Christine

This started out strong, but as the mystery receded and the main characters' swaggering smugness came to the fore, I lost interest. The female characters are atrocious, the setting is too fluid and insubstantial, and there is hardly any characterization, aside from every key character being a violent egomaniac. As it progresses, the battle descriptions become the focus of the story, and they are extremely tiresome.

There are some interesting ideas, such as the narrator having amnesia and the magical playing cards. It's just not nearly enough to sustain my interest for a whole novel.

This was compelling enough that I let the kids stay up late so I could read the end, but lacking enough that I was ultimately a bit disappointed.

Anyone who likes Holmes and doesn't mind some tinkering with him should check it out. I think the main character is a little too much a Mary Sue, and could have used a few more realistic flaws in place of her Tragic Backstory, but just when I would think, “Mary is just too insufferable,” the author would make her look a bit foolish or awkward, and she'd become more sympathetic.

I had figured out the basics of whodunnit pretty early, and I'm not a great hand at that sort of thing, but the ride was pretty absorbing regardless. I appreciate the dual challenge of writing Holmes anew, while creating a character who's his match without being off-putting. In the end, I think Conan Doyle made the right choice to narrate through the approachable Watson, but Mary is fun in her own way too.

Five stars for crafting intense interest and presence with a character who never appears. Also, I think if I hadn't seen the movie this would have been a compelling page-turner.

But the narrator wears on one after a while, and I felt like this would have been better if shorter.

Actually, I would have been more interested if I'd read the background information on the author before reading the novel. More analysis and reflection on my part about her polar depiction of What a Woman Should Be would have lent a lot of texture to the read.

Imagine a guy reads [b:The Haunting of Hill House 89717 The Haunting of Hill House Shirley Jackson https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327871336s/89717.jpg 3627] and thinks, “Damn, that was great - I'd love to write my own novel about a creepy house!” Only he's also REALLY sick and tired of his wife spending every weekend antiquing instead of making him a sandwich. And he read some Lovecraft once but he has no idea how to evoke cosmic horror or handle a monster reveal (the key, Rob, is if you have no idea how to finish, at least have a cleansing bolt of lightning and make the last line italic!) Then the novel gets published, Stephen King reads it, and he makes a decent story out of the idea.TL;DR - just go read [b:The Haunting of Hill House 89717 The Haunting of Hill House Shirley Jackson https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327871336s/89717.jpg 3627] and [b:The Shining 11588 The Shining (The Shining, #1) Stephen King https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1353277730s/11588.jpg 849585]This gets more than one star due to an effectively creepy door, and a vividly disturbing moment in the pool that very effectively blurs the line between a realistic parenting lapse (dad takes a joke so far it becomes abusive) and the product of Evil Influences.Upshot - 2/5; distinct lack of burning or sympathetic characters, would not slog through again

I couldn't put it down! Creepy and gothic, all about madness, deception, and unreliable perceptions and tales. Yet there's a core of love and solidarity too. In any case, I needed to find out what would happen next. And I was pleased with the ending - the folkloric aspect was really satisfying.

My original rating for this was 3 stars, and I pretty much stand by that. In my mind, it breaks down something like this:Establishment of creepy house, which rightly influenced so much subsequent fiction: 5 starsAmbiguity and underlying social/emotional forces worthy of [b:The Turn of the Screw 12948 The Turn of the Screw Henry James https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1443203592s/12948.jpg 990886]: 5 starsConstantly listening to Eleanor's neurotic thoughts and her telling herself incessantly that she's thinking something “concretely”: 2 starsLackluster banter among the characters: 2 stars*Obnoxiously out of place comic relief wife: 2 stars

I not only read this book - I'm in it! Well, the wallpaper my younger child ruined is. Cute and funny, if insubstantial. A good gift for a new parent or one trying to recover from catastrophic kid damage to their stuff.

Fun book. Sometimes a story would end just as I was getting into it (though some get picked up again later), but I suppose that also keeps the book from bogging down at all. As evidenced in [b:The Zombie Survival Guide 535441 The Zombie Survival Guide Complete Protection From the Living Dead Max Brooks http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1200466176s/535441.jpg 818], Brooks has thought this stuff out waaaaay too much for a normal person, but that means that his stories have a lot of detail and ring true. Seriously, I still worry sometimes about whether North Korea is crawling with subterranean zombies. :)

This starts out great, with all the sly wit I've come to expect from Scalzi. But I feel like the pacing is poor, and the story bogs down terribly when it gets to extended reflections on bioethics. Not only does this meditation last too long and clash with the tone of the first part of the book, but it feels rather contrived to deliver the outcome Scalzi wants so the plot can wrap up well, rather than an honest philosophical discussion.

Still, this is well worth reading and is overall very charming and fun.

