Despite a significant cheese factor, and a first season that suffers from being overly episodic, the show is absolutely brilliant. If you aren’t a fan you probably think, “Buffy has these weird obsessive fans, but that kind of thing isn’t for me.” It is.
I’ve had a funny relationship with TV as a storytelling medium. During the 80’s and much of the 90’s I used to mock it as generally inferior and for numbskulls. But let it be said that I watch TV for…
One wouldn’t have thought it would be possible to capture this novel on film but they did. The same unrelenting hopelessness. Grim everythingness. The terrifying fear of been eaten by cannibals or stepping on a rusty nail and dying of gangrene in a dank muddy ditch. Yep, it’s all there.
I read the book long before the movie came out. There was a lot of buzz about it already and generally, things that are really popular have a kernel of quality about them, and I love vampires and teen heroines. Hmmm. I remain somewhat mystified…
This book lurks in an ill-defined cross-genre like my own novel: Supernatural thriller with realistic style and magic. In fact, in this book it’s not even 100% clear that the magic is intended to have actually happened — but I like to think it did.
This is a vaguely Harry Potter-ish tale of a fifteen-year-old witch who ends up in magical reform school. It was surprisingly decent. Not great, not super innovative, but the first person voice was very enjoyable.
Since I enjoyed Old Man’s War so much I jumped right in and pounded this out. I might have liked it even better. The characters are a tad less likable than the first book, but there is more plot, and more aliens — remember I like aliens.
I don’t read too many Thrillers without a Horror/Sci-fi/Fantasy/Supernatural element, but this is a roller coaster ride I can only describe as Fletch meets James Bond meets The Big Sleep.
This throwback Science Fiction “classic” borrows heavily from classics like Starship Troopers and Forever War, but who cares. It’s great.
One of the weird and disconcerting things about the revision stage of novel writing is the waiting. For me a revision often goes like this: 1. Receive a bunch of notes about problems or possible improvements for the book. 2….
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.
I work with a lot of documents. By this I mean things one reads, usually mostly text and often PDF’s or Word docs. I always did, but especially now that I’ve been writing. I have drafts of my books, drafts…
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…