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Reading the End Posts

Review: The Tapestry of Love, Rosy Thornton

Published 29 Sep 2010 by Jenny Hamilton

Sometimes there is just a pleasing confluence of events. Litlove reviewed The Tapestry of Love a few weeks ago, and I thought it didn’t sound like the kind of thing I normally read at all, but that didn’t necessarily mean I wouldn’t like it / shouldn’t try it. So when the author emailed me to ask if I wanted to review it, of course I said yes. The Tapestry of Love is all about a divorced woman called Catherine Parkstone who decides to move to rural France and set up shop there as a decorator and seamstress. As you do.…

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Review: The Exception, Christian Jungersen

Published 27 Sep 2010 by Jenny Hamilton

Buried in Print posted a review of Diana Wynne Jones’s Charmed Life the other day, and as I was preparing jubilant remarks in my head to comment on the post, I saw that there was already a jubilant-remarks comment on the post, by Jenny, and I was like, Whoa, did I comment on this post in a fugue state? It freaked me out, so I hastily clicked “Jenny” and that is how I found….British Jenny! Hooray! (Hi, British Jenny!) British Jenny had just read a book that was translated from the Danish (I am trying to read more books in…

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Review: The Rock and the River, Kekla Magoon

Published 23 Sep 2010 by Jenny Hamilton

If I may borrow a phrase from Renay, this book punched me in the soul. I have a thing where anything about slavery and civil rights struggles and that business immediately makes my heart hurt and then when the inevitable family member dies or gets sold or whatever, I cry and cry, and that’s why I don’t really read that many historical fiction books from those periods. But Jill said The Rock and the River was good, and I happened to see it at the library, so there you go. I had the hugest lump in my throat from page…

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Review: Devices and Desires, K. J. Parker

Published 21 Sep 2010 by Jenny Hamilton

Why, why, why would my library purchase one book in a trilogy and not the other ones? Why, library, why? In my library’s defense, it has managed to lose its copy of Devices and Desires too, so unless you were searching on the library catalogue, you’d have no way of knowing the library owns anything but Purple and Black and The Company by K. J. Parker, and you would not therefore be disappointed to be unable to find Devices and Desires on the shelf. Happily for me, a copy showed up on PaperbackSwap at an ideal moment. But that doesn’t…

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Review: Monsters of Men, Patrick Ness

Published 19 Sep 2010 by Jenny Hamilton

Dear heavenly God. This book. Listen, everyone: Monsters of Men is being released in America on the 28th. That gives you just about enough time to go get the first two books in the series, The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and the Answer, and read them before Monsters of Men comes out. I strongly advise this course of action if you have not already read the series. Do it now. You will thank me later. I started writing this post during Book Blogger Appreciation Week, and that feels fitting because if there is any set of…

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Review: Still Life with Fascists trilogy, Jo Walton

Published 16 Sep 2010 by Jenny Hamilton

Britain didn’t declare war on Germany. Instead they made peace, and Britain slid gradually into fascism. One might call the trilogy the Small Change trilogy instead, as the books are called Farthing, Ha’Penny, and Half a Crown, but I like the Still Life with Fascists title better. Each book has two narrators, one the first-person narration of a young upper-class English woman, and one the third-person narration of a morally compromised policeman called Carmichael. Don’t you love a morally compromised narrator? The first book, Farthing, is a country house murder mystery. The so-called “Farthing set”, famed for their integral role…

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Review: Jellicoe Road, Melina Marchetta

Published 13 Sep 2010 by Jenny Hamilton

One definite conclusion I have reached from the first half of no-spoilers September is that reading the end sometime saves you misunderstanding the point of a book. I was sure Jellicoe Road was a good fit for the RIP Challenge, a dark gothic fantasy orphan boarding school book. When really all along it was a dark family tragedy orphan boarding school book. Happily for me and my reading experience, I like family tragedy nearly as much as gothic fantasy, so this disparity made me merely muddled, and not ultimately dissatisfied. Orphan Taylor Markham is the leader of the Jellicoe School…

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I love y’all in the face

Published 13 Sep 2010 by Jenny Hamilton

Today, the first day of Book Blogger Appreciation Week, you are supposed to talk about great new blogs you’ve discovered in the past year. This is problematic for me because I have a wobbly relationship with time and can’t remember when I discovered anything, and also because there are so many wonderful blogs it’s hard for me to pick one, or two, or even eight or nine, of which I am especially fond. But I will try to tell you five blogs that I am pretty sure I have found in the last year. Stella Matutina – I think Memory…

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Review: Here Lies Arthur, Philip Reeve

Published 10 Sep 2010 by Jenny Hamilton

All right, I give up. Philip Reeve isn’t for me, and Arthurian stories may not be either. Here Lies Arthur is the story of Gwyna (if you are expecting her to turn out to be Guinevere, like I was, revise your expectations now and save yourself some confusion), who is taken in by Myrddin, a healer and wise man traveling with conquering soldier Arthur. At once Gwyna is caught up in Myrddin’s quest to make Arthur a legendary king capable of uniting all of Britain. It’s my favorite kind of story: a story about stories. And yet, and yet. One…

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Absolutely spoiler-free review of Mockingjay

Published 9 Sep 2010 by Jenny Hamilton

I have had Carly Simon’s “Mockingbird” stuck in my head for the past week and a half. Except instead of “bird” I keep hearing “jay”. Mock–ye-ah; ing–ye-ah; jay–ye-ah. It’s gotten kind of old. All the time I was reading Mockingjay I’ve had this song in my head, and ever since then. To my joy, I read the end of Mockingjay at the bookshop ages before I started reading the library copy for real, so it didn’t fall under no-spoilers September. This worked out nicely for me because the rest of the book is pretty intense, and I am not positive…

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