1455557102
9781455557103
1455557102
3.80
67,823
Apr 07, 2015
Apr 07, 2015
liked it
While I definitely wouldn’t say that I’m one of those Americans who is weirdly obsessed with the British royal family, I will admit that my college ro
While I definitely wouldn’t say that I’m one of those Americans who is weirdly obsessed with the British royal family, I will admit that my college roommates and I got up at 4am to watch the live broadcast of the William/Kate wedding. I baked scones for the occasion. So actually yeah, I probably AM one of those Americans who’s weirdly obsessed with the British royal family.
That being said, I almost definitely read this book much too late. The Royal We was released in 2015, when everyone (or at least those of us who refuse to let go of our romanticized notions of royalty being inherently better than normal people) was still basking in the afterglow of the William/Kate Cinderella Romance Wedding Spectacular. Nowadays, public perception of the couple is, uhh…well, let’s just say that the honeymoon is definitely over. (If you don't know what I'm talking about because you don't pay attention to weird shit like this, allow Nicole Cliffe to summarize what's currently rotten in the house of Windsor)
So only four years after being published, The Royal We already feels like a charming nostalgia piece, written in a more hopeful time. (Just imagine being a reader in the early 1990’s, picking up a fictionalized account of the Charles/Diana courtship – you know that novel exists, somewhere)
Our William stand-in is "Prince Nicholas", while an American student named Rebecca Porter (aka “Bex”) has been subbed in for Kate. The two meet when Bex is studying abroad at Oxford and finds herself assigned to the same dorm building as the future King of England (along with a handful of his blue-blood friends and a pack of security personnel). The two coexist as Just Friends for several years before falling headlong into a romance, and the book follows their up-and-down relationship over the years as the couple deals with their massively different upbringings, obsessive media coverage, and enormous pressure from Nicholas’s family to go along with the path that’s been carefully planned for him.
People who followed the Will/Kate romance in the tabloids from the beginning will appreciate how closely Cocks's and Morgan's account follows the real-life trajectory of the relationship, and enjoy getting a behind-the-scenes look (even if that view is purely imaginary) at the more bombshell events in the timeline. But even if you don’t care all that much about the monarchy, the story is still compelling, because it explores the struggles of being an “ordinary” person trying to have a romantic relationship with someone in a position of unimaginable power and privilege. And The Royal We takes that concept and adds extra pressure: how do you maintain a personal, private relationship with someone who’s been a public figure from the moment they were born? The Royal We is best when it shows us Nicholas grappling with the idea that the price he pays for his unimaginable wealth and privilege is that his life doesn’t really belong to him.
Of course, even in these moments when Nicholas is trying to make his relationship with Bex exist alongside his responsibilities as future king, a thought kept intruding on my otherwise fun-and-fluffy reading experience: you know, you don’t HAVE to be king if you don’t want to.
It’s amazing to me that not a single character ever, in the entire course of the novel, even suggests abdication as a possibility. There is never any discussion that Nicholas might walk away from his birthright, even though he views it as more of a burden than a privilege or a calling. This, in my humble and very American opinion, is ridiculous. For starters, there’s already a historical precedent for this exact situation (do any characters in this book ever say “Wallace Simpson” out loud? I can’t remember, but I’m pretty sure she’s never mentioned), so it’s not like the concept of Nicholas abdicating so he can marry Bex is totally unheard of. And, like his real-life counterpart, the fictional heir has a younger brother who jokingly refers to himself as the “spare.”
Another problem cutting the high stakes of the novel, and the reason I think Cocks and Morgan would have done better to put this story in a historical setting when there were actual stakes attached to who wore the British crown: in this day and age, “King of England” is not an important job. In fact, I would argue that it’s not even a job, period. A king or queen of England in the 21st century isn’t a ruler, they’re a mascot of a vanished era. Looking at the situation dispassionately, what is Nicholas honestly giving up by abdicating? The chance to open Parliament once a year? Free tickets to Ascot? It was just really hard to sympathize with Nick’s “But I cannot turn my back on my DUTY” handwringing because, let’s be honest, the “duty” he’s talking about means wearing stuffy ceremonial garb maybe three times a year and then dividing the rest of his time between Balmoral and a yacht. Like, calm down, Aragorn son of Arathorn, this is not a big deal.
Can’t wait for the Meghan/Harry followup novel, though.
...more
That being said, I almost definitely read this book much too late. The Royal We was released in 2015, when everyone (or at least those of us who refuse to let go of our romanticized notions of royalty being inherently better than normal people) was still basking in the afterglow of the William/Kate Cinderella Romance Wedding Spectacular. Nowadays, public perception of the couple is, uhh…well, let’s just say that the honeymoon is definitely over. (If you don't know what I'm talking about because you don't pay attention to weird shit like this, allow Nicole Cliffe to summarize what's currently rotten in the house of Windsor)
So only four years after being published, The Royal We already feels like a charming nostalgia piece, written in a more hopeful time. (Just imagine being a reader in the early 1990’s, picking up a fictionalized account of the Charles/Diana courtship – you know that novel exists, somewhere)
Our William stand-in is "Prince Nicholas", while an American student named Rebecca Porter (aka “Bex”) has been subbed in for Kate. The two meet when Bex is studying abroad at Oxford and finds herself assigned to the same dorm building as the future King of England (along with a handful of his blue-blood friends and a pack of security personnel). The two coexist as Just Friends for several years before falling headlong into a romance, and the book follows their up-and-down relationship over the years as the couple deals with their massively different upbringings, obsessive media coverage, and enormous pressure from Nicholas’s family to go along with the path that’s been carefully planned for him.
People who followed the Will/Kate romance in the tabloids from the beginning will appreciate how closely Cocks's and Morgan's account follows the real-life trajectory of the relationship, and enjoy getting a behind-the-scenes look (even if that view is purely imaginary) at the more bombshell events in the timeline. But even if you don’t care all that much about the monarchy, the story is still compelling, because it explores the struggles of being an “ordinary” person trying to have a romantic relationship with someone in a position of unimaginable power and privilege. And The Royal We takes that concept and adds extra pressure: how do you maintain a personal, private relationship with someone who’s been a public figure from the moment they were born? The Royal We is best when it shows us Nicholas grappling with the idea that the price he pays for his unimaginable wealth and privilege is that his life doesn’t really belong to him.
Of course, even in these moments when Nicholas is trying to make his relationship with Bex exist alongside his responsibilities as future king, a thought kept intruding on my otherwise fun-and-fluffy reading experience: you know, you don’t HAVE to be king if you don’t want to.
It’s amazing to me that not a single character ever, in the entire course of the novel, even suggests abdication as a possibility. There is never any discussion that Nicholas might walk away from his birthright, even though he views it as more of a burden than a privilege or a calling. This, in my humble and very American opinion, is ridiculous. For starters, there’s already a historical precedent for this exact situation (do any characters in this book ever say “Wallace Simpson” out loud? I can’t remember, but I’m pretty sure she’s never mentioned), so it’s not like the concept of Nicholas abdicating so he can marry Bex is totally unheard of. And, like his real-life counterpart, the fictional heir has a younger brother who jokingly refers to himself as the “spare.”
Another problem cutting the high stakes of the novel, and the reason I think Cocks and Morgan would have done better to put this story in a historical setting when there were actual stakes attached to who wore the British crown: in this day and age, “King of England” is not an important job. In fact, I would argue that it’s not even a job, period. A king or queen of England in the 21st century isn’t a ruler, they’re a mascot of a vanished era. Looking at the situation dispassionately, what is Nicholas honestly giving up by abdicating? The chance to open Parliament once a year? Free tickets to Ascot? It was just really hard to sympathize with Nick’s “But I cannot turn my back on my DUTY” handwringing because, let’s be honest, the “duty” he’s talking about means wearing stuffy ceremonial garb maybe three times a year and then dividing the rest of his time between Balmoral and a yacht. Like, calm down, Aragorn son of Arathorn, this is not a big deal.
Can’t wait for the Meghan/Harry followup novel, though.
...more
Notes are private!
5
1
not set
Mar 2019
Jul 09, 2019
Hardcover
0735220689
9780735220683
0735220689
4.23
1,331,395
May 09, 2017
May 09, 2017
really liked it
“There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gu
“There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I’d lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock. The threads tighten slightly from Monday to Friday.”
Eleanor Oliphant has her life figured out. She has a job that pays well enough and an apartment that suits her needs. She knows what kind of clothes she likes to wear and what she likes to eat for dinner every night. She knows that she has no interest in relationships, platonic or otherwise. Five days a week, she gets up and goes to work, and then goes home. On Fridays, she buys two bottles of vodka to drink over the weekend, so she can pass out on her couch at night and not have any dreams. On Monday, the cycle repeats.
The cycle is thrown off balance, however, when Eleanor meets a man. Two men, actually: she meets a musician and is instantly sure that this is her soulmate, and then shortly after she meets an IT worker at her job and is mostly irritated by his attempts to be her friend. For the first time in many years, Eleanor Oliphant decides that she wants to change her life.
Ever since I read Hunting and Gathering I’ve been comparing every “weird group of loners form found-family in character-driven story” book to that one, and I’ve never been able to find one that measures up.Eleanor Oliphant, unfortunately, isn’t quite up to the challenge.
It comes so close, though. Gail Honeyman has all the workings of a great, quietly effecting character-driven story right there – this could have just been the story of a lonely, sad woman (who is most likely on the spectrum, which Honeyman delicately explores without putting too much pressure on the idea) breaking out of her comfort zone for the first time as she attempts to grow and change as a person. A story about a woman disrupting her self-inflicted routine and learning to be an adult (cultivating friendships, caring for herself and her home, enjoying her work) could make a compelling novel all on its own, with Honeyman mining drama simply from the challenges that come with learning to take care of yourself for the first time. But apparently she didn't have enough faith in this story’s ability to carry an entire novel, so what does she do? Throws in some unnecessary drama by alluding, often and clumsily, to Eleanor’s Secret Traumatic Past.
To put it bluntly, the book did not need this. Eleanor and her quiet, tentative struggle to actively participate in her own life is fascinating enough on its own - Eleanor is funny, acerbic, smart, rude, and secretly tenacious as hell, and just watching this complex and weirdly charming character navigate adult life is enough of a story for me. I did not need Honeyman to assure me that all of Eleanor's personal problems are a result of a single terrible event from her childhood.
Maybe it could have worked if it had been handled more elegantly, but Honeyman isn’t being as sneaky with the flashbacks as she thinks she is, and I was able to guess the Dark Secret pretty early. To Honeyman’s credit, she does manage to save one last big twist for the end that caught me off guard, but it mostly emphasized how desperate she was to inject unnecessary drama into her story.
And frankly, the last twist just created more questions than it answered. Click for spoilers:
(view spoiler)[So at the end, we learn that Eleanor’s younger sister died in a fire (called it) and that the fire was deliberately set by their mother. Not only that, but Eleanor’s mother also died in the fire (which means Eleanor has been having conversations with her mother who was dead the whole time, ugh this trope) and Eleanor…somehow escaped? The news article describing the fire even states that Eleanor and her sister had been “physically restrained”, so how in the hell was Eleanor able to get out of the house while the person who set the fire died in it? Honestly, “Eleanor set the fire that killed her mother and her sister” seems to be the most likely explanation, and I kept waiting for Honeyman to introduce it as a final twist. But that never happened. And this creates so many problems that are just glossed over. By the end of the book, Eleanor is not only dealing with he resurfaced memories of the deaths of her mother and sister (and the fact that her mother tried to kill Eleanor and her sister, but is also grappling with the fact that she’s been having imaginary conversations with her dead mother for years. Like, holy shit, this is not something that can be fixed by making a few friends and getting a cat. (hide spoiler)]
...more
Eleanor Oliphant has her life figured out. She has a job that pays well enough and an apartment that suits her needs. She knows what kind of clothes she likes to wear and what she likes to eat for dinner every night. She knows that she has no interest in relationships, platonic or otherwise. Five days a week, she gets up and goes to work, and then goes home. On Fridays, she buys two bottles of vodka to drink over the weekend, so she can pass out on her couch at night and not have any dreams. On Monday, the cycle repeats.
The cycle is thrown off balance, however, when Eleanor meets a man. Two men, actually: she meets a musician and is instantly sure that this is her soulmate, and then shortly after she meets an IT worker at her job and is mostly irritated by his attempts to be her friend. For the first time in many years, Eleanor Oliphant decides that she wants to change her life.
Ever since I read Hunting and Gathering I’ve been comparing every “weird group of loners form found-family in character-driven story” book to that one, and I’ve never been able to find one that measures up.Eleanor Oliphant, unfortunately, isn’t quite up to the challenge.
It comes so close, though. Gail Honeyman has all the workings of a great, quietly effecting character-driven story right there – this could have just been the story of a lonely, sad woman (who is most likely on the spectrum, which Honeyman delicately explores without putting too much pressure on the idea) breaking out of her comfort zone for the first time as she attempts to grow and change as a person. A story about a woman disrupting her self-inflicted routine and learning to be an adult (cultivating friendships, caring for herself and her home, enjoying her work) could make a compelling novel all on its own, with Honeyman mining drama simply from the challenges that come with learning to take care of yourself for the first time. But apparently she didn't have enough faith in this story’s ability to carry an entire novel, so what does she do? Throws in some unnecessary drama by alluding, often and clumsily, to Eleanor’s Secret Traumatic Past.
