One of this year’s top new vampire entries. It’s an odd book, long, and broken into three parts, but good. The middle part was beyond great, making the whole book worth it on that basis alone.
This is a wretched example of everything that is wrong with YA paranormal today.
Told in first person present tense this is the story of a girl who awakes from a mysterious accident with almost no memory. She doesn’t know what to make of what her “parents” tell her and the videos and images of a life she doesn’t remember.
Here I analyze the differences and relative merits of the book and both Swedish and American film productions for this property. The story is a unique take on vampire lore and essentially well executed in all three variants.
This is a the first adult novel I’ve read by Blume. It’s longer than her YA fare, but it still shows the same skill at painting fascinating characters. Summer Sisters is the tale of a girl, Vix, who joins her “wild friend,” Caitlen, for a whole summer on Martha’s vineyard (in 1977) and ends up with this surrogate family every year after.
I’m determined to figure out how to write normal life scenes this engaging. It almost seems like Judy Blume could have the characters do anything and make it a fascinating read. Tiger Eyes could have been like an after school special. In fact, it probably was made into one. There’s no sex, no violence (other than the retroactively occurring murder), but there is a lot of excellent dialog.
Everyone should read this. Okay. I admit I read a ton of Judy Blume back in Elementary School, but it’s been a long time. I found this because I was trying to find out how edgy YA books really get, particularly with regard to sex. Incredibly, a quick googling seems to indicate that 1975’s Forever is still about as much sex as YA gets.
This novel is about a woman who’s kidnapped, held for a year, and repeatedly raped, by a creep she can only call “the Freak.” This action is depressing, but pretty cool, but it’s mixed with a lot of “getting over it” nonsense involving her shrink. Call me a guy but…
The third person present gives this novel a breezy literary quality — I’m not sure of this, but I have to assume Updike was a fairly early proponent of this tense/pov in fiction. As usual his sketch-like descriptions and wry humor engaged. But I can’t say that I liked the protagonist, he’s a bit of a…
This is simply put: an amazing single volume history of World War I, its causes, and course of events (but not the post-treaty fallout).
This is the latest in the world’s longest running Fantasy series, The Wheel of Time, also known to us long time fans as The Wheel of Tedium. Sure the first five or so volumes were amazing, but now at twelve, plus a prequel, and with each clocking in at around 400,000 words it’s getting a bit… long.
This 400,000 word hunk of “light” reading is by Brandon Sanderson, a relatively young fantasy author who is finishing the late Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, and this is the first volume of a new massive epic fantasy of his own. Surprisingly, despite its tome-like weight, it was a fast read.
Lately I’ve been trying to read a ton of novels in order to improve my writing. I’ve always read a lot, but at the moment, I’m targeting one a day. I’m hitting a bewildering assortment of genres and styles, but of course,…