217 reviews found
Showing 41 to 60 of 217 results
Infernal Devices is the story of George, an unremarkable man with no major talents who has inherited his father’s watchmaker shop. Various zany characters show up and drag him into an intricate conspiracy reminiscent of H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft, and mostly, in my mind, Jules Verne. K.W. Jeter propels George through increasingly dangerous, nonsensical, over-the-top adventures powered by steampunk, bravado, and sheer imagination. This is an adventure in the classical sense, and as a work…
It was OK, I guess? I expected more fire, given the title. Burn Baby Burn is more of a slow simmer, though, without much payoff. I sped through it in an afternoon, and while it was not a bad book with which to pass the time sitting outside, it also wasn’t too remarkable.
There were a few places that Meg Medina made me angry—in a good way. It’s 1977. Nora Lopez is 17, and…
Women don’t need me to say this, because they know this, and many have said this themselves, but I’ll boost it: the thing about representation is that it isn’t enough to give people one character, one story, one thing and say, “There, you’ve representation, job done.” So I was excited when I received A Tyranny of Petticoats in a Book Riot Book Mail box. Those of you who have read my reviews for a while…
I get a strong Charles de Lint vibe from Mark Tompkins’ The Last Days of Magic, at least as a result of the frame story. Tompkins reaches back into the less mainstream myths and legends of Europe to answer the question that often comes up in fantasy: why, if there was so much overt magic centuries ago, does our world seem so barren of it now? Some authors say it’s hiding in plain sight,…
Look, this isn’t really a novel.
Huh. Is there an echo in here?
I was thinking it had been several years since I last read a Neal Stephenson novel, but it turns out to be just under a year. I borrowed Cryptonomicon from a friend’s mother, because it’s truly not on that I’m a mathematician by training yet haven’t read the most mathematical Stephenson work. I put off reading it for a few weeks, because…
OK, I tried to write this review without spoilers, but I can’t. I have to talk about the fates of certain characters, because the more I think about it the angrier I get. Trigger warning for violence against women used as a plot device. Buckle up.
Do you want to live forever? I’m not talking to you, Starship Trooper. I’m talking to you, disposable poor person from 1878. Would you like to be a test…
So my review for the first book in this series begins, “It took me forever to read Servant of the Underworld, and I don’t know why. It’s great.”
That was two years ago.
Yeah.
I’ve had Harbinger of the Storm all that time, thanks to my wonderful subscription to Angry Robot Books … I’ve just been very, very, very negligent in actually reading these books! And I don’t know why, because they are great! Aliette…
I had to dive into the children’s section of my library to get this one. I haven’t been in there for ages. There were short people around! And all the shelves are much shorter! Still, it was worth it. The Story of Cirrus Flux is an interesting attempt to set a children’s adventure novel in Georgian Britain. Matthew Skelton’s breadth of imagination makes for some entertaining characters and rambunctious action scenes. Nevertheless, the plotting is…
Sentences you thought you’d never read: Amistad (the movie) reminds me of Tropic Thunder.
This seems like as good a time as any other to read Amistad, the novelization of the 1997 Spielberg film now played in high school history classes the world over (including in my Grade 12 history class). With only fuzzy memories of the film, I decided the $2 for this book at the library-affiliated used bookstore was a bargain.…
“I am healing. I have scars that show and scars that don’t.”
The tagline for Rose Under Fire is “I will tell the world”, and it is so appropriate. This book is about many things. It’s about women in World War II; it’s about the beauty and freedom of flying planes; it’s about the lengths to which people go to survive, or to help others survive, and the paradox of our immense capacities for both…
Every so often, you read a novel that knocks it out of the park. And I’m not talking about the obvious classics, or the much-hyped new releases that also deliver on what they promise. I’m talking about the ones that sneak up on you. Arcadia is one of the best time travel stories I’ve read in a long while—more than that, it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a year already burgeoning with…
I feel really bad, because I received an ARC of Fever at Dawn from House of Anansi in exchange for a review … and then my to-be-read pile of books quite literally swallowed this ARC and two others. In the chaos of real life and having to read other books, I just forgot these were around. I have unearthed them, however, and like precious gems I shall now read and review them diligently. If you…
I’m intrigued, because there are only 4 other reviews of Amriika on Goodreads as I write this, yet the book is over 15 years old. What gives? Is this just not one of M.G. Vassanji’s more popular books? Or did everyone read it back before Goodreads and hasn’t gotten around to re-reading/reviewing it now?
In any event, I’ve really enjoyed some of Vassanji’s other books, but Amriika did not work as well for me. Although…
Oh look, an Isabel Allende novel hanging out on the New Books shelf. You treat me so well, library. So, so well. And I tried to love it, but I really only ended up liking it, and even then that might be a stretch. The Japanese Lover is the kind of novel that someone else will definitely love, but that person isn’t me.
This is a parallel story of two women—Irini Bazili and Alma Belasco—and…
This novel has quite the body count. Normally I hate hiding ARC reviews behind spoiler-walls, but it’s got to be done in this case….
I received an ARC of The Butcher’s Hook for free from House of Anansi Press in return for an honest review. And I will be honest: this book squicked me out a bit. I loves me the free books, though, and if you want me to talk about how much your…
I’m always fascinated by stories that examine the liminal space and time between the two World Wars. Take The Great Gatsby, for instance: it captures perfectly the weird mixture of fatigue and optimism that followed the Great War. In Carry Me, of course, Peter Behrens has the benefit of hindsight to allow him to trace the rise of Nazi Germany from the ashes of World War I. But he does this through a…
Wow, did I ever write more concise reviews in 2008!
In that spirit, I don’t have much to add after this second reading. I’m teaching this to my Grade 12 English class of adult Aboriginal learners. We spend a lot of time reading texts by/about Indigenous people and issues, such as Indian Horse. I wanted to expose them to a slice of Canadian identity (Francophone culture) they haven’t encountered…
It’s books like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich that make me glad I don’t do video or podcast reviews, because I cannot pronounce Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s last name. Indeed, as is often the case with books originally written in a language one does not speak, names of people and places would be a huge problem in this review. I don’t know how difficult a translation this was for H.T. Willetts, but I can…
What do you want in life? Power? Money? Being really, really, really good looking like Derek Zoolander? Or maybe just a roof over your head?
There are plenty of great stories about orphans and farm boys and farm girls and dragons who grow up to save the world. We call these adventures epic because of their scope. But there are also great stories on a smaller scale. The Chef’s Apprentice aims to be one of…
Normally when I love a book, I inhale it, reading it so quickly that it’s gone before I realize how much I should cherish this unique experience of reading it for the first time. It took me a little longer than normal to read The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, enough that I started to savour it. Each brief, cleverly-named chapter was a small episode in the life of Nouschka Tremblay. And it was…
Showing 41 to 60 of 217 results