Skip to content

Category: 3 Stars

Binny in Secret, Hilary McKay

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 Comments

The Life and Death of Sophie Stark, Anna North

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 Comments

The Just City, Jo Walton

So, hmmm. At the start of The Just City, Apollo can’t work out why Daphne chose to be turned into a tree rather than mate with him. When he goes to discuss it with his sister Athene, he finds her deep in the process of planning an experiment where she will put together a working version of the Just City envisioned by Plato in The Republic. Adult devotees of Plato from all throughout history will oversee the city’s establishment (with some robots to do the heavy lifting), and freed slave children will live there with the adults, learning and growing…

18 Comments

The Precious One, Marisa de los Santos

If I haven’t recently recommended Marisa de los Santos’s Love Walked In and Belong to Me, let me take the opportunity to do so now. She’s a writer along the lines of Jojo Moyes or Rainbow Rowell, where the books feel light-hearted even when sad things occur, and where the author seems to be the direct puppeteer of your heart strings (in a good way! not in a manipulative way!). Falling Together, de los Santos’s third book, was kind of a disappointment. I had my doubts about her fourth one, The Precious One. But I am glad to report that…

18 Comments

Review: The Cranes Dance, Meg Howrey

BALLET 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 Comments

Lessons learned from Dan Jones’s The Plantagenets

Dan 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 Comments

Comics round-up!

The recent launch of Book Riot’s sister site, Panels, plus the many comics posts of folks like Sarah and Andi and Memory, have put more new comics on my radar than I have the money to keep up with. But now and then my library abruptly has all the comics I have been wanting, and then I get to do a jolly little binge. So here’s what I’ve been reading: Nimona, by Noelle Stevenson This is the same Noelle Stevenson of Lumberjanes fame! And, okay, this isn’t something the library had, because the print edition of Nimona won’t exist until May. It began its life as a…

14 Comments

Review: Faith + Feminism, edited by B. Diane Lipsett and Phyllis Trible

I read more academic nonfiction than I tell y’all about. If you happen to be in my conversational line of fire as I am reading a thing, you will hear about it (sorry, family! sorry, friends! but not sorry enough to stop!), but the blog usually does not. Except sometimes my utterly favorite feminist scholar has a new collection of essays and I can’t resist asking the publisher for it, and then you get to hear about it after all. You lucky ducks. So, disclosure: I received this book from the publisher for review consideration. One time I read Phyllis…

7 Comments

Review: Lock In, John Scalzi

Every new year I intend to read more science fiction, and every year I don’t do it. (This year though! This year could be the year!) The type of science fiction that gets me every time is the near-future type: With these differences from our current situation, and advancing just a few years into the future, what adaptations would we have made? With these crucial additions or subtractions, what would being human look like? Lock In is a book like this, though it’s also a murder mystery. Agent Chris Shane, FBI, is the scion of a wealthy activist family and a survivor of a flu…

16 Comments