Do you ever think you know where your review is going, and then it turns out to be completely different? This was one of those for me. I’m late to the Cassandra Clare party — most readers of steampunk and urban fantasy have been reading her for a while. When she popped up as second…
Category: Part of a Series
Review: The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
The Wee Free Men is a children’s book, but like all good children’s books is just as funny and entertaining for adults. Think Roald Dahl meets Harry Potter. Wee Free Men is the first of four books about Tiffany Aching. In Book 1, Tiffany is nine years old and thinking about becoming a witch. She…
Review: One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde
One of Our Thursdays is Jasper Fforde’s new release in the Thursday Next series. I’m having a hard time describing this series, and an even harder time reviewing this book. No one writes like Jasper Fforde. He’s been compared to Douglas Adams but even that’s kind of a stretch. His books are kind of the…
Review: Silver Borne and River Marked by Patricia Briggs
This seems to be my week for reviewing sequels. Like my previous post, I thought I’d cover two books at once. But first off, IF you like urban fantasy and haven’t read the Mercy Thompson series, you should stop right here. Go get Moon Called (despite cheesy cover) and see if it suits you. I would…
Review: WWW.Wake and WWW.Watch by Robert Sawyer
These books are the first two in a trilogy by Robert Sawyer. Sawyer writes what my husband calls “hard” science fiction, which means that there’s an emphasis on the technical aspects of science and engineering, as opposed to “soft” science fiction where the story is set in a futuristic time but the science isn’t really…
Mini-review: Dark Road to Darjeeling by Deanna Raybourn
At this point in my mid-winter doldrums, it was definitely time for something fluffy. If you like Victorian mysteries with a little bit of romance, you can’t do better than Deanna Raybourn’s Lady Julia Grey series. Each of these books is better than the next, and it’s fluff I don’t feel too guilty about reading…
Mini-Review: Lirael by Garth Nix
It’s the first month of the year and already I’m struggling to keep up with my reviews — so you can expect a whole slew of “mini-reviews” coming at you. Although I did just finish One Day by David Nicholls and looking forward to writing my review of that one. I’m so grateful to those…
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the movie, too
Last month I accidentally watched most of the movie The Wizard of Oz twice. I say accidentally because when it comes on TV it’s apparently impossible for me to turn it off. Now this is a movie I know backwards and forwards – when I was a child I remember it coming on every year…
Review: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
In The Year of the Flood, Atwood does something unusual: she writes a book that’s set in the same time and place as her previous book, Oryx and Crake, but from the perspectives of different characters (see my review here). In an interview on Amazon, she says that one reason for this was to address…
Review: Mary Ann in Autumn by Armistead Maupin
I think if this book hadn’t received a good review I wouldn’t have bought it. Maupin’s recent books haven’t done much for me, and Mouse, Brian, Anna, and even Mary Ann are like old friends. Better to reread the old books again and again than change them with a not-so-good update. Happily, I think Maupin…
Review: Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld
In my last post, I recommended a book called Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld. Westerfeld is one of my favorite YA writers. He’s written the Uglies and Midnighters series, and this latest series is set in 1914 in a steampunk version of World War I. Behemoth is book 2 of this series. In Leviathan, the first…
Review: Bayou Moon by Ilona Andrews
I decided to give up on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It just didn’t do it for me — I didn’t like the way it was written and didn’t find either main character compelling. There must be a reason everyone in the world is reading this book — unless we are all just lemmings,…
The Book Stop 