To put it bluntly, the book did not need this. Eleanor and her quiet, tentative struggle to actively participate in her own life is fascinating enough on its own - Eleanor is funny, acerbic, smart, rude, and secretly tenacious as hell, and just watching this complex and weirdly charming character navigate adult life is enough of a story for me. I did not need Honeyman to assure me that all of Eleanor's personal problems are a result of a single terrible event from her childhood.
Maybe it could have worked if it had been handled more elegantly, but Honeyman isn’t being as sneaky with the flashbacks as she thinks she is, and I was able to guess the Dark Secret pretty early. To Honeyman’s credit, she does manage to save one last big twist for the end that caught me off guard, but it mostly emphasized how desperate she was to inject unnecessary drama into her story.
And frankly, the last twist just created more questions than it answered. Click for spoilers:
(view spoiler)[So at the end, we learn that Eleanor’s younger sister died in a fire (called it) and that the fire was deliberately set by their mother. Not only that, but Eleanor’s mother also died in the fire (which means Eleanor has been having conversations with her mother who was dead the whole time, ugh this trope) and Eleanor…somehow escaped? The news article describing the fire even states that Eleanor and her sister had been “physically restrained”, so how in the hell was Eleanor able to get out of the house while the person who set the fire died in it? Honestly, “Eleanor set the fire that killed her mother and her sister” seems to be the most likely explanation, and I kept waiting for Honeyman to introduce it as a final twist. But that never happened. And this creates so many problems that are just glossed over. By the end of the book, Eleanor is not only dealing with he resurfaced memories of the deaths of her mother and sister (and the fact that her mother tried to kill Eleanor and her sister, but is also grappling with the fact that she’s been having imaginary conversations with her dead mother for years. Like, holy shit, this is not something that can be fixed by making a few friends and getting a cat. (hide spoiler)]
...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Jan 2019
Jun 11, 2019
Hardcover
0062570609
9780062570604
0062570609
4.14
34,897
Apr 03, 2018
Apr 03, 2018
really liked it
When my friend recommended this book to me and said it was a zombie story, the first thing that popped into my head was Ilana from Broad City saying,
When my friend recommended this book to me and said it was a zombie story, the first thing that popped into my head was Ilana from Broad City saying, "That's very cool and 2004 of you, but..."
Like seriously, the last thing I wanted to read was another zombie story. But, just like The Girl With All the Gifts, sometimes there really is an exception that proves the rule. (The fact that Dread Nation was ranked as one of the best Young Adult books of the year doesn't hurt its case, either)
In Dread Nation, Justina Ireland finds a way to put a new spin on the very worn-out zombie apocalypse story by setting it in an alternate version of United States history. In Ireland's version of events, the Civil War went exactly the way it did in our history books, except for one thing: after the battle of Gettysburg, the dead began to rise. So in the aftermath of the conflict, the United States government had to deal the reconstruction of the country, and also a zombie uprising. The solution was to take black and Native children and place them in special combat schools, where they would be trained to fight zombies and eventually assigned to protect wealthy white families. Our heroine is Jane, the biracial teenager who is taken from her home on the Rose Hill plantation and sent to Miss Preston's School of Combat to learn the fine art of zombie killing.
It’s a great premise for a Young Adult adventure story, and my only real issue with the book was that Ireland couldn’t seem to focus her plot. At first, when Jane is introduced and is showing us around her school, I thought, “oh cool, this is gonna be like a zombie-hunter girls’ boarding school novel, I’m on board.” And then Jane goes on a school outing and rescues a bunch of rich white people from a zombie attack, and I thought, “oh cool, so she’s going to get hired by a rich lady and we’ll get to see her navigating high society while also killing zombies.” And then Jane and her friends get sent to an experimental protected settlement out in the territories, and I thought, “Oh cool, we’re…doing Wild West zombies? I guess?”
So it’s weird at the beginning, because it feels kind of like Ireland wastes a lot of page space on potential stories that never get off the ground, and by the time we get to the actual central setting of the story, we’re almost halfway through the book. But pacing aside, this was a fun blend of historic fiction and zombie apocalypse story, and Jane is a great protagonist who’s perfectly capable of carrying a series. The book functions well enough as a standalone novel, although of course Ireland throws in enough of a cliffhanger to make me anxious for the second book in the series.
Still kinda disappointed that I didn’t get my zombie-hunter girls’ boarding school novel, though. ...more
Like seriously, the last thing I wanted to read was another zombie story. But, just like The Girl With All the Gifts, sometimes there really is an exception that proves the rule. (The fact that Dread Nation was ranked as one of the best Young Adult books of the year doesn't hurt its case, either)
In Dread Nation, Justina Ireland finds a way to put a new spin on the very worn-out zombie apocalypse story by setting it in an alternate version of United States history. In Ireland's version of events, the Civil War went exactly the way it did in our history books, except for one thing: after the battle of Gettysburg, the dead began to rise. So in the aftermath of the conflict, the United States government had to deal the reconstruction of the country, and also a zombie uprising. The solution was to take black and Native children and place them in special combat schools, where they would be trained to fight zombies and eventually assigned to protect wealthy white families. Our heroine is Jane, the biracial teenager who is taken from her home on the Rose Hill plantation and sent to Miss Preston's School of Combat to learn the fine art of zombie killing.
It’s a great premise for a Young Adult adventure story, and my only real issue with the book was that Ireland couldn’t seem to focus her plot. At first, when Jane is introduced and is showing us around her school, I thought, “oh cool, this is gonna be like a zombie-hunter girls’ boarding school novel, I’m on board.” And then Jane goes on a school outing and rescues a bunch of rich white people from a zombie attack, and I thought, “oh cool, so she’s going to get hired by a rich lady and we’ll get to see her navigating high society while also killing zombies.” And then Jane and her friends get sent to an experimental protected settlement out in the territories, and I thought, “Oh cool, we’re…doing Wild West zombies? I guess?”
So it’s weird at the beginning, because it feels kind of like Ireland wastes a lot of page space on potential stories that never get off the ground, and by the time we get to the actual central setting of the story, we’re almost halfway through the book. But pacing aside, this was a fun blend of historic fiction and zombie apocalypse story, and Jane is a great protagonist who’s perfectly capable of carrying a series. The book functions well enough as a standalone novel, although of course Ireland throws in enough of a cliffhanger to make me anxious for the second book in the series.
Still kinda disappointed that I didn’t get my zombie-hunter girls’ boarding school novel, though. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Mar 2019
Jun 05, 2019
Hardcover
031623107X
9780316231077
031623107X
3.43
44,344
Jul 26, 2016
Jul 26, 2016
liked it
Since I a) love cheesy melodramatic thrillers and b) get super obsessed with gymnastics every time the summer Olympics roll around and never think abo
Since I a) love cheesy melodramatic thrillers and b) get super obsessed with gymnastics every time the summer Olympics roll around and never think about it otherwise, this book was the perfect blend for me. Gymnasts and (possibly) murder! Sign me the hell up (should really be the title of one of my shelves)!
The book is told from the perspective of Katie Knox, whose fifteen-year-old daughter Devon is a gifted gymnast on track to become an Olympian. The family’s entire life revolves around their daughter – weekends are spent traveling to meets, Katie and her husband Eric only spend time with other parents from the gym, and every extra money the family earns goes to Devon and gymnastics. The young athletes at the gym, their coaches, and the parents form a sort of cult community, where everyone knows everyone’s business and outsiders are not welcome, because who else could understand this kind of life?
The whole community is thrown off balance when a young man - a tumbling coach at Devon's gym - dies suddenly. Through Katie’s eyes, we go back to see the seemingly-random sequence of events that led to the death, and follow Katie’s tentative investigations into the possible crime. It’s all very dramatic and soapy, and is a lot of fun when Abbott is fully leaning into these elements of her story. At its best, this is a Pretty Little Liars-esque tale of small-town secrets and scandals, where small business owners act like mob bosses and parents are willing to do anything to protect their children (and their own interests).
I especially liked the little details where Abbott shows how fully invested you have to be in order to raise a future Olympian, and how thoroughly gymnastics eclipsed everything else going on in the Knox family’s life. One of the book’s best scenes shows Devon’s coach sitting down for a meeting with her parents and outlining a detailed five-year-plan that ends in the Olympics. Notably, Devon is (I think) eleven or twelve at this point, and is also not present at this meeting deciding her entire future.
The only thing I could have done without was the eventual revelation that Devon (view spoiler)[and the dead coach were having a sexual relationship. I understand that this twist serves a crucial function in the story and gives Devon a good reason for doing what she eventually does; my problem is that all of the characters – including Devon’s own mother - seem…weirdly okay with the idea of an adult man sleeping with a fifteen-year-old (who, due to the physical rigors of her training has only recently started menstruating ew ew ewwwwww)? Like they’re obviously upset, but after the initial shock the characters treat it as more of a taboo relationship, instead of an adult preying on a vulnerable child. I’m pretty sure the word “pedophile” is never used. Anyway, it seemed like Abbott was just trying to come up with a twist that had the best potential shock value, and didn’t fully consider all the implications. (hide spoiler)] ...more
The book is told from the perspective of Katie Knox, whose fifteen-year-old daughter Devon is a gifted gymnast on track to become an Olympian. The family’s entire life revolves around their daughter – weekends are spent traveling to meets, Katie and her husband Eric only spend time with other parents from the gym, and every extra money the family earns goes to Devon and gymnastics. The young athletes at the gym, their coaches, and the parents form a sort of cult community, where everyone knows everyone’s business and outsiders are not welcome, because who else could understand this kind of life?
The whole community is thrown off balance when a young man - a tumbling coach at Devon's gym - dies suddenly. Through Katie’s eyes, we go back to see the seemingly-random sequence of events that led to the death, and follow Katie’s tentative investigations into the possible crime. It’s all very dramatic and soapy, and is a lot of fun when Abbott is fully leaning into these elements of her story. At its best, this is a Pretty Little Liars-esque tale of small-town secrets and scandals, where small business owners act like mob bosses and parents are willing to do anything to protect their children (and their own interests).
I especially liked the little details where Abbott shows how fully invested you have to be in order to raise a future Olympian, and how thoroughly gymnastics eclipsed everything else going on in the Knox family’s life. One of the book’s best scenes shows Devon’s coach sitting down for a meeting with her parents and outlining a detailed five-year-plan that ends in the Olympics. Notably, Devon is (I think) eleven or twelve at this point, and is also not present at this meeting deciding her entire future.
The only thing I could have done without was the eventual revelation that Devon (view spoiler)[and the dead coach were having a sexual relationship. I understand that this twist serves a crucial function in the story and gives Devon a good reason for doing what she eventually does; my problem is that all of the characters – including Devon’s own mother - seem…weirdly okay with the idea of an adult man sleeping with a fifteen-year-old (who, due to the physical rigors of her training has only recently started menstruating ew ew ewwwwww)? Like they’re obviously upset, but after the initial shock the characters treat it as more of a taboo relationship, instead of an adult preying on a vulnerable child. I’m pretty sure the word “pedophile” is never used. Anyway, it seemed like Abbott was just trying to come up with a twist that had the best potential shock value, and didn’t fully consider all the implications. (hide spoiler)] ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Dec 2018
Jun 03, 2019
Hardcover
0399167064
9780399167065
0399167064
4.31
1,065,462
Dec 25, 2014
Jul 29, 2014
liked it
"New to town, single mom Jane is so young that another mother mistakes her for the nanny. Jane is sad beyond her years and harbors secret doubts about
"New to town, single mom Jane is so young that another mother mistakes her for the nanny. Jane is sad beyond her years and harbors secret doubts about her son. But why? While Madeline and Celeste soon take Jane under their wing, none of them realizes how the arrival of Jane and her inscrutable little boy will affect them all.
Big Little Lies is a brilliant take on ex-husbands and second wives, mothers and daughters, schoolyard scandal, and the dangerous little lies we tell ourselves just to survive."
Liane Moriarty's novel follows the lives of three women – Madeline, Celeste, and Jane – who meet because their children all attend the same elementary school. They all have their own private dramas and Deep Dark Secrets, and these elements create a powderkeg of circumstances that eventually lead us to a violent incident at a school event.
The book resembles a melodramatic made-for-tv movie even in its structure: we start at the end, in the immediate aftermath of The Incident, and then Moriarty takes us back in time to show us the events that led to it. As we meet the characters and learn about their lives, we also get snippets of police interviews post-Incident, which give us more clues about what happened (and keep us on the hook by dropping hints that one of the main characters has been murdered).
I got this from the library mainly because I was curious about the show and knew I was never going to get around to watching it (I don’t have HBO and don’t plan to get it anytime soon, because I am cheap and also have too many shows already). It’s a perfectly serviceable Lifetime Original Movie-style thriller, and Moriarty was able to surprise me with some twists at the end – and really, that’s all I require a book like this to be. Moriarty occasionally overreaches herself by trying too hard to turn her book into a Statement About Society instead of letting it exist as just a fun juicy thriller, but overall it’s a quick, engaging read. ...more
Big Little Lies is a brilliant take on ex-husbands and second wives, mothers and daughters, schoolyard scandal, and the dangerous little lies we tell ourselves just to survive."
Liane Moriarty's novel follows the lives of three women – Madeline, Celeste, and Jane – who meet because their children all attend the same elementary school. They all have their own private dramas and Deep Dark Secrets, and these elements create a powderkeg of circumstances that eventually lead us to a violent incident at a school event.
The book resembles a melodramatic made-for-tv movie even in its structure: we start at the end, in the immediate aftermath of The Incident, and then Moriarty takes us back in time to show us the events that led to it. As we meet the characters and learn about their lives, we also get snippets of police interviews post-Incident, which give us more clues about what happened (and keep us on the hook by dropping hints that one of the main characters has been murdered).
