Goodbye, July! My first full month of real summer in the Midwest. What I loved: fireflies, thunder and rain storms that last for hours. What is not so much: humidity that flattens me but makes my hair explode. And flies. So many flies! Why? The natural world aside, even with the increasing crazy that is America, July was an outstanding reading month. I finished 15 ... Read More...
Thrilling Reading: Mini-Reviews
Sometimes the mood strikes for thrilling reading. It’s not a genre I look to often, but in the beginning of the year it felt like the only kind of reading that satisfied me. Maybe because if it’s done right it can be great reading without being great? I’m not sure, but I tore through these two novels even when a part of my brain was thinking ‘Really?’. They piled unreliable ... Read More...
Broken Monsters
Lauren Beukes covered creepy in her debut The Shining Girls but it doesn't compare to just how mess-with-your-mind she gets in her latest, Broken Monsters. As if Detroit hasn't taken enough hits in the last decade it is now the setting for this scary tale of an amorphous monster creating gruesome art out of mixed human and animal body parts...taken from living subjects. ... Read More...
Dominion: A Novel
What-if books can go terribly wrong. They require a great deal of thought, generally because they are written about a time when a change in events would bring a massive change to history. In the novel Dominion, C.J. Sansom writes about Great Britain in the 1950s if it had not declared war on Germany but had held to Prime Minister Chamberlain’s desire for appeasement. The novel ... Read More...
The Shining Girls
There was a lot of buzz at Book Expo America about Lauren Beukes’s new novel, The Shining Girls, and for good reason. The most often heard synopsis I heard was “Time Traveler’s Wife meets Silence of the Lambs”. If you’re squeamish that may be all you need to know but if you can handle a serial killer who disembowels his victims, Beukes creates a creepy but compelling ... Read More...
