3.5 Stars. I have to admit that I’m one of those who have never heard of Humboldt; or, if he was ever mentioned in my classes, I’ve completely forgotten him. And that’s a shame because the man was so right about so very many things. He was brilliant and brought together many scientific disciplines in his theories in a time when scientists […]
3 Stars. I listened to this on audio, narrated by Ana Clements, and it just never grabbed my attention. I don’t have any major complaints or praise for either the story or the narrator, I just found it easy to tune the whole thing out–and did. The story rotates between three different narrators–the sisters, Hannah, Sarah, and […]
4 Stars. I love retold fairy tales but don’t often go back to the original sources. This was a nice refresher and even an introduction to some classic European tales. Some annotations and introductions were more helpful than others, as is always the case with these kinds of books. I would have been perfectly happy if any contributions […]
4 Stars. Oh my goodness. I think I need to be friends with T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon). The book starts out pretty light and fluffy. I laughed quite a bit. Even when things start getting serious, Kara and Simon face their fears with snarky humor. They’re my kind of people. So much so that I suddenly added up a whole bunch of […]
3 Stars. You can imagine my surprise when I listened to World War Z and discovered that I was… a little bored. There. I said it. The format is very similar to that used in Devolution, with a fictional interviewer speaking with survivors of a catastrophic event. I think the difference for me was that Devolution also included a […]
2.5 Stars. If I had read this in print, I think I would have rated it higher. Don’t get me wrong–I absolutely enjoyed Todd Haberkorn’s narration. But I don’t absorb detail as well when listening as I do in print so I need things to move along quickly without getting too complicated. And Andrew’s life is incredibly complicated […]
4 Stars. I generally like reading horror. I get spooked, I have fun, I move on. Demons and/or possession are too scary for me and I’m not happy with way over the top, incredibly gory violence, but otherwise I’m good. Hendrix delivers on the “spooking me” front. In the world of this book, six women survived their own real-life […]
3 Stars. I’m just not the reader for magical realism in literature. Oh, I do just fine with Sarah Addison Allen’s light touches of fantasy in otherwise contemporary novels. But a huge black beast of an unknown species adopting a family? Spirits wandering the house? Curses? Mermaid girls? All in dark historical fiction? I just […]
4.5 Stars. I got behind on the monthly prompts for the Diversity Reading Challenge in August so I was looking for a short book about mental health or addiction when I stumbled on this title. It seemed like the perfect choice to help me catch up. But what started as a book I was reading simply to check a box quickly became a […]
3 Stars. I’m not a fan of New York. To be fair, I’ve only spent one day there and that was the day after my best friend’s funeral; still, nothing about the city has ever appealed to me. That said, Time and Again didn’t work particularly well for me but I think those who love New York and its history will relish it. I don’t […]
4 Stars. I’m not a huge fan of Westerns but this book caught my eye when a friend of a friend mentioned it on Facebook. I really enjoyed it. There’s no denying the Western background but the themes of family, love, and loss are universal. I would actually recommend this for a book club. Jess’s mother died in childbirth and Jess […]