Skip to content

Tag: read the end

Review: Talking About Detective Fiction, P.D. James

Published 10 Jul 2010 by Gin Jenny

Okay, I know you remember that I said no more books I can get at home. I know I know I know. I realize this post means that Diary of a Provincial Lady was not my last exception to the rule. Actually the rule was, I will only read books that I cannot get when I am at home, unless the author gives his or her name as two initials followed by a surname. Please do not be perturbed by my Orwellian alteration of a previously established rule. P.D. James, acclaimed writer of detective fiction, has a number of things…

Continue readingReview: Talking About Detective Fiction, P.D. James
35 Comments

After You’d Gone, Maggie O’Farrell

Published 4 May 2010 by Gin Jenny

After You’d Gone begins at the end: our protagonist Alice sees something nasty in the woodshed (as it were; it’s not really a woodshed) and shortly thereafter gets hit by a car (possibly on purpose) and lapses into a coma.  The rest of the book goes circling and swooping around what happened and why and what it meant to Alice, exploring her past and her mother’s and her grandmother’s, shifting points of view and tenses every few pages.  I know I complained recently about rapidly-shifting narrative focus.  It’s disorienting here too, and there’s no reason to be changing tenses every…

Continue readingAfter You’d Gone, Maggie O’Farrell
21 Comments

An open letter to Patrick Ness, author of The Knife of Never Letting Go

Published 13 Jul 2009 by Gin Jenny

Wow, Patrick Ness, color me super impressed.  Way to create a distinctive, consistent, memorable voice for your protagonist.  That isn’t easy.  I have not read a book where I enjoyed the narrator’s voice so much since, mm, The Book Thief, and before that The Ground Beneath Her Feet.  Which are two of my all-time favorite books. The Knife of Never Letting Go is based on a fantastic premise, that the aliens in this settled world have given the settlers the disease of Noise, which killed all the women and left the men able to hear each other’s thoughts; and then…

Continue readingAn open letter to Patrick Ness, author of The Knife of Never Letting Go
22 Comments

The Fire Fighter, Francis Cottam

Published 22 Feb 2009 by Gin Jenny

The Fire Fighter is about a guy who is good at putting out fires, so good in fact that he gets taken away from the front in Africa, and has to come back to London and protect these five buildings in London, during the Blitz.  He is not best pleased about this as it’s not clear to him what’s so good about these five buildings, and the mysterious Military Intelligence people are extremely vague and un-forthcoming.  He has a painful past, worries about his mother and brother, and falls in love with a German woman who works as a translator…

Continue readingThe Fire Fighter, Francis Cottam
Leave a Comment

Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters

Published 19 Apr 2008 by Gin Jenny

I liked Night Watch enough that I got all of Sarah Waters’s other books out of the library in the hopes that I would be getting a grand new favorite author.  Tipping the Velvet was evidently her first, and I didn’t like it as much as Night Watch, sadly, but I still totally enjoyed it.  So much I stayed up until three last night finishing it even though I have a paper to write today.  I’m doing that straightaway after I write this. Lots of interesting Victorian underworld in this book.  I spent a lot of this book trying to…

Continue readingTipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters
4 Comments