I got this from the library mainly because I was curious about the show and knew I was never going to get around to watching it (I don’t have HBO and don’t plan to get it anytime soon, because I am cheap and also have too many shows already). It’s a perfectly serviceable Lifetime Original Movie-style thriller, and Moriarty was able to surprise me with some twists at the end – and really, that’s all I require a book like this to be. Moriarty occasionally overreaches herself by trying too hard to turn her book into a Statement About Society instead of letting it exist as just a fun juicy thriller, but overall it’s a quick, engaging read. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Feb 2019
Apr 18, 2019
Hardcover
0765386232
9780765386236
0765386232
3.86
4,231
May 31, 2016
May 31, 2016
really liked it
A well-written, well-researched and well-argued critique of geek culture through a feminist lens. Kameron Hurley definitely has the qualifications for
A well-written, well-researched and well-argued critique of geek culture through a feminist lens. Kameron Hurley definitely has the qualifications for this, being a sci-fi and fantasy author herself, and I loved the perspective she brings to different aspects of geek culture (even though I believe that Mad Max: Fury Road is a feminist masterpiece and will defend it to the death, Hurley’s essay on the movie made me rethink how some of the minor female characters function in the story, and how they could have been presented better).
Geek culture is one that has always been openly hostile to women, even though women created many of the foundations that it rests on (*coughMary Shelleycough*), and it’s truly sad that even in the year of our Lord 2019 there are still men whining about how they shouldn’t have to allow women (and POC) into what they’ve always believed should be a Straight White Boys Only clubhouse. So I’m glad that we have people like Kameron Hurley to slam an entire book’s worth of arguments onto the table and say, “Move over.”
Go see Captain Marvel.
...more
Geek culture is one that has always been openly hostile to women, even though women created many of the foundations that it rests on (*coughMary Shelleycough*), and it’s truly sad that even in the year of our Lord 2019 there are still men whining about how they shouldn’t have to allow women (and POC) into what they’ve always believed should be a Straight White Boys Only clubhouse. So I’m glad that we have people like Kameron Hurley to slam an entire book’s worth of arguments onto the table and say, “Move over.”
Go see Captain Marvel.
...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Oct 2017
Mar 26, 2019
Hardcover
0374299323
9780374299323
0374299323
3.99
519
Oct 27, 2015
Oct 27, 2015
really liked it
Is it basic of me to say that I love Paris? Fuck it, I love Paris. And I especially love histories like this one, that look at other sides of the famo
Is it basic of me to say that I love Paris? Fuck it, I love Paris. And I especially love histories like this one, that look at other sides of the famous city, sides that maybe the French tourism board would prefer you not see.
The format of Sante’s book can be best described as “meandering.” He’s not presenting us with a straightforward, chronological history of the city of Paris (for one thing, that book would probably have to be a few thousand pages long). Instead, he tells us that he’s going to present the city through the lens of a flaneur - a kind of loose term that, basically, means a person who walks all over Paris, observing all they can and talking to everyone who will talk back.
To be frank, it’s a kind of convoluted structure that Sante only sticks to about half the time anyway, but it allows him to divide his book into easily separated sections, so the reader doesn’t get too lost. Each section is essentially a mini-history, focusing on the topic of that particular chapter. There are sections on thieves, prostitutes, the homeless, the dance halls – basically the elements of Paris that are less-than-picture-perfect.
It’s definitely not a complete or contemporary history – even though the book was published in 2015, Sante isn’t really concerned with anything that happens after the 1960’s – and if you go into this without at least a basic knowledge of French history you will find yourself getting frequently lost in Sante’s many digressions and allusions. But it’s an interesting look at the underbelly of one of the most famous and glamorous cities in the world, an inside look at how the sausage gets made. And Sante’s argument, that the Paris of the past will never exist again because the city has become too disconnected and sanitized, is certainly an interesting one to consider. It can’t function as a guidebook, because most of the streets Sante describes no longer exist, thanks to Baron Hausmann, but it’s nevertheless a good introduction to Paris, both as a city and as a population.
It’s definitely not perfect, but at least Sante gives us passages like these, when he’s describing artists’ communities in the 19th century and how they were their own particular brand of ridiculous:
“On occasion, they drank wine from human skulls, sometimes dispensed with clothing, gave recitals on instruments they did not know how to play. Nerval occasionally pitched a tent in his room, or slept on the floor next to a carved Renaissance bed he claimed to be in thrall to. Most famously, he had a pet lobster named Thibault, rescued from a fishmonger’s, which he, at least once, walked on a leash. Most of the Jeanes-France went on to respectable careers, although Borel took up an administrative post in Algeria but was driven by shifting political tides to subsistence farming, refusing to wear a hat because ‘nature knows what it’s doing,’ and died of sunstroke. Nerval, of course, was found hanged with the belt of a woman’s apron from the grille of a cabinetmaker’s stall on Rue de le Vielle-Lanterne in 1855, wearing a hat, two shirts, two vests, and no coat, and with a tetragrammaton drawn in ink on the left side of his chest.” ...more
The format of Sante’s book can be best described as “meandering.” He’s not presenting us with a straightforward, chronological history of the city of Paris (for one thing, that book would probably have to be a few thousand pages long). Instead, he tells us that he’s going to present the city through the lens of a flaneur - a kind of loose term that, basically, means a person who walks all over Paris, observing all they can and talking to everyone who will talk back.
To be frank, it’s a kind of convoluted structure that Sante only sticks to about half the time anyway, but it allows him to divide his book into easily separated sections, so the reader doesn’t get too lost. Each section is essentially a mini-history, focusing on the topic of that particular chapter. There are sections on thieves, prostitutes, the homeless, the dance halls – basically the elements of Paris that are less-than-picture-perfect.
It’s definitely not a complete or contemporary history – even though the book was published in 2015, Sante isn’t really concerned with anything that happens after the 1960’s – and if you go into this without at least a basic knowledge of French history you will find yourself getting frequently lost in Sante’s many digressions and allusions. But it’s an interesting look at the underbelly of one of the most famous and glamorous cities in the world, an inside look at how the sausage gets made. And Sante’s argument, that the Paris of the past will never exist again because the city has become too disconnected and sanitized, is certainly an interesting one to consider. It can’t function as a guidebook, because most of the streets Sante describes no longer exist, thanks to Baron Hausmann, but it’s nevertheless a good introduction to Paris, both as a city and as a population.
It’s definitely not perfect, but at least Sante gives us passages like these, when he’s describing artists’ communities in the 19th century and how they were their own particular brand of ridiculous:
“On occasion, they drank wine from human skulls, sometimes dispensed with clothing, gave recitals on instruments they did not know how to play. Nerval occasionally pitched a tent in his room, or slept on the floor next to a carved Renaissance bed he claimed to be in thrall to. Most famously, he had a pet lobster named Thibault, rescued from a fishmonger’s, which he, at least once, walked on a leash. Most of the Jeanes-France went on to respectable careers, although Borel took up an administrative post in Algeria but was driven by shifting political tides to subsistence farming, refusing to wear a hat because ‘nature knows what it’s doing,’ and died of sunstroke. Nerval, of course, was found hanged with the belt of a woman’s apron from the grille of a cabinetmaker’s stall on Rue de le Vielle-Lanterne in 1855, wearing a hat, two shirts, two vests, and no coat, and with a tetragrammaton drawn in ink on the left side of his chest.” ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Mar 2019
Mar 19, 2019
Hardcover
9781937512651
1937512657
4.56
16,820
Nov 14, 2017
Nov 07, 2017
it was amazing
I had never heard of Hanif Abdurraqib (although I don’t read a lot of essay collections, so he might be more well-known in those circles), so it was b
I had never heard of Hanif Abdurraqib (although I don’t read a lot of essay collections, so he might be more well-known in those circles), so it was by pure coincidence that I was in a local bookstore looking for Christmas presents and saw his book on the shelf of Staff Picks. If you want the short review, here it is: this is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Not one of the best essay collections – best books, full stop.
Even though I read and enjoyed [title] by Chuck Klosterman, there was definitely a generational divide that kept me from getting really immersed in his essays. Klosterman’s main focus is the music of the 1980’s, which I just don’t know very much about. It feels unoriginal (and a little reductive) to call Abdurraqib the Chuck Klosterman for Millennials, but if you were to ask me for my elevator pitch for They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, that would be it. Abdurraqib writes about music that I have a much more personal relationship with, so I enjoyed his essays a lot more than Klosterman’s.
But to reduce Abduraqib to just a music or pop culture critic is to undersell the brilliance of his writing. Abdurraqib isn’t just writing about music; he’s writing about how music seeps into every aspect of our lives, and how it can shape and change our experiences. Abdurraqib doesn’t just write about concerts he attended; he writes about how it feels to be one of the few black kids at a punk concert. He writes about Fleetwood Mac and how artists commidify heartbreak (“At some point, a person figured out that the performance of sadness was a currency, and art has bowed at its altar ever since. Sometimes it’s a game we play: if I can convince you that I am falling apart, in need of love, perhaps I can draw you close enough to tell you what I really need.”). He writes about the concert he was at when the news came out about Trayvon Martin, and how nobody could get cell service inside the venue so when the show ended everyone was standing in the parking lot, staring at their phones as they read the news. He writes about the history of Fall Out Boy, and it becomes an exploration of ego and fame and then Abdurraqib makes it circle back to the beginning of the essay, when he wrote about an old friend who committed suicide.
“Patrick [Stump] once said, ‘I sang because Pete [Wentz] saw, in me, a singer,” and I think what he meant is that Pete saw, in him, a vehicle. This was the band’s great fascinating pull. That they were a bit of a mutation: a shy and otherwise silent frontman with a voice like a soul singer, belting out the confessional emo lyrics of a neurotic narcissist. Pete, who wanted the attention, but not enough to sing the words himself. I’m thinking about this again in a bar in Austin, Texas. Wearing a patch taken from my dead friend’s old bedroom, and considering the things we saw in each other that kept us whole for our brief window of time together. Tyler fought kids who fucked with us at punk shows because I saw, in him, a fighter. Until he stopped getting out of bed some mornings and I told myself that I saw, in him, a burden. Until the dirt was shoveled over the black casket and I saw, in him, nothing but a collection of memories.”
Music is so much more than just music.
Hopefully I’ve raved about this book enough to convince you to go out and buy a copy, but just in case, I’m going to quote the end of Abdurraqib’s (fucking transcendent) essay on Prince’s performance at the 2007 SuperBowl halftime show. If you’re not familiar with it, please watch this video and then come back to the review.
“There is no moment like this one in any other halftime show, before it or since. Prince, only a shadow, putting his hands to an instrument and coaxing out a song within a song. And of course there was still rain, beads of it covering the camera lens from every angle, drops of it covering the faces of the people in the front row, and still none of it visible on Prince himself. And of course there were two doves scattering themselves above Prince’s head when the sheet came down and he was whole, in front of us again, walking to the mic and asking, ‘Y’all wanna sing tonight?’
Yes, Prince. This is the one we know all of the words to. Throw the microphone to the ground and walk away. We don’t need you now like we did in that moment, but we will remember it always. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called Life. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to cast away another hero on the face of a flood that began on a Miami night in 2007 and never stopped. Dearly beloved, when the sky opens up, anywhere, I will think of how Prince made a storm bend to his will. How the rain never touches those who it knows were sent into it for a higher purpose. Dearly beloved, I will walk into the next storm and leave my umbrella hanging on the door. Please join me.”
...more
Even though I read and enjoyed [title] by Chuck Klosterman, there was definitely a generational divide that kept me from getting really immersed in his essays. Klosterman’s main focus is the music of the 1980’s, which I just don’t know very much about. It feels unoriginal (and a little reductive) to call Abdurraqib the Chuck Klosterman for Millennials, but if you were to ask me for my elevator pitch for They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, that would be it. Abdurraqib writes about music that I have a much more personal relationship with, so I enjoyed his essays a lot more than Klosterman’s.
But to reduce Abduraqib to just a music or pop culture critic is to undersell the brilliance of his writing. Abdurraqib isn’t just writing about music; he’s writing about how music seeps into every aspect of our lives, and how it can shape and change our experiences. Abdurraqib doesn’t just write about concerts he attended; he writes about how it feels to be one of the few black kids at a punk concert. He writes about Fleetwood Mac and how artists commidify heartbreak (“At some point, a person figured out that the performance of sadness was a currency, and art has bowed at its altar ever since. Sometimes it’s a game we play: if I can convince you that I am falling apart, in need of love, perhaps I can draw you close enough to tell you what I really need.”). He writes about the concert he was at when the news came out about Trayvon Martin, and how nobody could get cell service inside the venue so when the show ended everyone was standing in the parking lot, staring at their phones as they read the news. He writes about the history of Fall Out Boy, and it becomes an exploration of ego and fame and then Abdurraqib makes it circle back to the beginning of the essay, when he wrote about an old friend who committed suicide.
“Patrick [Stump] once said, ‘I sang because Pete [Wentz] saw, in me, a singer,” and I think what he meant is that Pete saw, in him, a vehicle. This was the band’s great fascinating pull. That they were a bit of a mutation: a shy and otherwise silent frontman with a voice like a soul singer, belting out the confessional emo lyrics of a neurotic narcissist. Pete, who wanted the attention, but not enough to sing the words himself. I’m thinking about this again in a bar in Austin, Texas. Wearing a patch taken from my dead friend’s old bedroom, and considering the things we saw in each other that kept us whole for our brief window of time together. Tyler fought kids who fucked with us at punk shows because I saw, in him, a fighter. Until he stopped getting out of bed some mornings and I told myself that I saw, in him, a burden. Until the dirt was shoveled over the black casket and I saw, in him, nothing but a collection of memories.”
