Tag: reviews

Recent Reads: The Alchemist of Souls

February 16, 2016

Skraylings! I don’t think I’ve read a book with skraylings, or anything much like them, since Elizabeth Boyer’s books that I haven’t read in a Very Long Time Indeed but still have on my shelf because fond memory tells me they were pretty darn good. Anne Lyle’s THE ALCHEMIST OF SOULS is nothing like those books, though. I’d say it’s more grown-up, but that’s kind of a disservice to the Boyer books, which were of their time, just as Lyle’s novel is. I just really, really *enjoyed* ALCHEMIST being of…

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Recent Reads: The Abigail Adams Mysteries

August 25, 2015

I’ve had Barbara Hamilton (Hambly)’s Abigail Adams books on my TBR shelf for quite a while, based on my love for her Benjamin January books. I didn’t like the Adams books as much as the January books, which kind of surprised me. It was partly, I recognize, the Puritanism in the books, which made me…impatient. I don’t have a lot of use for religious fundamentalists in real life, much less in my fiction, and the fact that Abigail Adams herself apparently struggled with her (literally) Puritanical faith did not help…

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Recent Reads: THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS

August 18, 2015

I confess that I would not have made it past page ten or so of THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS had it not been written by a friend of mine. It’s not that it wasn’t well written: it was. It’s that it’s a zombie novel, and I’m not much of a horror fan. (Re: at all.) But I’ve known MR Carey for years now and he’s a wonderful human being, so I was inclined to try working my way past the subject material and going for broke. I’m glad…

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Picoreview: San Andreas

June 8, 2015

Picoreview: San Andreas: exciting! I saw a review that said “this is a movie about earthquakes having a vendetta against the Rock,” which mostly made me think “Didn’t they see 2012, in which earthquakes were literally chasing John Cusack?” San Andreas was much better than 2012, which is not meant to damn with faint praise, given how utterly awful 2012 was. (I liked 2012, but it was disaster movie porn. It was not good.) But I spent far more of San Andreas on the edge of my seat than I…

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Picoreview: Spy

June 6, 2015

Picoreview: Spy: very very funny. Very vulgar. Very kick-ass. Very funny. Two weeks ago I’d had no intention at all of seeing Spy, because the trailer made it look like it was probably all about making mockery of the fat lady. I then read a review from a reviewer whose politics I like (Scott Mendelson; he reviews movies for Forbes and is a left-leaning liberal feminist) which said “despite the trailers that is not what this movie is,” and then I read a few more reviews that all said the…

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