This was lovely and funny. I feel so much affection for Cassandra - she's at her best when she's sharply witty in her observations, and I can forgive her boring wallow in teenage romantic self-pity, since it doesn't last too terribly long, and only occurs after I've gotten to know her well. It also winds up in a very artful way, in my opinion.This book reminds me of two other books in very different ways.First, this seems like an inside-out version of [b:We Have Always Lived in the Castle 89724 We Have Always Lived in the Castle Shirley Jackson https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1415357189s/89724.jpg 847007] - first-person narration by a teenage girl we can't always trust to be accurate or objective, telling about living with her sister in a Gothic pile and how a potential suitor entering the picture affects their relationship. Of course, this was published earlier, so Shirley Jackson's story would be the funhouse mirror version while this is the original. I can totally see Jackson reading this and saying to herself, “I could write a completely NFBSKed-up take on this story.”The second book it puts me in mind of is [b:Drama 13436373 Drama Raina Telgemeier https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1330157763s/13436373.jpg 18940474], because they both tell stories about romance that aren't “romances.” The relationships don't necessarily follow a predictable arc, and interactions can be frustrating, ambiguous, confusing, and uncertain. You know, like real life teenage romantic relationships! Cassandra's struggles with love are very true to life.Sometimes this suffers from extreme tonal shifts - most notably depictions of depression and guilt suddenly making way for extreme farce at one point. But overall it's just enjoyable to see the world through Cassandra's eyes and meet all the loving, comical, flawed people she knows.

A fascinating look at another culture and its radical changes, told by a protagonist with profound ties to the personal and political aspects of these changes. This was compulsively readable, and really gave me a new point of view.

Creepy and has great sense of place as well as character development for such a short story!

Philosophical reflections on the nature and power of stories.
A delightfully snarky jab at midichlorians.
Adventure! Intrigue! Violence!
A nested choose-your-own-adventure story, that returns back to philosophy and deep thoughts about the value of truth versus stories, and how blurry the line can be between them.
This was a ton of fun, and pulled me in considerably more than the previous book (which was no slouch itself). Highly recommended!

Hated the narrator and his wife within a few paragraphs and decided not to spend any more time with them.

This was an excellent spooky tale which successfully melded a poignant personal story with the wilderness-awe style of horror seen in classics like The Wendigo and The Willows. The journal narration is effective, and Paver goes beyond using it simply as a first-person view. Jack's uses his journal to buck himself up, ventilate stress, explore his thoughts, and disclose secrets he can't otherwise admit to himself.

I listened to the audio book, and Jeremy Northam does an amazing job. It was a pleasure to hear him evoke Jack's progression from a disillusioned, resentful clerk to adventurer, to someone who views himself as half-desperate and half-heroic, in extremely trying, terrifying circumstances.

In the words of Dr. Clayton Forrester, “Decidedly un-bold.”

I read this after being underwhelmed by the movie, and was duly underwhelmed by the source material. I feel like there really is something to this idea, but neither iteration captured it.

The art here was unusual enough to draw my interest, but ultimately I found it undermined the story by being too confusing.

Good idea, interesting art, but not realized in any medium to its full potential.

On re-read, this is less a mystery and more a fun, weird story. Knowing more (but certainly not all!) about what's going on adds a layer to the reading, which was gratifying.

Even though I wind up skimming the ins-and-outs of the code breaking, I really enjoyed watching A., Niamh, and Help navigate the spooky house, make parts of it their own, and pursue Ambrose's mysteries.

The conclusion offers enough closure, while also leaving enough questions and potential territory that I crave further stories (short stories would fit well) in this universe.

3.5 stars, really. There were times I laughed out loud, for sure. And I enjoyed learning more about a mythology I'm not very familiar with. I liked the story about Fenrir the a lot - partly because Neil Gaiman does a great voice for him. But at the same time, similar story elements recur constantly, and listening to this straight through became a little boring at times.

I feel like the best way to read this would be to read it aloud, a bit at a time, with a child. I guess it's not unexpected that myths would show to their best advantage when being told at bedtime as individual stories with a recognizable cast of characters.

This was really good, and greatly enhanced by the reading by Will Patton. This is such an effective thriller, I feel like recommending some Xanax along with it. As usual, King is so good at crafting the villain, it adds even more tension. Seeing things through Mr. Mercedes's eyes as well as Hodges (and occasionally from other points of view) creates both engagement and anxiety.

There were a couple times when Hodges drove me insane with his foolishness. I'd say the biggest hurdle with this story is accepting the decisions to keep the authorities uninvolved. It's an essential conceit to keep the story going, and all in all I can swallow it as the price of admission to a cat-and-mouse story between a mass murderer and a retired cop.

The other thing that can be hard to take is the graphically terrible things that happen. The story starts with such a nasty event, which is horrifying on its own, but also establishes real stakes for the rest of the tale. If THAT happened in chapter one, we understand that no one is safe (well, aside from the spoiler embedded in the book's subtitle I guess!)

In fact, if anyone is interested but a little wary, here are some high-level spoilers, including what happens with the dog: the dog is safe and sound; the concert full of tweens does not get blown up; however, some characters do die along the way

This is a very amusing book, especially for those who have read Three Men in A Boat. I think Jerome leaves Willis in the dust for outright belly laughs, but this book did have me smiling a lot.

