OH MY GOD Y’ALL, THIS BOOK. Don’t let me get your expectations up so high that you can’t enjoy it but like, OH MY GOD THIS BOOK, there are not an adequate number of words in my brain box to describe my feelings about this book right here. The People in the Trees is startling. Not startling in a plot way, but startling in the way that was like I had never read a book before and was reading my very first one right now. The People in the Trees admittedly hits a lot of sweet spots for me: a…
41 CommentsReading the End Posts
Fwoo. This was dark. Which I guess is what I should have expected from a murder mystery that takes places in a small town in apartheid South Africa. The beginning: British police detective Emmanuel Cooper comes to investigate the murder of an Afrikaner police captain in the small town of Jacob’s Rest. Yes, you read that correctly. It’s a murder mystery where the victim is male. This probably happens more often than it seems to me to happen. I don’t read that many murder mysteries, partly because it always seems to be women getting killed, and I get tired of…
27 CommentsNote: I received this review copy from the publisher. This in no way influenced my review. A man named Oda Sotatsu signs a confession for a crime he did not commit: the disappearances of eight elderly men and women from a town in Japan. On the door of each disappeared person was found a single playing card, with no fingerprints. After signing his confession, Sotatsu says nothing either to defend or to further condemn himself. Jesse Ball, journalist, goes to Japan to try and discover the true story of Oda Sotatsu and the Narito Disappearances. Silence Once Begun is the…
10 CommentsNot to be confused with Megan Whalen Turner’s book of the same title, although each depicts a clever theft by a protagonist unhappy in his circumstances. The beginning: There’s some weirdness about timelines, so I may have this wrong, but okay, there is a pickpocket who has returned to Tokyo although it is unsafe for him to do so. He formerly worked with another gifted thief named Ishikawa, and he now works alone. Reasons unclear, though there are hints that Ishikawa came to a Bad End. Oh, gosh, I hope there’s a crime syndicate! The end (spoilers in this section…
4 CommentsAs mentioned in this space a few weeks ago, I was more excited by the first couple of chapters of Pandemonium than I have been by the first few chapters of any book I’ve read in a while. Naturally, I was excited to check out more of Gregory’s work. Like Pandemonium, The Devil’s Alphabet drew me in with its premise, but didn’t quite succeed in bringing the plot home. Okay. Here’s the premise. Bear with me for a bit. When Paxton was a kid, his town was hit with what’s now known as Transcription Divergence Syndrome, which killed some of…
11 CommentsIs it okay to admit that I’m really, really psyched for the future of Veronica Mars? Am I jinxing anything by saying that? A Netflix series would be ideal, I think we can all agree: TV show format plus unlimited cussing; but I’m down for whatever. I really, really liked the Veronica Mars movie. Note: All spoilers. Spoilers everywhere. The wonderful Linda Holmes, with whom I nearly always agree (particularly about gender stuff), wrote a piece complaining about the trope of the Bad Caterpillar and how boring it is to have made the love of the Bad Caterpillar the main stakes…
28 CommentsLess assured than Lalwani’s first book, Gifted, but still, an intriguing meditation on identity and the ethics of documentary film The beginning: A young British woman of Indian descent has been chosen by the BBC to film a documentary about a small village in India. The village houses about 48 families, and in each family, one member is a murderer. Ashwer is a prison without locks, a place for well-behaved convicts to live with their families and enjoy some degree of autonomy. In its years of operation, no prisoner has ever reoffended, and only one has ever attempted to escape.…
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