Music is so much more than just music.
Hopefully I’ve raved about this book enough to convince you to go out and buy a copy, but just in case, I’m going to quote the end of Abdurraqib’s (fucking transcendent) essay on Prince’s performance at the 2007 SuperBowl halftime show. If you’re not familiar with it, please watch this video and then come back to the review.
“There is no moment like this one in any other halftime show, before it or since. Prince, only a shadow, putting his hands to an instrument and coaxing out a song within a song. And of course there was still rain, beads of it covering the camera lens from every angle, drops of it covering the faces of the people in the front row, and still none of it visible on Prince himself. And of course there were two doves scattering themselves above Prince’s head when the sheet came down and he was whole, in front of us again, walking to the mic and asking, ‘Y’all wanna sing tonight?’
Yes, Prince. This is the one we know all of the words to. Throw the microphone to the ground and walk away. We don’t need you now like we did in that moment, but we will remember it always. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called Life. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to cast away another hero on the face of a flood that began on a Miami night in 2007 and never stopped. Dearly beloved, when the sky opens up, anywhere, I will think of how Prince made a storm bend to his will. How the rain never touches those who it knows were sent into it for a higher purpose. Dearly beloved, I will walk into the next storm and leave my umbrella hanging on the door. Please join me.”
...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Dec 2018
Mar 15, 2019
Paperback
1101906669
9781101906668
1101906669
3.72
33,397
Mar 07, 2017
Mar 07, 2017
it was ok
**spoiler alert** Before I really get into this review, I should start with a disclaimer: I raced through this book in about four days, and read the l
**spoiler alert** Before I really get into this review, I should start with a disclaimer: I raced through this book in about four days, and read the last two hundred pages in one sitting. So even though this review isn’t going to be overwhelmingly positive, the fact remains that The Roanoke Girls is gripping and (dare I say) impossible to put down.
I just wish that Amy Engel had been able to stick the landing.
The Roanoke Girls has a very similar setup to Paula Hawkins’ latest novel, Into the Water (which, full disclosure, I was also not a huge fan of): a young woman is called home after tragedy strikes a close female relative, and while she’s back in her hometown, the woman starts digging into her relative’s secrets while trying to come to terms with her own trauma. Family secrets are forced into the light, there are dramatic and violent confrontations, and men continue to be just the Absolute Worst.
In this case, our heroine is Lane, who as a teenager was sent to live with her cousin Allegra and their grandparents after her mother committed suicide. Lane’s grandparents live on a ramshackle mansion, known as Roanoke, in the middle of the Kansas prairie. The family is unique because, aside from her grandfather, Lane and Allegra have only female relatives in their immediate family tree: their grandfather’s sisters, his daughters, and their daughters. These women are known as the Roanoke Girls, and they have something else in common: with the exception of Lane and Allegra, all of them either died at Roanoke or fled the house as a teenager. Lane spends one summer living at Roanoke, and as an adult, has never gone back. Then Allegra disappears, and Lane returns to the house to find out what happened to her cousin.
I feel that it is not a spoiler to say that there are some very, very dark secrets lurking under the surface at Roanoke, and one of the (many) frustrating things about this novel is how the author chooses to reveal those secrets. Engel, perhaps realizing that an audience already familiar with Law & Order: SVU-style storytelling with be able to guess her big twist easily, decides to lay her cards on the table and spill the incest secret relatively early in the book, first by broadly hinting at it, and then by having adult Lane directly accuse her grandfather of sleeping with Allegra.
This is a confounding choice, mostly because it clears up the main mystery of the book when we’re just barely halfway through it. For the rest of the story, Engel's narration dances around the issue, using vague language and never having her characters come right out and say what’s going on. This was very confusing to me – why keep trying to hide the secret when the cat’s already out of the bag? – to the point where I wondered if maybe Engel was just leading me on a massive misdirect, and it would turn out that someone other than the grandfather was sleeping with the girls. But this doesn’t happen, and the best that Engel can do as a final twist is reveal that the grandmother, who previously admitted that she hated her granddaughters, killed Allegra and the other dead Roanoke girls. This revelation is not shocking, and it kind of sucked all the fun out of the final confrontation.
Also disappointing was Engel's decision to end the book – a book brimming with trauma, sexual abuse, incest, murder, and suicide – on a happy, candy-coated ending: Lane gets back together with her old boyfriend, who Engel goes out of her way to present as the perfect man (he has a violent streak, is dismissive of women in general, and has a lot of inherited trauma from his abusive father but whatever I’m sure it’ll all be fine), and they pack up and move away together, driving off into the sunset and what Engel apparently believes is a great future together. Eesh.
This was so frustrating to me, because on the one hand, Engel is using this book to explore the lifetime trauma created by abuse – how abusers spend years grooming their victims, to the point where the victim believes that not only was the abuse their fault, but they actually wanted the abuse – and how difficult it can be to move past such trauma. So in light of this, it’s incredibly disappointing that Engel chooses to end her book by just slapping a Band-Aid over everything, trying to get us to believe that Lane’s new relationship will fix everything. LOL no – the story has already established that Lane and Cooper hurt each other emotionally whenever one of them feels threatened, and Lane admits to us that she intentionally hurts people in order to scare them away. Lane is dealing with not only the fact that her family is built on three generations of incest, but also that her own grandmother murdered her cousin and at least one other relative. Lane doesn’t need a man, she needs therapy, and Engel's apparent belief that everything will be okay for Lane from now on is naïve at best; at worst, it’s a dangerously misguided idea of how trauma works.
But I’m probably taking all of this too seriously: this is, after all, a story built on the idea that a man had sex (and fathered children) with almost every female relative he ever lived with, like he’s goddamn Craster from Game of Thrones. This is intended to be a dramatic, scary, Southern Gothic-esque thriller, and in that respect, it succeeds.
In conclusion: reading this is basically like watching a Law & Order: SVU marathon when you’re home sick from school in the middle of the afternoon. It’s thrilling in a disturbing sort of way, you can feel smart when you guess the culprit twenty minutes in, and you know better than to think about it too critically.
(Okay, just one more nitpick: Allegra is only “missing” and not “immediately found dead” due to some truly incompetent police work. Like, Allegra was last seen at the house and there’s a swimming hole on the property, yet apparently no one suggested they drag the pond looking for a body. C’mon, guys. Also Susan totally should have been the murderer and not Gran, but this review is long enough already.) ...more
I just wish that Amy Engel had been able to stick the landing.
The Roanoke Girls has a very similar setup to Paula Hawkins’ latest novel, Into the Water (which, full disclosure, I was also not a huge fan of): a young woman is called home after tragedy strikes a close female relative, and while she’s back in her hometown, the woman starts digging into her relative’s secrets while trying to come to terms with her own trauma. Family secrets are forced into the light, there are dramatic and violent confrontations, and men continue to be just the Absolute Worst.
In this case, our heroine is Lane, who as a teenager was sent to live with her cousin Allegra and their grandparents after her mother committed suicide. Lane’s grandparents live on a ramshackle mansion, known as Roanoke, in the middle of the Kansas prairie. The family is unique because, aside from her grandfather, Lane and Allegra have only female relatives in their immediate family tree: their grandfather’s sisters, his daughters, and their daughters. These women are known as the Roanoke Girls, and they have something else in common: with the exception of Lane and Allegra, all of them either died at Roanoke or fled the house as a teenager. Lane spends one summer living at Roanoke, and as an adult, has never gone back. Then Allegra disappears, and Lane returns to the house to find out what happened to her cousin.
I feel that it is not a spoiler to say that there are some very, very dark secrets lurking under the surface at Roanoke, and one of the (many) frustrating things about this novel is how the author chooses to reveal those secrets. Engel, perhaps realizing that an audience already familiar with Law & Order: SVU-style storytelling with be able to guess her big twist easily, decides to lay her cards on the table and spill the incest secret relatively early in the book, first by broadly hinting at it, and then by having adult Lane directly accuse her grandfather of sleeping with Allegra.
This is a confounding choice, mostly because it clears up the main mystery of the book when we’re just barely halfway through it. For the rest of the story, Engel's narration dances around the issue, using vague language and never having her characters come right out and say what’s going on. This was very confusing to me – why keep trying to hide the secret when the cat’s already out of the bag? – to the point where I wondered if maybe Engel was just leading me on a massive misdirect, and it would turn out that someone other than the grandfather was sleeping with the girls. But this doesn’t happen, and the best that Engel can do as a final twist is reveal that the grandmother, who previously admitted that she hated her granddaughters, killed Allegra and the other dead Roanoke girls. This revelation is not shocking, and it kind of sucked all the fun out of the final confrontation.
Also disappointing was Engel's decision to end the book – a book brimming with trauma, sexual abuse, incest, murder, and suicide – on a happy, candy-coated ending: Lane gets back together with her old boyfriend, who Engel goes out of her way to present as the perfect man (he has a violent streak, is dismissive of women in general, and has a lot of inherited trauma from his abusive father but whatever I’m sure it’ll all be fine), and they pack up and move away together, driving off into the sunset and what Engel apparently believes is a great future together. Eesh.
This was so frustrating to me, because on the one hand, Engel is using this book to explore the lifetime trauma created by abuse – how abusers spend years grooming their victims, to the point where the victim believes that not only was the abuse their fault, but they actually wanted the abuse – and how difficult it can be to move past such trauma. So in light of this, it’s incredibly disappointing that Engel chooses to end her book by just slapping a Band-Aid over everything, trying to get us to believe that Lane’s new relationship will fix everything. LOL no – the story has already established that Lane and Cooper hurt each other emotionally whenever one of them feels threatened, and Lane admits to us that she intentionally hurts people in order to scare them away. Lane is dealing with not only the fact that her family is built on three generations of incest, but also that her own grandmother murdered her cousin and at least one other relative. Lane doesn’t need a man, she needs therapy, and Engel's apparent belief that everything will be okay for Lane from now on is naïve at best; at worst, it’s a dangerously misguided idea of how trauma works.
But I’m probably taking all of this too seriously: this is, after all, a story built on the idea that a man had sex (and fathered children) with almost every female relative he ever lived with, like he’s goddamn Craster from Game of Thrones. This is intended to be a dramatic, scary, Southern Gothic-esque thriller, and in that respect, it succeeds.
In conclusion: reading this is basically like watching a Law & Order: SVU marathon when you’re home sick from school in the middle of the afternoon. It’s thrilling in a disturbing sort of way, you can feel smart when you guess the culprit twenty minutes in, and you know better than to think about it too critically.
(Okay, just one more nitpick: Allegra is only “missing” and not “immediately found dead” due to some truly incompetent police work. Like, Allegra was last seen at the house and there’s a swimming hole on the property, yet apparently no one suggested they drag the pond looking for a body. C’mon, guys. Also Susan totally should have been the murderer and not Gran, but this review is long enough already.) ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Mar 2019
Mar 14, 2019
Hardcover
0316778516
9780316778510
0316778516
3.79
904
2002
Jul 14, 2004
liked it
I've been watching the BBC show Versailles lately, and it made me want to dive back into some fun, slutty Louis XIV history. Luckily, I picked this bo
I've been watching the BBC show Versailles lately, and it made me want to dive back into some fun, slutty Louis XIV history. Luckily, I picked this book up in a secondhand store years ago, and was apparently just waiting for the right time to read it.
Athenais de Montespan life story follows a pattern that we see often in stories of royal mistresses: she came from a well-born family and used her social position to gain a place at court, where she quickly captured the king's attention. For several years, she was the unofficial "Queen of Versailles," and enjoyed great social and political influence. Several royal bastards came along, and pretty soon the king's eye wandered, and despite her increasingly desperate efforts, Athenais couldn't maintain her position at court and died in disgrace, far from court. But during her brief time as top dog at the French court, she burned more brightly and brilliantly than many of her contemporaries, and her influences on life at Versailles would far outlive her.
I haven't read anything about Athenais de Montespan since Love and Louis XIV, which I remember as being interesting and detailed, but fully on the side of Louis' last mistress and possible secret wife, Maintenon. Hilton's biography swings the opposite way - she's firmly Team Athenais, and has very few nice things to say about Maintenon (who Hilton often refers to - with no small amount scorn - by her first married name, Madame Scarron) or, indeed, any of the women featured in this book - fans of the show Versailles will be disappointed by Hilton's sneering dismissal of Princess Palantine, which basically reduces her to a bitter, stupid woman who disliked Athenais mainly because she was prettier.
People who know their French history better than I do can poke holes in Lisa Hilton's history, and based on the other reviews I've seen, it looks like they already have. There are certainly more well-researched, balanced, and better-written (just to point out one issue: Hilton, for some reason, found it necessary to include long, untranslated excerpts of French poems and songs throughout the book) biographies out there. Honestly, I should have realized what I was in for when I read Hilton's opening paragraph in Chapter One:
"Versailles today is rather a sad place. The titanic mass of the chateau is obscured by the crowds of buses which spew fumes and tourists on to the Cour Royale. The famous gardens retain their magnificent views, but without the attentions of their thousand gardeners they can seem as soulless as a scrubby, shrubby municipal park. Inside, the long coil of visitors shuffles over cheap, squeaky parquet, through huge doorways whose marble mantels have been replaced by painted wood. The crush, the crowd, and the heat of the massed bodies in the vast rooms are perhaps all that remain true to the life of the house."