Utterly compelling. I picked this up because people said it's nonfiction that reads like a novel, and that's pretty close to the mark. I needed to find out what happened next, and I was fully invested in the personal stories. At times I was astonished at developments, and throughout I kept wondering how I'd never heard about any of this.

I highly recommend reading this to learn about the Osage nation, their paradoxical luck (good and bad) at the hands of the U.S. government, and the investigation of what was happening to them. You can find it all from other sources, but Grann does an amazing job of storytelling, and extends the story with additional research that connects points left unexplored by the original case.

I grabbed this entirely out-of-season because I wanted a good audio book, and Bronson Pinchot does a lovely job bringing this to life.

This doesn't rate five stars for me because something about Bradbury's “good old days” schtick grates a little. It goes without saying that there are no female characters or people of color. But I'm pretty sure that accurately reflects Bradbury's subjective experience as a boy in 1920s Waukegan, Illinois, so I get it. Also, the gushing description of Pipkin as the apotheosis of boyhood came off a little strange to me.

But never mind all that - overall, this is a wonderfully evocative tale that artfully meshes the ambivalent nature of our harvest/death festivals with the weird zone between being a carefree child and learning hard grownup truths about mortality.

It can be deliciously Halloween-creepy - the old house, the enigmatic Moundshroud, the titular tree with its magical jack–o'–lanterns. But it is sometimes also seriously creepy, as the group travels through time witnessing stylized representations of historical festivals of the dead, and a ghostly Pipkin is repeatedly embodied and lost in them. (And let me tell you, Pinchot uses some well-placed whispers and wails to reinforce the shivers perfectly.) Then, thinly layered on top is a serious meditation about death and learning to live with the knowledge of death.

And throughout, Bradbury's poetic use of language supports the tone, while making each passage a pleasure of its own, apart from the advancement of the plot.

Definitely recommended for reading with your older kids and highly suitable as Halloween fare or for reading around a campfire!

This was insubstantial but fun. I think it'll be entertaining if you go into it with the right expectations.

There aren't deep layers of plot - if you think you know where a point is going, you're right. Not much is twisty or surprising. Some of the characters are endearing, while others are rather thinly drawn, and it suffers from Smurfette Principle. But it's a silly romp with some fun action scenes and goofy gags.

Sometimes it seems like Meyer is trying to worldbuild very carefully and follow those rules, but other times it feels like a significant question gets glossed over. Chief among them is “you discovered the source code of the universe and your ambitions are basically limited to avoiding arrest and LARPing?” But I had to get over that. That's the setup - don't fight the hypothetical, just go along for the ride.

My 15-year-old asked if I'd be interested in reading this to help her with a school paper. (Worry not, this means I equipped myself to ask her interesting questions rather than doing the work for her!)

I'm so glad I said yes. Conrad was clearly a gifted writer, and had progressive (for his time) views about colonialism. What struck me most was this: while he clearly abhors the casual cruelty of colonialism, he seems even more repelled by its stupid futility.

Conrad's narrator is as artful and barbed as Jane Austen's, adroitly conveying his contempt with a factual description:

When near the buildings I met a white man, in such an unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clear necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a big white hand. He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear.

or even by merely relating a name: International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs

My English Major soul thrills at the potential points of analysis and comparison. Kurtz is the hypnotic center of the tale, yet barely appears himself (Rebecca, anyone?). I'm actually quite curious about Kurtz and can't wait to check out Brando's portrayal in Apocalypse Now. And the story hammers at the thoughtless, egotistical presumptuousness of the white characters as they attempt to invade and improve a “dark” place, resulting merely in the suffering of both the natives and themselves (this review is being written about two weeks after missionary John Chau got himself killed by flouting laws meant to protect the Sentinelese people - it's not clear yet if he also managed to exterminate them with any of his foreign microbes).

Conrad wasn't the most evolved in his attitudes toward native Africans (or women), but his portrayal of the evils of colonialism is so well crafted and evocative, it continues to resonate in the present day.

What if a catastrophe threatened all humanity, but a truly good, smart, decent leader happened to come to power and listened to the most knowledgeable scientists to try to deal with it? Sounds almost cozy, doesn't it?

Don't worry, there are plenty of logistical challenges, as well as scheming power brokers who have to officially kowtow to the Emperox, but who hold enough power to require careful diplomacy. Intrigue and backstabbing and mysteries abound.

I'd call this 3.5 stars, rounded up. I really liked the opening vignette, the characters are great, and the mysteries and challenges are diverting enough. But honestly, I'm mostly going to read the next one to watch Kiva Lagos fuck with people who try to put one over on her.

That really highlights the one drawback to the story - the heroes are nice and good - and kind of bland. Kiva is indisputably amoral and reprehensible, and so, so fun to read about. I want to see more of her, more space mutineers and pirates, more of Marce's so-much-more-capable sister, and a little less navel-gazing and unsureness from Cardenia.