Note: I received a copy of Binny in Secret from the publisher for review consideration. Oh frabjous day when Hilary McKay has a new book! Hilary McKay — in case you have not heard me sing her praises in the past — is a British children’s writer who should be much more famous than she is. She writes the kind of old-fashioned children-doing-adventures books you loved as a kid, like Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy Quartet or, more recently, Jeanne Birdsall’s Penderwicks books; but with more carefully-drawn family dynamics than the former and more humor than the latter. Binny in Secret, the follow-up to Binny for Short, sees…
10 CommentsCategory: 3 Stars
Note: I received a copy of The Life and Death of Sophie Stark from the publisher, for review consideration. Let’s get one thing cleared up off the bat: Sophie Stark is not the dreamy Game of Thrones redhead who keeps getting promised in marriage to psychopathic twerps. That is Sansa Stark, played in the show by Sophie Turner. But I can see how you would get confused. I have been confused about that myself. Moving on. Sophie Stark (nee Emily Buckley) makes films. From her earliest documentary short about a college athlete she’s obsessed with, she tells stories that don’t belong to her. What matters to Sophie is getting…
8 CommentsBALLET BOOKS, YOU GUYS. Have I told you before how I will read any book set in the world of ballet? Even if everyone says it’s idiotic? This is partly because I love ballet books, and partly because, for reasons passing (my) understanding, there just aren’t that many ballet books out there. Yet my forays into the Alex Awards continue to yield glorious dividends, for a past Alex Award winner was Meg Howrey’s The Cranes Dance, a book about the older of two sisters who dance in a prestigious New York company. Or rather, the only of two sisters who…
23 CommentsDan Jones’s The Plantagenets is a hugely enjoyable read, particularly if you are (as I am) already roughly conversant with the early kings and queens of England. Since I have a vague outline in my head of the course of early British history, this book might as well have been Gossip about the Plantagenets. My main takeaways were on a theme, that theme being People from History Who Were Way Worse Than You Thought. First up: Thomas Becket. I know you learned in school that Thomas Becket was a martyr to his faith, and “will no one rid me of this turbulent priest” etc. That is true as far as it…
16 CommentsBeautiful Darkness (Drawn and Quarterly) opens as a girl called Aurora has tea with a boy she has a crush on. (They met at the ball the other night.) Then — in seconds — they find themselves struggling to survive in the woods. They are all very wee, and the woods are normal-sized. They also appear to have emerged from the decomposing corpse of a little girl. Possibly — the book isn’t explicit about this — all of the tiny people are aspects of the dead girl’s personality, now set free to roam freely and tinily around the woods. If that synopsis seems unwarrantedly weird, don’t blame me. Apply…
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