Listen, Lisa, I'm sorry that the most famous palace in the world has - horror! - attracted tourists, but if Versailles wasn't famous then nobody would be buying your goddamn book in the first place, so maybe scale back the snobbery? Jesus. How jaded and disillusioned do you have to be to stand in the gardens of fucking Versailles and think it's comparable to a "scrubby, shrubby municipal park"? The fucking nerve. I swear, I haven't been this angry on behalf of Versailles since they dumped all those Jeff Koons sculptures in the gardens.
The book worked for me, not as a biography of a single person, but as a portrait of Versailles when it was in its infancy. Hilton's writing is at its best and most evocative when she's making you understand just how far removed Louis XIV was from normal people - as far as anyone at the time was concerned, Louis was literally chosen by God to be king of France, and he behaved accordingly. Reading descriptions like this, can anyone blame the residents of Versailles for being completed unattached from reality?:
"For the court and the ambassadors, Versailles was a book as much as a palace, the means by which the Sun King used all available symbols to create and impose his power. Nothing in the design of Versailles was without its symbolism, from the statues - Apollo in his chariot, or the giant Encelade being crushed by rocks for his defiance of Zeus - to the fountains, whose choreography was minutely devised by Colbert and the master of the fountains in a ten-page manual, so that when the King walked in his garden, they would spring to life in order - the Couronnes, the Pyramide, the Dragon, the grotto of Ceres, the Dosme, the Apollon, the horses, the Latone, the Aigrettes, the bosquets, the Cinq Jets - the music of the water coming alive with Louis's step and fading with his retreat, as though rainbow cascades were activated merely by his presence. The legions of undergardeners sprinting between the fountains, struggling at the taps with damp hands and rasping lungs, were invisible, and where the King walked, the music of the water followed him." ...more
Athenais de Montespan life story follows a pattern that we see often in stories of royal mistresses: she came from a well-born family and used her social position to gain a place at court, where she quickly captured the king's attention. For several years, she was the unofficial "Queen of Versailles," and enjoyed great social and political influence. Several royal bastards came along, and pretty soon the king's eye wandered, and despite her increasingly desperate efforts, Athenais couldn't maintain her position at court and died in disgrace, far from court. But during her brief time as top dog at the French court, she burned more brightly and brilliantly than many of her contemporaries, and her influences on life at Versailles would far outlive her.
I haven't read anything about Athenais de Montespan since Love and Louis XIV, which I remember as being interesting and detailed, but fully on the side of Louis' last mistress and possible secret wife, Maintenon. Hilton's biography swings the opposite way - she's firmly Team Athenais, and has very few nice things to say about Maintenon (who Hilton often refers to - with no small amount scorn - by her first married name, Madame Scarron) or, indeed, any of the women featured in this book - fans of the show Versailles will be disappointed by Hilton's sneering dismissal of Princess Palantine, which basically reduces her to a bitter, stupid woman who disliked Athenais mainly because she was prettier.
People who know their French history better than I do can poke holes in Lisa Hilton's history, and based on the other reviews I've seen, it looks like they already have. There are certainly more well-researched, balanced, and better-written (just to point out one issue: Hilton, for some reason, found it necessary to include long, untranslated excerpts of French poems and songs throughout the book) biographies out there. Honestly, I should have realized what I was in for when I read Hilton's opening paragraph in Chapter One:
"Versailles today is rather a sad place. The titanic mass of the chateau is obscured by the crowds of buses which spew fumes and tourists on to the Cour Royale. The famous gardens retain their magnificent views, but without the attentions of their thousand gardeners they can seem as soulless as a scrubby, shrubby municipal park. Inside, the long coil of visitors shuffles over cheap, squeaky parquet, through huge doorways whose marble mantels have been replaced by painted wood. The crush, the crowd, and the heat of the massed bodies in the vast rooms are perhaps all that remain true to the life of the house."
Listen, Lisa, I'm sorry that the most famous palace in the world has - horror! - attracted tourists, but if Versailles wasn't famous then nobody would be buying your goddamn book in the first place, so maybe scale back the snobbery? Jesus. How jaded and disillusioned do you have to be to stand in the gardens of fucking Versailles and think it's comparable to a "scrubby, shrubby municipal park"? The fucking nerve. I swear, I haven't been this angry on behalf of Versailles since they dumped all those Jeff Koons sculptures in the gardens.
The book worked for me, not as a biography of a single person, but as a portrait of Versailles when it was in its infancy. Hilton's writing is at its best and most evocative when she's making you understand just how far removed Louis XIV was from normal people - as far as anyone at the time was concerned, Louis was literally chosen by God to be king of France, and he behaved accordingly. Reading descriptions like this, can anyone blame the residents of Versailles for being completed unattached from reality?:
"For the court and the ambassadors, Versailles was a book as much as a palace, the means by which the Sun King used all available symbols to create and impose his power. Nothing in the design of Versailles was without its symbolism, from the statues - Apollo in his chariot, or the giant Encelade being crushed by rocks for his defiance of Zeus - to the fountains, whose choreography was minutely devised by Colbert and the master of the fountains in a ten-page manual, so that when the King walked in his garden, they would spring to life in order - the Couronnes, the Pyramide, the Dragon, the grotto of Ceres, the Dosme, the Apollon, the horses, the Latone, the Aigrettes, the bosquets, the Cinq Jets - the music of the water coming alive with Louis's step and fading with his retreat, as though rainbow cascades were activated merely by his presence. The legions of undergardeners sprinting between the fountains, struggling at the taps with damp hands and rasping lungs, were invisible, and where the King walked, the music of the water followed him." ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Dec 2018
Mar 07, 2019
Paperback
0385539088
9780385539081
0385539088
3.84
219,571
Jun 16, 2015
Jun 16, 2015
it was ok
(warning: this review will contain spoilers for the first book in the Crazy Rich Asians series. If you haven't read it, or have just seen the movie, p
(warning: this review will contain spoilers for the first book in the Crazy Rich Asians series. If you haven't read it, or have just seen the movie, proceed with caution because I am going to discuss the ending and crucial plot points for that book)
So, I'm a little baffled at the difference in my reactions to the first Crazy Rich Asians novel versus the second. The first book was a fun, fluffy romp of a story about an Everywoman's journey into Filthy Rich People Land - everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, and Kwan was adept at using brand names, luxury settings, and general wealth porn to distract me from the shallowness and mediocre prose of his debut novel. (I should probably also admit that the movie version, which is one of the rare cases where the movie is better than the book, is probably making me feel more positive about the book than when I first read it)
In China Rich Girlfriend, Kwan assumes that he can stick to the formula that made his first book such a hit, and doesn't bother to deviate very far from his established pattern of "Nick and Rachel go somewhere luxurious, then we follow some other characters to similarly luxurious locations, repeat until you hit your required page count" because why should he? The first book was so well received, why bother trying anything new?
The problem is that China Rich Girlfriend didn't work for me, at all, and I'll try to use this review to figure out why.
For starters, Kwan's decision to have this book pick up two years after the events of the first book is baffling, because none of the characters have experienced any growth or change in that time. Rachel and Nick are just now getting engaged (and I had totally forgotten that the book, unlike the movie, doesn't end with Rachel accepting Nick's proposal) and in that time, they don't appear to have ever had any serious conversation about money and how their marriage will potentially be affected by Nick's wealth - Rachel remains as confounded as ever by the obscene wealth of the people she encounters in China and Singapore, and Nick continues to refuse to discuss his family finances with her in any detail. The lack of personal growth doesn't stop at Rachel and Nick, either - Nick hasn't spoken to his mother in two years, and Astrid is still married to her dirtbag husband, and is still maintaining an "I swear we're just friends" relationship with Charlie Wu. (The Astrid of the movie version, who delivered that blistering breakup speech to her husband, is nowhere to be found in this book.)
The big drama of this novel is Rachel reconnecting with her birth father, and Kwan has absolutely no idea how to handle this plot. Rachel and her father immediately get on like a house on fire, and she bonds with her newly-discovered half-brother without any issues. (Instead of having Rachel wonder why her father the billionaire politician never used his resources to try to find her and her mother, or question whether it's healthy to try to start a relationship with a family that never wanted anything to do with her, it's all "Wow, my dad sure is great!" and "Oh wow, my estranged brother and I eat our soup dumplings the same way!") At the same time, Kwan decides to do what he did at the end of Crazy Rich Asians and take a hard left turn into soap opera-level drama, when Rachel is (view spoiler)[poisoned and almost died, all because someone was afraid that she would inherit some of the money that would have gone to her brother (hide spoiler)]. It's like he doesn't know how to create drama out of people reacting normally to extremely emotional circumstances, so he has to throw crazy plots into the mix instead.
The other big issue here is that, unlike in the first book, it has become glaringly obvious that all of these people are shallow, spoiled monsters. Kwan was able to keep me reasonably distracted from this in the first book, but while I was reading China Rich Girlfriend, an intrusive thought kept ruining my reading experience: these people have too much money and it has turned them into sociopaths.
Some of them are supposed to be ridiculous, like Kitty Pong (who, by the way, I will defend to the death, and it's a major flaw of the book that we don't get to spend more time watching her My Fair Lady journey into high society) and Carlton's girlfriend, the Chinese socialite Collette Bing. But on the other hand, we have Carlton himself, who at the beginning of the book crashes his sports car into a luxury boutique, severely injuring himself and putting one passenger in a coma, and killing the other. His mother then pays to have the girl's death covered up, and Carlton never sees any consequences for his actions.
I cannot imagine how Kwan thought his readers would be capable of sympathizing with Carlton after that. Again - he put one girl in a coma, and killed another one. Oh sure, he feels super bad about it, but Kwan seems to think that that's sufficient. It was not, and in every interaction Carlton has with another character, all I could think was "a girl is dead because of you." Also, notice how I have to just keep referring to each of his victims as "the girl"? That's because they never get names. I mean, Jesus, Kwan.
Even Nick sucks in this one. There's a scene where his aunt sits down with him and bluntly tells him that he's free to continue dating Rachel if he wants, but he should wait to marry her until after his grandmother dies so she'll leave him Tyersol Park in her will. And instead of defending Rachel (you know, like he spent the first book doing?) and inviting his aunt to take a flying leap off her mega-yacht, Nick gives some non-committal non-answer, because despite knowing all the shit his family put Rachel through and even though he ultimately chose her over them, he's still not willing to risk pissing off his grandma and losing his chance to be lord of the manor one day. It was deeply disappointing, to say the least.
Crazy Rich Asians succeeded because its core story was a universal one: the pressure of meeting your partner's family for the first time, and the anxiety that you won't be accepted. Readers loved the first book because Kwan took a very familiar, everyday experience and sprinkled it with gold dust and placed it in an exotic setting, making the humdrum "meeting the parents" scenario feel much more interesting and high-stakes.
China Rich Girlfriend could have worked in a similar way, because again, it deals with a common experience: a newly married couple trying to navigate their shared life and make their partnership succeed despite their vastly different families and upbringings. Unfortunately, Kwan has absolutely no interest in exploring this, preferring instead to stick with his old formula of repetitive scenes of rich people doing rich people things in rich people places, and he can't even do us the favor of letting us watch familiar, already-beloved characters do them - he seems to think that he can just repeat the plot of the first book with new characters and settings, and that his audience will be happy.
I read this book for one reason, and one reason only: so I would have added background information when the movie version came out. In that respect, China Rich Girlfriend delivers. ...more
So, I'm a little baffled at the difference in my reactions to the first Crazy Rich Asians novel versus the second. The first book was a fun, fluffy romp of a story about an Everywoman's journey into Filthy Rich People Land - everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, and Kwan was adept at using brand names, luxury settings, and general wealth porn to distract me from the shallowness and mediocre prose of his debut novel. (I should probably also admit that the movie version, which is one of the rare cases where the movie is better than the book, is probably making me feel more positive about the book than when I first read it)
In China Rich Girlfriend, Kwan assumes that he can stick to the formula that made his first book such a hit, and doesn't bother to deviate very far from his established pattern of "Nick and Rachel go somewhere luxurious, then we follow some other characters to similarly luxurious locations, repeat until you hit your required page count" because why should he? The first book was so well received, why bother trying anything new?
The problem is that China Rich Girlfriend didn't work for me, at all, and I'll try to use this review to figure out why.
For starters, Kwan's decision to have this book pick up two years after the events of the first book is baffling, because none of the characters have experienced any growth or change in that time. Rachel and Nick are just now getting engaged (and I had totally forgotten that the book, unlike the movie, doesn't end with Rachel accepting Nick's proposal) and in that time, they don't appear to have ever had any serious conversation about money and how their marriage will potentially be affected by Nick's wealth - Rachel remains as confounded as ever by the obscene wealth of the people she encounters in China and Singapore, and Nick continues to refuse to discuss his family finances with her in any detail. The lack of personal growth doesn't stop at Rachel and Nick, either - Nick hasn't spoken to his mother in two years, and Astrid is still married to her dirtbag husband, and is still maintaining an "I swear we're just friends" relationship with Charlie Wu. (The Astrid of the movie version, who delivered that blistering breakup speech to her husband, is nowhere to be found in this book.)
The big drama of this novel is Rachel reconnecting with her birth father, and Kwan has absolutely no idea how to handle this plot. Rachel and her father immediately get on like a house on fire, and she bonds with her newly-discovered half-brother without any issues. (Instead of having Rachel wonder why her father the billionaire politician never used his resources to try to find her and her mother, or question whether it's healthy to try to start a relationship with a family that never wanted anything to do with her, it's all "Wow, my dad sure is great!" and "Oh wow, my estranged brother and I eat our soup dumplings the same way!") At the same time, Kwan decides to do what he did at the end of Crazy Rich Asians and take a hard left turn into soap opera-level drama, when Rachel is (view spoiler)[poisoned and almost died, all because someone was afraid that she would inherit some of the money that would have gone to her brother (hide spoiler)]. It's like he doesn't know how to create drama out of people reacting normally to extremely emotional circumstances, so he has to throw crazy plots into the mix instead.
