Category — Books

Barnes’ promising first effort introduces the reader to a wild reimagining of turn of the century London. It’s very “The world has moved on” a la Stephen King — technology is on the rise, magic/mystery in the form of …

My goal when I began rereading the Anita Blake books was to finally write up a post centering on Obsidian Butterfly. I wanted to talk about how OB stood out as an awesome treatment of mixed race issues. Because …

Ultimately, Lisey’s Story is an unmemorable foray into King’s trademark prose. While it’s certainly compelling, it doesn’t really stand up to some of his classic works like The Stand or to some of his more recent works like …

At some point, when I was fourteen or fifteen years of age, someone said to me, “If you like Piers Anthony, you really should try Terry Pratchett!” This recommendation resulted in my avoiding Pratchett for ten years.

I did eventually …

  At the heart of the Alina is the titular character, a Romanian teenager who does webcam porn in order to pay off her father’s debts. He’s been hospitalized, and Alina’s instituted The Policy, where she cuts costs …

Wowzers. Slammerkin is an amazingly well told tale based on the court case of Mary Saunders, an 18th century Londoner hung and burned for the murder of her mistress. Donoghue takes as her starting point an excerpt from Saunders’ …

Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is not an obvious choice for feminist critique. First, there’s the nameless female narrator searching for an identity and finding it only as “Mrs. De Winter.” Then there’s Rebecca, the obligatory dead woman who launches …

Sometimes? LKH makes me really really angry. Why? Because she takes these pretty standard tropes re: the angsty mulatta, tosses in some vampires/angry faeries, and voila! People love it.

I’m gonna do a close read of The Laughing Corpse, one …

In English as a Second Language, our heroine Alexandra goes to grad school across the pond primarily because her ex-boyfriend says she can’t. It’s a bit of a lark… but one that’ll take about a year to get through.

Right.

Hm. …

Hmm. It’s a toss-up. On the one hand, Roberson’s writing at full force here. All the delightful sensory details that made the dry deserty world of Tiger and Del a reality are present. You can feel the dust …