world. The changelings select carefully, for such opportunities might come along only once a decade or…
Leave a CommentI’m sure someone told me about this book – probably a number of someones, as it is old and famous – but I haven’t got the faintest idea who. It is also an impossible book to review; so I will just say, It was very funny (as it intended to be), and I enjoyed it a lot. Here is an excerpt. The whole thing is like this: The selfishness of the riparian proprietor grows with every year. If these men had their way they would close the River Thames altogether. They actually do this along the minor tributary streams and…
2 CommentsOr, I didn’t know the third Libba Bray book was out already! Actually, ultimately, I am not that huge a fan of these books. They entertain me but I can’t remember a single character’s name except Gemma. I can’t even remember the sexy gypsy boy’s name, just that Gemma was having Totally Shocking Dreams about him the likes of which no nice Victorian girl would repeat to a biographer. So basically I am not going to live or die by what happens in The Sweet Far Thing (not sure about this title), but I will be chagrined if the sexy…
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