The other big issue here is that, unlike in the first book, it has become glaringly obvious that all of these people are shallow, spoiled monsters. Kwan was able to keep me reasonably distracted from this in the first book, but while I was reading China Rich Girlfriend, an intrusive thought kept ruining my reading experience: these people have too much money and it has turned them into sociopaths.
Some of them are supposed to be ridiculous, like Kitty Pong (who, by the way, I will defend to the death, and it's a major flaw of the book that we don't get to spend more time watching her My Fair Lady journey into high society) and Carlton's girlfriend, the Chinese socialite Collette Bing. But on the other hand, we have Carlton himself, who at the beginning of the book crashes his sports car into a luxury boutique, severely injuring himself and putting one passenger in a coma, and killing the other. His mother then pays to have the girl's death covered up, and Carlton never sees any consequences for his actions.
I cannot imagine how Kwan thought his readers would be capable of sympathizing with Carlton after that. Again - he put one girl in a coma, and killed another one. Oh sure, he feels super bad about it, but Kwan seems to think that that's sufficient. It was not, and in every interaction Carlton has with another character, all I could think was "a girl is dead because of you." Also, notice how I have to just keep referring to each of his victims as "the girl"? That's because they never get names. I mean, Jesus, Kwan.
Even Nick sucks in this one. There's a scene where his aunt sits down with him and bluntly tells him that he's free to continue dating Rachel if he wants, but he should wait to marry her until after his grandmother dies so she'll leave him Tyersol Park in her will. And instead of defending Rachel (you know, like he spent the first book doing?) and inviting his aunt to take a flying leap off her mega-yacht, Nick gives some non-committal non-answer, because despite knowing all the shit his family put Rachel through and even though he ultimately chose her over them, he's still not willing to risk pissing off his grandma and losing his chance to be lord of the manor one day. It was deeply disappointing, to say the least.
Crazy Rich Asians succeeded because its core story was a universal one: the pressure of meeting your partner's family for the first time, and the anxiety that you won't be accepted. Readers loved the first book because Kwan took a very familiar, everyday experience and sprinkled it with gold dust and placed it in an exotic setting, making the humdrum "meeting the parents" scenario feel much more interesting and high-stakes.
China Rich Girlfriend could have worked in a similar way, because again, it deals with a common experience: a newly married couple trying to navigate their shared life and make their partnership succeed despite their vastly different families and upbringings. Unfortunately, Kwan has absolutely no interest in exploring this, preferring instead to stick with his old formula of repetitive scenes of rich people doing rich people things in rich people places, and he can't even do us the favor of letting us watch familiar, already-beloved characters do them - he seems to think that he can just repeat the plot of the first book with new characters and settings, and that his audience will be happy.
I read this book for one reason, and one reason only: so I would have added background information when the movie version came out. In that respect, China Rich Girlfriend delivers. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Mar 2019
Mar 2019
Mar 06, 2019
Hardcover
0316206873
9780316206877
0316206873
4.05
282,897
Jun 19, 2014
Jun 19, 2014
really liked it
Three and a half stars would honestly be a more accurate rating for this book, since four stars feels like too much and three stars would be undersell
Three and a half stars would honestly be a more accurate rating for this book, since four stars feels like too much and three stars would be underselling how much I enjoyed the story. This is, overall, a good continuation of the Cormoran Strike series, and improves several of the issues I found with the last one.
As with The Cuckoo's Calling, the best part of this book is the dynamic between Strike and his Girl Friday, Robin. Rowling (sorry, "Galbraith") is definitely pushing these two towards a romantic arc, which I still remain on the fence about, mostly because I think their professional partnership is compelling enough on its own. The best development on the Strike/Robin front is that Robin shows a much stronger interest in becoming a detective herself - we see her researching interrogation techniques and looking into getting officially certified. I really hope this happens, mostly because I really love the idea of Robin and Strike being a pair of detectives on equal footing, rather than the detective/secretary dynamic.
The mystery itself is definitely messier than the Lula Landry case, which makes the book difficult to read sometimes. The case centers around the death of an author, which means we have to sit through essentially the same conversation multiple times as Strike interviews various suspects about their relationship with the author. I had trouble keeping track of the suspects, mainly because their level of animosity towards the missing author was pretty much the same across the board, and it was hard for me to piece together everyone's stories about their difficult pasts with him. There's eventually a murder, and it's very gruesome and elaborate, to the point where it feels like its in the wrong story - the murder scene is straight out of Hannibal, and felt wrong, somehow, for these characters and this setting. (And committing the murder requires a level of sadism, not to mention mental and physical fortitude, from the culprit that I never quite believed.)
Finally, even though I know that JK Rowling published this series under a pseudonym specifically to distance it from her Author of Harry Potter persona and that I should at least give her that and evaluate the Strike novels on their own merit, there were a couple moments where I could see JK Rowling behind the text, and it took me out of the story.
First - since the book concerns a semi-famous author, naturally it's going to take place mainly in the publishing world. This is fine, because if anyone knows her way around big publishing firms, it's the woman who wrote Harry freakin' Potter. But within the narration there's a distinct and distracting snobbery whenever the characters are talking about self-published authors. One of the suspects is a self-published author who has a blog, so obviously she's going to have a massive chip on her shoulder and be really bitter because she couldn't get published the traditional way (because obviously no one chooses to self-publish, says the woman who captured lightning in a bottle and became a billionaire through traditional publishing). There's a one-line dismissal of a romance novelist at a publishing party who's never named. A character makes a sneering reference to an author who writes erotic high-fantasy, and this one's especially irritating to me, because I can guarantee that the worst erotic fantasy novel still won't contain anything as awkward and laughable as Harry Potter's chest dragon. Also a character threatens to self-publish their work, and it's made clear that this is the absolute last-ditch resort, because again, Rowling cannot conceive of anyone being unable to succeed through traditional publishing. It was an unnecessary distraction and irritation in an otherwise fun and entertaining detective story, and I wish Rowling would do a better job at being "Robert Galbraith" in future Strike mysteries. ...more
As with The Cuckoo's Calling, the best part of this book is the dynamic between Strike and his Girl Friday, Robin. Rowling (sorry, "Galbraith") is definitely pushing these two towards a romantic arc, which I still remain on the fence about, mostly because I think their professional partnership is compelling enough on its own. The best development on the Strike/Robin front is that Robin shows a much stronger interest in becoming a detective herself - we see her researching interrogation techniques and looking into getting officially certified. I really hope this happens, mostly because I really love the idea of Robin and Strike being a pair of detectives on equal footing, rather than the detective/secretary dynamic.
The mystery itself is definitely messier than the Lula Landry case, which makes the book difficult to read sometimes. The case centers around the death of an author, which means we have to sit through essentially the same conversation multiple times as Strike interviews various suspects about their relationship with the author. I had trouble keeping track of the suspects, mainly because their level of animosity towards the missing author was pretty much the same across the board, and it was hard for me to piece together everyone's stories about their difficult pasts with him. There's eventually a murder, and it's very gruesome and elaborate, to the point where it feels like its in the wrong story - the murder scene is straight out of Hannibal, and felt wrong, somehow, for these characters and this setting. (And committing the murder requires a level of sadism, not to mention mental and physical fortitude, from the culprit that I never quite believed.)
Finally, even though I know that JK Rowling published this series under a pseudonym specifically to distance it from her Author of Harry Potter persona and that I should at least give her that and evaluate the Strike novels on their own merit, there were a couple moments where I could see JK Rowling behind the text, and it took me out of the story.
First - since the book concerns a semi-famous author, naturally it's going to take place mainly in the publishing world. This is fine, because if anyone knows her way around big publishing firms, it's the woman who wrote Harry freakin' Potter. But within the narration there's a distinct and distracting snobbery whenever the characters are talking about self-published authors. One of the suspects is a self-published author who has a blog, so obviously she's going to have a massive chip on her shoulder and be really bitter because she couldn't get published the traditional way (because obviously no one chooses to self-publish, says the woman who captured lightning in a bottle and became a billionaire through traditional publishing). There's a one-line dismissal of a romance novelist at a publishing party who's never named. A character makes a sneering reference to an author who writes erotic high-fantasy, and this one's especially irritating to me, because I can guarantee that the worst erotic fantasy novel still won't contain anything as awkward and laughable as Harry Potter's chest dragon. Also a character threatens to self-publish their work, and it's made clear that this is the absolute last-ditch resort, because again, Rowling cannot conceive of anyone being unable to succeed through traditional publishing. It was an unnecessary distraction and irritation in an otherwise fun and entertaining detective story, and I wish Rowling would do a better job at being "Robert Galbraith" in future Strike mysteries. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Jan 2019
Feb 13, 2019
Hardcover
3.82
112,315
Jun 08, 1999
May 18, 2000
it was amazing
**spoiler alert** Wow! What an ending!!! I love the ambiguity of it! How we just get the final scene at Mason Verger's, where Starling rescues Hanniba
**spoiler alert** Wow! What an ending!!! I love the ambiguity of it! How we just get the final scene at Mason Verger's, where Starling rescues Hannibal and he escapes! And then the book ends right after that! With no more scenes! So we're left to imagine! How Starling works her way back into the good graces of her FBI superiors! And continues her cat-and-mouse pursuit of Hannibal Lecter! But Thomas Harris knows that it's better to leave this up to the readers' imaginations! So he has Starling save Hannibal from Mason Verger! And then that's the end! There were no more chapters!
SO BOLD AND INNOVATIVE. FIVE STARS.
...more
SO BOLD AND INNOVATIVE. FIVE STARS.
...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Jan 2019
Feb 01, 2019
Paperback
0061348104
9780061348105
0061348104
4.25
32,202
Apr 28, 2009
Apr 28, 2009
it was amazing
I found out about this book through Last Podcast on the Left, which did a phenomenal three-part episode series on the Donner Party and used this book
I found out about this book through Last Podcast on the Left, which did a phenomenal three-part episode series on the Donner Party and used this book as the primary source for their information. I was so fascinated and intrigued by this story, which I'd only ever heard about in vague details, that I decided to read the book for myself.
Pretty much all I knew about the Donner Party until this book was that a group of pioneers once got trapped in the mountains in a snowstorm and ended up resorting to cannibalism to stay alive. Obviously, the real story is so much more complicated (and harrowing) than that, and if nothing else, this book will ensure that after you read it you will be absolutely impossible to have a conversation with anyone that doesn't eventually end in you saying, "So, do you want to hear a cool story?" My friends and coworkers know so much more about cannibalism than they ever wanted to know, thanks to this book and my hyper-fixation on the story while I was reading it.
There was so much that I didn't know. I didn't know, for example, that the "Donner Party" actually consisted of several extended families traveling to California together, along with a handful of single men hired as workers. I didn't know that the Graves family, who form the focal point of Brown's book, were hardscrabble poineers who had survived plenty of harsh conditions before the fateful trip, and were hardly the foolhardy amateurs that they're sometimes reduced to. I also didn't know that the Donner Party was traveling a route that had never actually been attempted before, and was created by some guy who looked at a map and thought, huh, they can save 200 miles by just cutting through this salt desert in Utah! (spoiler alert, it was not a good shortcut). Basically, these people were doomed from the moment they set out from Independence, Missouri (a whole three weeks after the deadline to avoid the winter, by the way) and it's a miracle that there were any survivors at all.
One of the best aspects of the book is how thoroughly Brown researched every aspect of the journey to California, and goes into exhaustive detail about everything from wagon construction to frontier gender politics, so that the reader has a complete picture of what life was like for the people who would eventually be trapped in the snow on the shores of Donner Lake. (Apparently there's a boulder next to Donner Lake with a plaque in it, informing people that a family from the Donner Party used it as a wall for their shelter when they were trapped in ten-foot snow drifts, and there is something so chilling about that fact, I can't get over it)
This is a brutal book, as it should be. Brown makes sure that his readers understand exactly how dangerous the route to California was, even under ideal conditions, and I'm still amazed that anyone ever made it past the Midwest. Once the Donner Party's supplies start to run low and exhaustion sets in, things start to get bad: first their cattle die, then they have to eat the cattle. They eat their dogs, they eat their own shoe leather, they boil bones down into a gluey soup - and that's long before anyone suggests eating the dead humans. The details and descriptions that Brown provides of these people's gradual, desperate descent into cannibalism are gruesome and vivid, and the visuals he conjures up will stay with you for a long time: as the first few survivors staggered out of the mountains, Brown describes them as being basically walking skeletons, with their clothes almost completely disintegrated, their lips cracked and bleeding, their bare feet leaving bloody footprints in the snow. This story is basically a horror movie, and these people didn't triumph over their circumstances so much as they crawled out of them, bloody and broken but somehow still alive. It's not uplifting, exactly, but it does leave you impressed by just how much the human body can potentially withstand, and how far people are willing to go in order to stay alive. ...more
Pretty much all I knew about the Donner Party until this book was that a group of pioneers once got trapped in the mountains in a snowstorm and ended up resorting to cannibalism to stay alive. Obviously, the real story is so much more complicated (and harrowing) than that, and if nothing else, this book will ensure that after you read it you will be absolutely impossible to have a conversation with anyone that doesn't eventually end in you saying, "So, do you want to hear a cool story?" My friends and coworkers know so much more about cannibalism than they ever wanted to know, thanks to this book and my hyper-fixation on the story while I was reading it.
