Teija
Madeline Miller is on my immediate purchase list now. This story is a masterpiece: emotionally resonant, romantic, tragic. The setting and characters leap off the page and move into your brain where they proceed to live rent free between opportunities to read. Just an incredibly moving, absolutely phenomenal story.
Tamsyn Muir is a bloody genius.
This book took some time to get going and it is TRIPPY until you figure out what's happening, but it is so worth it. All the characters are so good. This universe is so unique and so interesting. One in particular might be climbing my favorite fictional characters of all time list real fast. I'll wait for the next installment just to be sure. And I CAN'T WAIT.
Also, if you're into audiobooks at all, Moira Quirk does a phenomenal job with these. Highly recommend.
I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe at the chapter about the fight in the grocery store. That was definitely my favorite part. But the whole thing was great. I laughed (a LOT) and I cried (a LOT in one particular spot) and it was just a really good, quick read. Brosh has a heck of a way of talking about all kinds of things.
Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire) did such a phenomenal job with this book. I don't think I've read a book in YEARS that I have wanted this badly to be adapted into a high-quality movie. Everything about this was great. The creativity in the way she imagined the cryptids, the characters, the tech involved... I just loved every minute of this. Really glad I picked it up.
This was a fun read. There was nothing particularly mind-blowing about it, but the author did a really good job of presenting very difficult life situations in meaningful and realistic ways. I really felt for the characters (well, all but one) and thought that the author managed to artfully handle both the issues of the time periods the book covers as well as the concepts she decided to tackle (parenthood in a time of crisis, adultery, making a choice that hurts you because it's what's best for someone else). Overall I enjoyed this.
This is a fictional take on the race for the atomic bomb, inspired by the author's discovery of the story of Dr. Lise Meitner, long ignored in the historic record of the era. It was engaging and a pretty quick read. A solid historical fiction novel. I'm glad I took a break from my nonfiction binge for it.
Albright writes clearly and saliently on a topic she has seen grown and change through her lifetime in politics and political thought. She walks us through her definition of fascism and then takes us on a trip around the world to see it in action, from Duterte to Kim Jong Un, and then spends a lot of time discussing the developing political atmosphere in the United States. She laments the fall of the US as a world leader, the loss of trust in our government from other leaders around the world, the dubious position our democracy is currently occupying, and what it would take, in her eyes, to bring it back from the edge. She does not hold back on her opinions, but she is also very diplomatic. And she highlights exactly why she thinks America is in such a dubious position not based in our political leadership, but based in the way we interact with one another when it comes to politics. Contempt, she argues, is one of America's defining political attitudes, and that is largely what allows us to be so strongly divided by bad actors in our current political landscape. Well worth the read.
Every time we get a new October Daye book it's like getting invited to a family gathering... plus murder and mayhem. I love all these characters. I love this universe. I love how this particular installment of the series moved the plot along and also spent a ton of time with the Luidaeg, who has become my favorite character over the course of this series, and whose character has the deepest well of fascinating backstory stuff to explore. Love love love.
Rachel Maddow once again writes a thoughtful, compelling, and riveting work of exemplary scholarship. Well worth the time. It is absolutely wild just how much the oil and gas industry has to answer for, and just how little it generally seems to care about literally anything but its own profit margin.
I finished this almost two weeks ago and I'm still thinking about it so that's good. It also hurt my feelings.
I want to return to this series and finish it because I am SO intrigued by the politics and the worldbuilding and the characters but I'm taking a break because of said hurt feelings hahaha. It's great writing and plotting. I just have an ache.
This is a great follow up to The Black House, taking you further into life in the Outer Hebrides and with an interesting mystery. If you're intrigued by bog bodies or by stories with moody, atmospheric orphanages or by unreliable narrators or by hidden lifelong sinister origin stories, this is a good little package of mystery. Pro tip: get this in audiobook format. Mmm, Scottish accents.
This was a really well done follow up to Atwood's iconic The Handmaid's Tale. It was a very interesting return to Gilead through the eyes of multiple narrators, all of whom play key roles in one of the biggest questions of the first novel - the eventual fall of Gilead. It was truly interesting to see how it all played out.
It did feel a little bit like Atwood wrote this with the tv show in mind, but not in a bad way. The bulk of its action is set roughly 15 years after the point we are currently at in the show, so it's clear she wanted to tread in territory far enough removed from Offred's story to give that narrative time to breathe. But it was really satisfying to read this, set in the somewhat near future with characters that are becoming familiar. Though there are some major differences particularly regarding Aunt Lydia that the show would not be able to adapt wholesale, should they ever get to this point in the story. It will be interesting to see how much of this they eventually choose to incorporate into the show, if they even get to this book's timeline in their planned series.
This was... fine? It went quickly so I wasn't bothered. The story is fine. The writing is fine. The plot is boilerplate murder mystery, you could tell what was coming well before it came. It's meant for younger readers, clearly, so that didn't bother me so much. What kept me from loving it was the characters themselves and some choices the author made. The biggest of which is hinging some major plot stuff on a WILDLY inaccurate description of how Facebook even works. I feel like if you're going to describe young people and their social media you ought to familiarize yourself with how it works. Young people always know the ins and outs of the social media platforms they're using. Miranda clunkily fumbling through facebook like someone's elderly parent was just badly done.
The biggest issue for me though is that every Allerdon not named Miranda was flat and portrayed as anywhere between naive and actually stupid. Lander is described repeatedly as the perfect kid who can do no wrong and is so smart and then is actually depicted as a lovesick dingdong who switches her brain entirely off if a boy she thinks is cute walks by - enough to not speak up when she is literally dragged to jail and charged with murder? Really? And the Allerdon parents... just yikes. I get that part of this story is giving all these privileged cushy people a massive wake-up call, but goodness.
Just read Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary. This elementary, insipid writing is getting compared to those and I have to wonder if the people making the comparisons just read the cliff's notes for those. This is hamhanded and ineffective. The psychotherapist is laughably bad, the main character is clearly DEPRESSED AS HECK and in need of help that no one is getting her, and the people around her are alternatingly clever and stupid depending on if the protag needs to get away with something.
It's also getting compared to 50 Shades. THAT comparison at least might be apt, in terms of the quality of the writing. But I'm pretty sure people are making the comparison because the first 2/3 of this book is full of sex. They are not as repetitive as the protagonist's constant, ridiculous inner monologue, but you could argue a lot of them don't actually add anything to the book. Overall this is just a mess. I feel like it could've been whittled down to a novella pretty easily.