217 reviews found
Showing 61 to 80 of 217 results
Not going to write a lot here, because I covered most of it in my review of 4 years ago, below.
Victory of Eagles is a lot of fun because Temeraire takes it into his head to form his own little dragon corps and even request a rank. That’s cool for many reasons. First, he wrests some acknowledgement of dragon sapience from Government. Second, Temeraire discovers that having rank is…
This is not the type of novel I am meant to enjoy. Even meant as satire, War of the Encyclopaedists just screams “I am the product of an MFA writer.” It flounders in its pretentiousness, then washes up on the rocky shores of “but … but … plot?” before an errant wave knocks it loose and the undertow drags it out to the sea of irrelevance.
Hey, I can write metaphors too. Graduate degree, please!
…
Britain had some whack ideas. Remember that time they colonized an entire continent with convicts? That was whack.
Gould’s Book of Fish is the epistolary adventure of William Gould, a convict imprisoned on Sarah Island. Somewhere along the way he picked up enough painting skills to become an artist, and he starts painting fish for the island’s science-and-status–obsessed Surgeon instead of working on the chain gang.
I enjoy books (The Luminaries comes to mind)…
Sometimes the best books are the books that are actually more than one story. Fall On Your Knees is a difficult book to summarize, or review, in a way that could do it justice. It is one of those sweeping multi-generational pieces of historical fiction, but at the same time it’s really just a story about four sisters. Against the backdrop of Cape Breton Island and New York City from the turn of the 20th…
Let me summarize this book for you.
Aristotle: Join me, Alexander. Feel the power of the Dark Side.
Alexander: Never!
Aristotle: Alexander, I AM YOUR FATHER.
Alexander: No!
Aristotle: Look within your heart, Alexander, which is actually a heart, and is not merely the shadow of an ideal heart, because how the hell did Plato think that would work anyway? You know it to be true.
Alexander: Noooooooo!
Aristotle
…
I love that truth—in this case, history—is often stranger than fiction. Take Razorhurst. The year 1932, and in a run down section of Sydney, Australia, gangs of men rove the streets, scarring each other with razor blades.
Cool alternate history, right? Wrong. That’s true facts. Justine Larbalestier might have created some composite characters based on real people from that era, but the setting is real. These razor gangs of Surry Hills were real. That’s…
Most of my first review of Empire of Ivory stands, so rather than rehash that, I’ll just comment on where my opinion has changed or things I noticed that I didn’t mention in the first review.
I’ve mentioned this in previous reviews, but Laurence is just such a delightful character. I think we’ve gotten used to seeing caricatures of women from the turn of the nineteenth century simply based on Jane Austen’s celebrity. It’s refreshing…
It took me forever to read Servant of the Underworld, and I don’t know why. It’s great. Aliette de Bodard has created a mystery set in the Mexica (Aztec) Empire in 1480. As a long-lived emperor under whom the Mexica have prospered lies on his deathbed, Acatl, a priest of the dead, finds himself investigating a murder or abduction where his estranged brother is the prime suspect. And rather than making this a straight-up…
Us Conductors notably plays fast and loose with its label as historical fiction. Michaels freely admits in his Author’s Note that the Termen he depicts is highly fictionalized—no kung fu or murder is on record, as far as we know—and points the reader in the direction of a more vanilla accounting of Termen’s real life. It seems, sometimes, like authors of historical fiction can’t win. No matter how close one adheres to historical fact, one…
I read, and greatly enjoyed, The Toss of a Lemon years ago. Now Padma Viswanathan is back, this time with a Giller Prize nomination, again with a book connected to India, but now one firmly grounded in Canada’s history and conflicted mixture of cultural obligations as well. The Ever After of Ashwin Rao is every bit as complex and emotionally sensitive as one might expect from a literary award nominee. While it didn’t quite…
Right, so you don’t have a soul, which means any supernatural creature you touch turns back into a mortal. Handy, but also it makes you a kind of threat to the supernatural community. Queen Victoria makes you muhjah, which is a fancy term for “I have a bureaucratic position as well as target painted on my back.” And you marry a werewolf member of the peerage. Who is Scottish. Then, suddenly, a phenomenon that replicates…
I’m enjoying my re-read of the Temeraire series, as I work to get caught up to the most recent volumes. It’s interesting to see how my opinions have changed since my first reading. As with the previous book, Throne of Jade, I have reduced my rating for Black Powder War. Maybe I’ve grown harsher in my old age. Maybe I was just caught up in enthusiasm for dragons the first time I read…
This is the third in a trilogy of historical fiction I’ve been reading. And by “trilogy” I mean “three historical fiction books I borrowed at the same time from the library but otherwise they have no relation to each other, and one is The Serpent of Venice so techically it’s not historical fiction, just madness”. It hasn’t been the most satisfying experience. The slightly ahistorical The Serpent of Venice was definitely the best of the…
I thought that, having actually visited Amsterdam, I would get more from The Miniaturist. I would enjoy Jessie Burton’s descriptions of Amsterdam scenery as it would have been in the seventeenth century—and while most of Amsterdam has modernized, this is set within the old part of the city which has retained a lot of its historical elements. But that’s not what happened. I was disappointed by how little description Burton puts into the…
Guys, Pocket is back!
I heard about this book ages ago, then promptly forgot it existed, and rediscovered it at my library. (Libraries are awesome that way.) My first reaction was, “Ooh, a Christopher Moore novel I haven’t read.” My second reaction was, “Bloody hell, it’s a semi-sequel to Fool!” (No English accent though. Two years in England and I still can’t do a decent English accent. sigh)
Fool was the first Christopher…
I started re-reading the entire Temeraire series recently. I didn’t post a new review of His Majesty’s Dragon, because I felt my original review said everything that needed to be said. Throne of Jade, however, has been lingering on my to-reread shelf for years, a somewhat hyperbolic five stars attached to it, no explanation. So it’s only fair I give it a review it deserves. Yes, I’ve downgraded it to a satisfactory three stars.…
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a kind of bildungsroman for an anti-hero. We first meet Duddy through his Scottish history teacher, the tired and broken Mr. MacPherson, who earns Duddy’s enmity when he insults Duddy’s father and quickly finds out that he has crossed the wrong boy. From the first, Mordecai Richler establishes that Duddy is a bully and prone to holding a grudge. Indeed, Duddy’s long memory figures prominently in a novel that…
This was the (viewer-selected!) December book for the Banging Book Club. I read this over two years ago (God, where does the time go?) but decided to re-read it. I do not regret this decision. It’s even better than I remember.
I’m actually pretty happy with my review below, and it is long, so I won’t add much. But as much as this book is about sex…
During my time in England, I have consumed an extraordinary number of BBC documentaries (and the occasional drama) about Britain’s long, bloody, occasionally confused history. Some of these covered the Plantagenets, but the lion’s share tend to drift decidedly towards the Tudors. Even the brutal episodes of internecine family bloodshed of the Wars of the Roses have nothing on slow-motion car crash that is Henry VIII’s six wives, Reformation, and Elizabethan England. In The Marriage…
Having not grown up during a time with segregation, it’s difficult for me to understand completely what such a society is like. But stories like Wakulla Springs at least help by highlighting some of the less overt but no less harmful racist and oppressive tactics used in the United States to maintain the social status quo. In this eponymous Florida town, Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages allow their characters to dream—and then sacrifice those dreams…
Showing 61 to 80 of 217 results