There was so much that I didn't know. I didn't know, for example, that the "Donner Party" actually consisted of several extended families traveling to California together, along with a handful of single men hired as workers. I didn't know that the Graves family, who form the focal point of Brown's book, were hardscrabble poineers who had survived plenty of harsh conditions before the fateful trip, and were hardly the foolhardy amateurs that they're sometimes reduced to. I also didn't know that the Donner Party was traveling a route that had never actually been attempted before, and was created by some guy who looked at a map and thought, huh, they can save 200 miles by just cutting through this salt desert in Utah! (spoiler alert, it was not a good shortcut). Basically, these people were doomed from the moment they set out from Independence, Missouri (a whole three weeks after the deadline to avoid the winter, by the way) and it's a miracle that there were any survivors at all.
One of the best aspects of the book is how thoroughly Brown researched every aspect of the journey to California, and goes into exhaustive detail about everything from wagon construction to frontier gender politics, so that the reader has a complete picture of what life was like for the people who would eventually be trapped in the snow on the shores of Donner Lake. (Apparently there's a boulder next to Donner Lake with a plaque in it, informing people that a family from the Donner Party used it as a wall for their shelter when they were trapped in ten-foot snow drifts, and there is something so chilling about that fact, I can't get over it)
This is a brutal book, as it should be. Brown makes sure that his readers understand exactly how dangerous the route to California was, even under ideal conditions, and I'm still amazed that anyone ever made it past the Midwest. Once the Donner Party's supplies start to run low and exhaustion sets in, things start to get bad: first their cattle die, then they have to eat the cattle. They eat their dogs, they eat their own shoe leather, they boil bones down into a gluey soup - and that's long before anyone suggests eating the dead humans. The details and descriptions that Brown provides of these people's gradual, desperate descent into cannibalism are gruesome and vivid, and the visuals he conjures up will stay with you for a long time: as the first few survivors staggered out of the mountains, Brown describes them as being basically walking skeletons, with their clothes almost completely disintegrated, their lips cracked and bleeding, their bare feet leaving bloody footprints in the snow. This story is basically a horror movie, and these people didn't triumph over their circumstances so much as they crawled out of them, bloody and broken but somehow still alive. It's not uplifting, exactly, but it does leave you impressed by just how much the human body can potentially withstand, and how far people are willing to go in order to stay alive. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Jan 2019
Jan 30, 2019
Hardcover
0061001783
9780061001789
0061001783
4.10
17,580
1953
Nov 01, 1994
it was amazing
How is this only the second Georgette Heyer romance I’ve ever read? I picked up An Infamous Army years ago and loved it; I can’t believe it’s taken me
How is this only the second Georgette Heyer romance I’ve ever read? I picked up An Infamous Army years ago and loved it; I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to seek out another one of her Regency romances. Cotillion often appears on lists of people’s favorite Heyer novels, so it seemed like a good starting point for diving back into her work.
I am happy to report that, in short, Cotillion is a goddamn bonbon of a book – clever, cute, and so light and carefree it practically bounces. As an added bonus, the plot is basically a checklist of all your favorite fanfiction tropes: our heroine is Kitty Charing, who was adopted at a young age by a wealthy but miserly Englishman. He declares that Kitty will inherit his entire fortune, but only if she marries one of his great-nephews (he very generously leaves the choice up to Kitty). Kitty hatches a plan - she approaches the most sympathetic of the nephews, a delightful fop named Freddy, and presents her proposal. She and Freddy will pretend to get engaged so Kitty has an excuse to go to London and go to all the ton parties and buy new clothes, and after a suitable amount of time they’ll have a “fight” and “break up” and no one will be the wiser. (And if Freddy's rakish and scandalously handsome cousin Jack should become jealous of Kitty's apparent engagement and decide to do something about it WELL THEN) So the couple goes off to London, where Kitty immediately gets herself involved in the scandalous marriage plots of two separate couples, all while trying to keep a lid on her own marriage plot.
This baby’s got everything, in other words. Rakes, social climbers, fake engagements, fortune hunters, elopements – god, we even get that scene where a character is teaching someone how to dance and they have a Moment (“characters unexpectedly falling in love after being forced to dance together for some reason” is my personal favorite in the FanFic Trope grab bag). The only thing that’s missing is a scene where Freddy and Kitty have to make out or share a bed to prove that their engagement’s genuine, since the 18th century setting doesn't allow for such nonsese. Really, the only thing I didn't like was that there was never any real payoff to Kitty being adopted - I was sure that we were going to learn something scandalous about her mother's identity, but she remains merely French, and therefore scandalous enough.
All in all, this book was a fun, fluffy all-around good time, where even the villains are funny and charming. Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, and we need that from our books every now and then. ...more
I am happy to report that, in short, Cotillion is a goddamn bonbon of a book – clever, cute, and so light and carefree it practically bounces. As an added bonus, the plot is basically a checklist of all your favorite fanfiction tropes: our heroine is Kitty Charing, who was adopted at a young age by a wealthy but miserly Englishman. He declares that Kitty will inherit his entire fortune, but only if she marries one of his great-nephews (he very generously leaves the choice up to Kitty). Kitty hatches a plan - she approaches the most sympathetic of the nephews, a delightful fop named Freddy, and presents her proposal. She and Freddy will pretend to get engaged so Kitty has an excuse to go to London and go to all the ton parties and buy new clothes, and after a suitable amount of time they’ll have a “fight” and “break up” and no one will be the wiser. (And if Freddy's rakish and scandalously handsome cousin Jack should become jealous of Kitty's apparent engagement and decide to do something about it WELL THEN) So the couple goes off to London, where Kitty immediately gets herself involved in the scandalous marriage plots of two separate couples, all while trying to keep a lid on her own marriage plot.
This baby’s got everything, in other words. Rakes, social climbers, fake engagements, fortune hunters, elopements – god, we even get that scene where a character is teaching someone how to dance and they have a Moment (“characters unexpectedly falling in love after being forced to dance together for some reason” is my personal favorite in the FanFic Trope grab bag). The only thing that’s missing is a scene where Freddy and Kitty have to make out or share a bed to prove that their engagement’s genuine, since the 18th century setting doesn't allow for such nonsese. Really, the only thing I didn't like was that there was never any real payoff to Kitty being adopted - I was sure that we were going to learn something scandalous about her mother's identity, but she remains merely French, and therefore scandalous enough.
All in all, this book was a fun, fluffy all-around good time, where even the villains are funny and charming. Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, and we need that from our books every now and then. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Dec 2018
Jan 10, 2019
Paperback
4.25
570,630
Jul 1988
2002
really liked it
There’s a very good reason that this is the Hannibal Lecter novel that put Thomas Harris on the map. Red Dragon was good. The Silence of the Lambs is
There’s a very good reason that this is the Hannibal Lecter novel that put Thomas Harris on the map. Red Dragon was good. The Silence of the Lambs is better. Harris takes everything he did well in the previous novel and fine-tunes it – we have a better killer, a more dramatic race against time, a more compelling protagonist, and of course, much more time with dear Dr. Lecter, who finally gets to take center stage after being little more than a cameo in Red Dragon. Unlike Francis Dolarhryde, Thomas Harris is not particularly concerned with the tragic backstory of Buffalo Bill, or interested in exploring his motivations. We get satisfying answers to both of those questions, of course, but this is not a book about Buffalo Bill. This is a story about Clarice Starling, and the dangerous quasi-partnership she cultivates with a serial killer in order to catch another serial killer.
It’s also, brilliantly, a revealing look at how much of a daily struggle it is to be a woman in a male-dominated field. There’s a great moment early in the movie adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs where Starling gets into an elevator filled with her fellow FBI trainees, and we see Jodie Foster in a tight space surrounded by men who are all at least six inches taller than her. It’s a brief shot, and isn’t over-emphasized, but it tells us everything we need to know about what Starling’s daily routine is like. And the best part is that we don’t even get any obvious scenes of outright gender discrimination – just constant little things, in every single interaction Starling has with other characters. (Starling can’t escape even when she’s performing everyday, unexciting tasks – an errand to the Smithsonian ends with one of the scientists asking her out, and what’s especially funny is that Starling isn’t even mad that this guy couldn’t see her as an FBI agent first and a woman second, she’s just annoyed that he asked her out and not his cuter coworker)
I’ll have to track down Hannibal soon, because I definitely need more Clarice Starling in my life.
“We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the café curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we’re frightened in the face of Doom. Starling was old enough to know that; she didn’t let the room affect her.
Starling walked up and down. She gestured to the air. ‘Hold on, girl,’ she said aloud. She said it to Catherine Martin and she said it to herself. ‘We’re better than this room. We’re better than this fucking place,’ she said aloud. ‘We’re better than wherever he’s got you. Help me. Help me. Help me.’ She thought for an instant of her late parents. She wondered if they would be ashamed of her now – just that question, not its pertinence, no qualifications – the way we always ask it. The answer was no, they would not be ashamed of her.
She washed her face and went out into the hall.” ...more
It’s also, brilliantly, a revealing look at how much of a daily struggle it is to be a woman in a male-dominated field. There’s a great moment early in the movie adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs where Starling gets into an elevator filled with her fellow FBI trainees, and we see Jodie Foster in a tight space surrounded by men who are all at least six inches taller than her. It’s a brief shot, and isn’t over-emphasized, but it tells us everything we need to know about what Starling’s daily routine is like. And the best part is that we don’t even get any obvious scenes of outright gender discrimination – just constant little things, in every single interaction Starling has with other characters. (Starling can’t escape even when she’s performing everyday, unexciting tasks – an errand to the Smithsonian ends with one of the scientists asking her out, and what’s especially funny is that Starling isn’t even mad that this guy couldn’t see her as an FBI agent first and a woman second, she’s just annoyed that he asked her out and not his cuter coworker)
I’ll have to track down Hannibal soon, because I definitely need more Clarice Starling in my life.
“We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the café curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we’re frightened in the face of Doom. Starling was old enough to know that; she didn’t let the room affect her.
Starling walked up and down. She gestured to the air. ‘Hold on, girl,’ she said aloud. She said it to Catherine Martin and she said it to herself. ‘We’re better than this room. We’re better than this fucking place,’ she said aloud. ‘We’re better than wherever he’s got you. Help me. Help me. Help me.’ She thought for an instant of her late parents. She wondered if they would be ashamed of her now – just that question, not its pertinence, no qualifications – the way we always ask it. The answer was no, they would not be ashamed of her.
She washed her face and went out into the hall.” ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Dec 2018
Jan 04, 2019
Paperback
0670919985
9780670919987
0670919985
3.76
242,511
Oct 27, 2016
Oct 27, 2017
really liked it
“So I’m giving you the crib sheet right now. Maybe you’ll understand it and maybe you won’t. Your whole question is the mistake. Who’s the serpent and
“So I’m giving you the crib sheet right now. Maybe you’ll understand it and maybe you won’t. Your whole question is the mistake. Who’s the serpent and who’s the Holy Mother? Who’s bad and who’s good? Who persuaded the other one to eat the apple? Who has the power and who’s powerless? All of these questions are the wrong question.”
Like all great science fiction, Naomi Alderman’s story looks at the current state of the world, makes one small advancement, and then follows that to its logical conclusion. In this case, the advancement is at once very simple and very complicated: one day, for no clear reason, teenage girls all over the world wake up with the ability to create electricity with their hands. The Power asks one simple question – what would happen if women had nothing to be afraid of? – and examines how far the effects of this change would reach.
Honestly, I don’t want to get into any more detail than that, because part of the fun of reading this book is realizing, slowly and over the course of several hundred pages, exactly what Alderman is doing with this story. Apparently Alderman is a sort of protégée of Margaret Atwood, and it shows in the world building, the careful consideration of all the possible ripple effects of an event, and the way the story is more speculative fiction than science fiction.
“The shape of power is always the same: it is infinite, it is complex, it is forever branching. While it’s alive it’s like a tree, it is growing; while it contains itself, it is a multitude. Its directions are unpredictable; it obeys its own laws. No one can observe the acorn and extrapolate each vein in each leaf of the oak crown. The closer you look, the more various it becomes. However complex you think it is, it is more complex than that. Like the rivers to the ocean, like the lightning strike, it is obscene and uncontained.
A human being is made not by own our will but by that same organic, inconceivable, unpredictable, uncontrollable process that drives the unfurling leaves in season and the tiny twigs to bud and the roots to spread in tangled complications.
Even a stone is not the same as any other stone.
There is no shape to anything except the shape it has.
Every name we give ourselves is wrong.
Our dreams are more true than our waking.”
...more
Like all great science fiction, Naomi Alderman’s story looks at the current state of the world, makes one small advancement, and then follows that to its logical conclusion. In this case, the advancement is at once very simple and very complicated: one day, for no clear reason, teenage girls all over the world wake up with the ability to create electricity with their hands. The Power asks one simple question – what would happen if women had nothing to be afraid of? – and examines how far the effects of this change would reach.
Honestly, I don’t want to get into any more detail than that, because part of the fun of reading this book is realizing, slowly and over the course of several hundred pages, exactly what Alderman is doing with this story. Apparently Alderman is a sort of protégée of Margaret Atwood, and it shows in the world building, the careful consideration of all the possible ripple effects of an event, and the way the story is more speculative fiction than science fiction.
