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Tag: American cover wins

Review: Ruby and the Stone Age Diet, Martin Millar

  The beginning: An unnamed narrator and his flatmate Ruby come home one day to find that a girl has died outside of their squat. “What it needs now,” says Ruby, “is for the radio to start playing ‘You’re Sixteen, You’re Beautiful, and You’re Mine.’”   “Yes,” I agree. “If that was to happen it would be immensely poignant.”   But when I switch on the radio the only station we can find is broadcasting a report from the Tokyo stock market instead, and no matter how we try we cannot work this up into any really effective kind of…

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Review: Talking from 9 to 5, Deborah Tannen

Because the cover image icons on my library ebook wish lists are rather wee, I was not able to see that there is a subtitle to this book, and it explains that the book is about gendered differences in conversational styles in the workplace and how it can affect people’s professional lives. Most of my notes for this review were about my sadness that the book focused so closely on gender to the exclusion of other interesting aspects of how people talk at work (when acronyms/jargon get used, what kind of conversational accommodations are made in various settings to visitors,…

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Lexicon, Max Barry

Oh what a fun book this was. What a completely fun and enjoyable book. Kerry from Entomology of a Bookworm described it as “part X-Men Academy, part ode to the power of language, part action novel,” which is a pretty perfect description of the book. The beginning: A man called Wil is abducted from an airport by two men he has never seen before, men who are convinced that he knows a secret they desperately need. Meanwhile, a sixteen-year-old street kid called Emily is recruited by a mysterious organization whose members learn to control others with something that looks like…

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Review: Night Film, Marisha Pessl

Hurrah, I have convinced my beautiful and intelligent mother to write a guest post for me on Marisha Pessl’s new book Night Film. Whiskey Jenny and I discussed it on the podcast, and now you may also hear a third view, that of my mumsy. This review is certified spoiler-free.   This is what Marisha Pessl’s new novel Night Film is like:  It’s like walking into your living room to find a live kangaroo in there.  It’s unexpected, it’s pretty scary, it’s extremely lively and very uninhibited; it feels dangerous and destructive, and at the same time, almost comically absurd. …

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Review: Blue Is for Nightmares and White Is for Magic, Laurie faria Stolarz

Well. This is not what I expected. Amanda reviewed this series, of which Blue Is for Nightmares and White Is for Magic are the first two, earlier this year, and they are boarding school books and the series is a bunch of books that are matching and color-coded. Y’all know I had to get some of that. How, you inquire, did I manage to resist for eight months? By my home library always having them checked out, that’s how! But I got the first two at Mid-Manhattan when I came into the city last weekend to see the statues at…

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How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff

I will preface this by saying that I liked this book a lot.  However, due to that habit I have of forming expectations when I read about things, it was also not at all what I thought it was going to be.  Because I forgot about the whole second half of Nymeth’s review or something, but the only thing that stuck with me was a girl goes off to live with her cousins (there is really no phrase I find more appealing in a book synopsis than goes off to live with) and I had a vague sense that they…

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The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

This is more like it.    I read Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go when I was in England.  I don’t remember why – maybe it was that phase in my life where I was getting book recommendations from book prize lists.  Book prize books are often not good books for me (see Darkmans).  However, I really liked Never Let Me Go, and I really liked this one too. The beginning: The Remains of the Day (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) is all about a butler called Stevens who has been in service for many years, and has gone on…

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