All right, this is technically a recent re-read, as I have read this book more times than I can count. I think the last time, though, may well have been ten or twelve years ago, when I was writing my own “children from our world are whisked away to another, which only they can save” book. Halfway through, I basically fell into a complete panic that I was not writing THE SECRET COUNTRY and that what I was doing was disasterous, so I did something I never ever do, which…
I fully admit that one of the reasons I really love reading MC Beaton’s books is that I can read two of them in less than 3 hours, which makes me feel like I’m getting Lots Of Reading Done. :) I’d been reading Agatha Raisin books, but I got a couple of Hamish Macbeth books for Christmas. Agatha one likes despite herself, but Hamish is really incredibly charming and more fun to read. So I blew through the first two books, DEATH OF A GOSSIP and DEATH OF A CAD,…
I read CITY OF BONES in a deliberately deconstructive manner. I wanted to see what worked and why. So this is perhaps an unusually, er, structural, review thingy. First off, Clare nearly lost me on page three, where the POV character did something to the effect of “my flashing green eyes scanned the room,” which, well, how damned often do you say, “My clear blue eyes lifted to the heavens,” even if you’re deliberately describing what actions you took? The color of your eyes is not likely to come into…
Maria’s one of the other Luna alumni who got picked up at the same time I did. She’s done a kind of splendid shooting star rise, reaching the NYT with first book, and going on to take the YA world by storm since then. This book might work better for that audience. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it (except a language thing Maria’s chosen to do in all her books which I understand but find jarring), but I was underwhelmed, which leaves me feeling like probably I just wasn’t a…
ASTONISHING X-MEN: GHOST BOX, EXOGENETIC, XENOGENESIS: Sometime back Warren Ellis said he was never going to write for Marvel again. After reading this trilogy of story arcs, I really wish he’d stuck with that. I gather the X-universe storylines have taken a turn for the bleak recently, but I liked GHOST BOX less than anything else of Ellis’s I’ve ever read, and less than any X-story I’ve ever read, including what I considered to be the god-awful Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely run that culminated with Cassandra Nova. The art in GHOST…