“The shape of power is always the same: it is infinite, it is complex, it is forever branching. While it’s alive it’s like a tree, it is growing; while it contains itself, it is a multitude. Its directions are unpredictable; it obeys its own laws. No one can observe the acorn and extrapolate each vein in each leaf of the oak crown. The closer you look, the more various it becomes. However complex you think it is, it is more complex than that. Like the rivers to the ocean, like the lightning strike, it is obscene and uncontained.
A human being is made not by own our will but by that same organic, inconceivable, unpredictable, uncontrollable process that drives the unfurling leaves in season and the tiny twigs to bud and the roots to spread in tangled complications.
Even a stone is not the same as any other stone.
There is no shape to anything except the shape it has.
Every name we give ourselves is wrong.
Our dreams are more true than our waking.”
...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Nov 2017
Dec 19, 2018
Hardcover
074324754X
9780743247542
074324754X
4.32
1,294,653
Mar 01, 2005
Jan 17, 2006
it was ok
I really don't know how I'm supposed to defend my dislike of this book? I mean, what kind of asshole says, "Man, this book about a woman's miserable c
I really don't know how I'm supposed to defend my dislike of this book? I mean, what kind of asshole says, "Man, this book about a woman's miserable childhood really bummed me out, two stars"?
But for real - this book about a woman's miserable childhood really bummed me out. Like, if you read Angela's Ashes and thought it just needed more sexual assault of the pre-pubescent protagonist, then The Glass Castle is for you! There's a bit early on where the dad takes his kids to the zoo and I sure hope you enjoy it, because that's pretty much the only truly happy interaction Jeannette Walls has with her parents for the rest of the book.
And it's totally unfair of me to complain about that. Jeannette Walls owes me nothing, and she definitely isn't obligated to gloss over the uglier aspects of her (I cannot emphasize this enough) truly awful childhood just to make readers more comfortable. So honestly, it's not even the fact that this book is XXX-rated Misery Porn that bothers me. What I really don't like about this memoir is that Walls, even as she recounts stories where she and her siblings were being routinely abused by her parents, seems unwilling to look this ugliness fully in the face, and condemn her parents for the way they treated her and her siblings. She ends (no spoilers, relax) on a note of, not quite forgiveness, but acceptance of the fact that her parents were just being true to themselves, and did the best they could.
And that's somehow the most depressing thing about the book. The Glass Castle seems to frequently market itself as a story of an unconventional childhood that was tough, sure, but full of love and adventure. (Probably the movie adaptation, which made major changes in order to make the story more heartwarming, is mostly responsible for this) But in reality, The Glass Castle is just the story of an abusive childhood, written by a woman who maybe doesn't realize how truly toxic her parents really are.
Anyway. If starving kids, alcoholic fathers, dangerously narcissistic mothers, and sexual assault makes up your preferred memoir cocktail, enjoy. ...more
But for real - this book about a woman's miserable childhood really bummed me out. Like, if you read Angela's Ashes and thought it just needed more sexual assault of the pre-pubescent protagonist, then The Glass Castle is for you! There's a bit early on where the dad takes his kids to the zoo and I sure hope you enjoy it, because that's pretty much the only truly happy interaction Jeannette Walls has with her parents for the rest of the book.
And it's totally unfair of me to complain about that. Jeannette Walls owes me nothing, and she definitely isn't obligated to gloss over the uglier aspects of her (I cannot emphasize this enough) truly awful childhood just to make readers more comfortable. So honestly, it's not even the fact that this book is XXX-rated Misery Porn that bothers me. What I really don't like about this memoir is that Walls, even as she recounts stories where she and her siblings were being routinely abused by her parents, seems unwilling to look this ugliness fully in the face, and condemn her parents for the way they treated her and her siblings. She ends (no spoilers, relax) on a note of, not quite forgiveness, but acceptance of the fact that her parents were just being true to themselves, and did the best they could.
And that's somehow the most depressing thing about the book. The Glass Castle seems to frequently market itself as a story of an unconventional childhood that was tough, sure, but full of love and adventure. (Probably the movie adaptation, which made major changes in order to make the story more heartwarming, is mostly responsible for this) But in reality, The Glass Castle is just the story of an abusive childhood, written by a woman who maybe doesn't realize how truly toxic her parents really are.
Anyway. If starving kids, alcoholic fathers, dangerously narcissistic mothers, and sexual assault makes up your preferred memoir cocktail, enjoy. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Dec 13, 2018
Jan 14, 2019
Dec 13, 2018
Paperback
014240120X
9780142401200
014240120X
4.00
224,016
Jun 01, 1978
Apr 12, 2004
it was ok
I checked out this audiobook on a whim when I saw that it was available, because it seemed like a quick, fun nostalgia read. I remember being assigned
I checked out this audiobook on a whim when I saw that it was available, because it seemed like a quick, fun nostalgia read. I remember being assigned to read this book in fifth grade or sixth grade, and had fond memories of it as a brief, fun little puzzle of a story.
The Westing Game begins when sixteen people are called to the abandoned Westing mansion to hear the will of Sam Westing, recently deceased millionaire industrialist. In his will, Westing proposes a game: the sixteen people (his “heirs”) will be divided into teams of two and given a handful of clues, which they must use to figure out who murdered Westing. The team that wins inherits his entire fortune.
Honestly, on re-reading this, I realize that it’s basically Saw for the elementary school set: rich eccentric dude brings a group of strangers together and proceeds to psychologically torture them by a) teasing them with the chance to win an outrageous fortune and b) convincing them that someone in their group is a murderer. Plus there’s puns and puzzles based on patriotic songs!
In short, this has not aged well. Maybe people were more open to the idea of a rich guy fucking with people’s lives for shits and giggles back when the book was originally published in 1979, but reading The Westing Game in the year of our lord 2018 was a significantly different experience for me. Watching all of these people go through what was basically an elaborate parlor game to appease the whims of a rich dead asshole wasn’t very fun, at all, and it was a genuine disappointment for me when at the end (view spoiler)[it turns out that not only was Westing alive the entire time, none of the characters ever take him to task for how thoroughly he disrupted their lives for his own amusement (hide spoiler)].
And it’s not just the general plot that left a bad taste in my mouth – there are a lot of little things that I definitely didn’t realize were problematic when I read the book as a kid. A child with mental disabilities is described by a character as “a mongoloid child”; a Chinese woman’s inner thoughts are written in broken English; and the one black character wears traditional African clothing once, but those are all the details about it we get, since no country or other information about her clothes are provided, aside from a character calling her outfit “ethnic” and the narration describing her as looking like “an African princess.” Oof. Oh, and since one of the characters has Down’s Syndrome, listening to the audiobook meant having to listen to a non-disabled voice actor do an impression of a person with a speech impediment, which…was not fun for me. I mean, I don’t know how else they were supposed to do it, but that doesn’t make it any easier to listen to. ...more
The Westing Game begins when sixteen people are called to the abandoned Westing mansion to hear the will of Sam Westing, recently deceased millionaire industrialist. In his will, Westing proposes a game: the sixteen people (his “heirs”) will be divided into teams of two and given a handful of clues, which they must use to figure out who murdered Westing. The team that wins inherits his entire fortune.
Honestly, on re-reading this, I realize that it’s basically Saw for the elementary school set: rich eccentric dude brings a group of strangers together and proceeds to psychologically torture them by a) teasing them with the chance to win an outrageous fortune and b) convincing them that someone in their group is a murderer. Plus there’s puns and puzzles based on patriotic songs!
In short, this has not aged well. Maybe people were more open to the idea of a rich guy fucking with people’s lives for shits and giggles back when the book was originally published in 1979, but reading The Westing Game in the year of our lord 2018 was a significantly different experience for me. Watching all of these people go through what was basically an elaborate parlor game to appease the whims of a rich dead asshole wasn’t very fun, at all, and it was a genuine disappointment for me when at the end (view spoiler)[it turns out that not only was Westing alive the entire time, none of the characters ever take him to task for how thoroughly he disrupted their lives for his own amusement (hide spoiler)].
And it’s not just the general plot that left a bad taste in my mouth – there are a lot of little things that I definitely didn’t realize were problematic when I read the book as a kid. A child with mental disabilities is described by a character as “a mongoloid child”; a Chinese woman’s inner thoughts are written in broken English; and the one black character wears traditional African clothing once, but those are all the details about it we get, since no country or other information about her clothes are provided, aside from a character calling her outfit “ethnic” and the narration describing her as looking like “an African princess.” Oof. Oh, and since one of the characters has Down’s Syndrome, listening to the audiobook meant having to listen to a non-disabled voice actor do an impression of a person with a speech impediment, which…was not fun for me. I mean, I don’t know how else they were supposed to do it, but that doesn’t make it any easier to listen to. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Nov 2018
Dec 11, 2018
Paperback
4.07
353,697
Oct 1981
May 22, 2000
liked it
I do not care about serial killers.
Don’t get me wrong, I love true crime shit – like everybody else in the world, I was deeply obsessed with Serial f I do not care about serial killers.
Don’t get me wrong, I love true crime shit – like everybody else in the world, I was deeply obsessed with Serial for about a month and then forgot about it, and I briefly got really into the JonBenet Ramsey case – but serial killers themselves are deeply uninteresting to me. I am not one of those people who’s fascinated by the psychology of a serial killer, mainly because the answer is usually pretty boring: nine times out of ten, the answer to “but why did this guy kidnap/rape/dismember/cannibalize all those people” is “because he’s a violent misogynist who hates his mother.” Yawn. Also I think a lot of true crime stuff gets way too wrapped up in the serial killer and forgets about the victims, who become footnotes in the story of their own deaths, but I digress.
That being said, I am very interested in the stories of the people who hunt serial killers, and how they catch them. So I actually enjoyed The Red Dragon very much, because it’s just as much a story of people trying to catch a killer, as it is a story about a killer. The book (actually published before Silence of the Lambs, which I didn’t realize until I compared the publication dates) follows the work of FBI investigator Will Graham as he and his team try to catch the killer known first as the Tooth Fairy, who later gets the nickname the Red Dragon. At the same time, we see the killer going about his work selecting victims and carrying out their murders. The tension comes from watching the two men circle each other, and not knowing who’s going to catch who first.
I’ll admit that reading this was kind of a weird experience for me – like I said, I didn’t realize that this book came out before Silence of the Lambs, and was actually the introduction of Hannibal Lector. So knowing that, it’s honestly super weird that he’s basically a background character, showing up two or three times so Will Graham can bounce information off him, and then disappearing from the narrative. It’s also weird because even though this is the first time Lector has appeared in print, it’s not the first time he and Graham have met – they have this long history that the reader only gets hints about, but Thomas Harris does such a good job of establishing this history and hinting at the larger story that I was halfway convinced there was some previously-published book that I needed to read first.
It was also weird to read this simply because my first introduction to Will Graham and most of the other characters in this book was the show Hannibal. It was actually pretty fun to read the book and see how much the show had kept, and how much it had changed. (Credit to the Hannibal writers for gender-bending Alan Bloom and Freddie Lounds; and race-bending Jack Crawford, Beverly Katz, and Reba McClane. You’re doing good work, guys. Also thanks for inserting sexual tension between Graham and Lector and turning it all the way to eleven. Seriously guys, Hannibal was such a good, weird show)
...more
Don’t get me wrong, I love true crime shit – like everybody else in the world, I was deeply obsessed with Serial f I do not care about serial killers.
Don’t get me wrong, I love true crime shit – like everybody else in the world, I was deeply obsessed with Serial for about a month and then forgot about it, and I briefly got really into the JonBenet Ramsey case – but serial killers themselves are deeply uninteresting to me. I am not one of those people who’s fascinated by the psychology of a serial killer, mainly because the answer is usually pretty boring: nine times out of ten, the answer to “but why did this guy kidnap/rape/dismember/cannibalize all those people” is “because he’s a violent misogynist who hates his mother.” Yawn. Also I think a lot of true crime stuff gets way too wrapped up in the serial killer and forgets about the victims, who become footnotes in the story of their own deaths, but I digress.
That being said, I am very interested in the stories of the people who hunt serial killers, and how they catch them. So I actually enjoyed The Red Dragon very much, because it’s just as much a story of people trying to catch a killer, as it is a story about a killer. The book (actually published before Silence of the Lambs, which I didn’t realize until I compared the publication dates) follows the work of FBI investigator Will Graham as he and his team try to catch the killer known first as the Tooth Fairy, who later gets the nickname the Red Dragon. At the same time, we see the killer going about his work selecting victims and carrying out their murders. The tension comes from watching the two men circle each other, and not knowing who’s going to catch who first.
I’ll admit that reading this was kind of a weird experience for me – like I said, I didn’t realize that this book came out before Silence of the Lambs, and was actually the introduction of Hannibal Lector. So knowing that, it’s honestly super weird that he’s basically a background character, showing up two or three times so Will Graham can bounce information off him, and then disappearing from the narrative. It’s also weird because even though this is the first time Lector has appeared in print, it’s not the first time he and Graham have met – they have this long history that the reader only gets hints about, but Thomas Harris does such a good job of establishing this history and hinting at the larger story that I was halfway convinced there was some previously-published book that I needed to read first.
It was also weird to read this simply because my first introduction to Will Graham and most of the other characters in this book was the show Hannibal. It was actually pretty fun to read the book and see how much the show had kept, and how much it had changed. (Credit to the Hannibal writers for gender-bending Alan Bloom and Freddie Lounds; and race-bending Jack Crawford, Beverly Katz, and Reba McClane. You’re doing good work, guys. Also thanks for inserting sexual tension between Graham and Lector and turning it all the way to eleven. Seriously guys, Hannibal was such a good, weird show)
...more
Notes are private!
1
Nov 2018
not set
Dec 05, 2018
Hardcover