4 Stars. I miss Obama in the White House, I really do. Reading his thoughts and decision-making processes, his deliberations, his efforts to reflect many voices from many backgrounds in his policies–I just miss that stability and thoughtfulness. That said, I’ll start with my one complaint. At 703 pages (751 with the index), the […]
Full disclosure: I requested Mexican Gothic from the library back in September or October, which is practically the only time of year that I seek out horror and/or Gothic reads. When my turn finally came up in November, I wasn’t necessarily in the mood for this kind of book but I decided to read it anyway and see what all the […]
4 Stars. I grabbed this on a whim as I was prowling through my library’s shelves last week. Who can resist a bright and cheerful cover that also portrays monsters? Not me. This was really cute and contained important messages about friendship; overcoming self-doubt; and living for your own ideals of happiness, not those dictated […]
4 Stars. In this information age, we find ourselves bombarded with facts or “facts,” as the case may be. A fringe group believing a kooky conspiracy theory may seem fairly harmless but when large swathes of the population believe anything they read that reinforces their own beliefs, we have a huge problem. Consider these sobering statistics […]
4 stars. I know this book probably won’t have much appeal to a broad audience but it was so engaging, I felt that I needed to review it. When my husband and I first arrived in Oregon in April of 2020 for his work assignment at a hospital outside Portland, my aunt put me in touch with one of her friends who owns a summer home on […]
4 Stars. I’m not quite sure what I expected when I downloaded this book from the library but it’s not exactly what I got. Not that I’m complaining; this book is absorbing. My review keeps turning into a book report because I want to discuss so many of the ideas I just read! I knew this was nonfiction about the worlds of […]
Hmmm…. Where to start? I mostly found this book fascinating and the inaccurate history we are taught infuriating but I also had problems with the tone. I’ll start with the positives…. Loewen’s main complaint is that our American history textbooks invariably teach from the point of view of White males of European descent. The […]
I almost always have one nonfiction book on the go that I read exclusively before bed. I’m primarily a fiction reader so I don’t usually fall into the “one more chapter” trap that keeps me awake way past my bedtime if I follow this plan. This was not a great book for that. It’s intelligently written, presented, and argued, but […]
Any short story collection is going to be a bit uneven but I truly enjoyed the vast majority of these. I would like to read novels based on some of these characters and I will be seeking out longer works by some of these authors. I appreciated that the writers are a culturally-diverse group and their characters reflect that. […]
I loved the way this ended and I hate that I can’t say more about it because I definitely have things I want need to say. But no one likes spoilers, right? Just know that the celebration of real, true friendship surprised me and made me so happy. A horror novel made me happy? Why, yes, it did. Now that that’s out of the way, I […]
This book cracked me up! My best description is that it’s a version of Tucker and Dale vs Evil if Tucker was a werewolf and Dale was a vampire. I can’t watch many horror movies but that one made me laugh, just like this book did. Earl and Duke aren’t quite as hapless as Tucker and Dale since they’re very aware of their own […]