Wildwood is a children’s book written by Colin Meloy and illustrated by Carson Ellis. Let’s get down to business (to defeat the Huns. Duh): I adore this book. It’s fun, engaging, whimsical, action-packed, imaginative, well-written, and (perhaps best of all) it’s a children’s book that uses big, beautiful words and deftly grapples with complicated and […]
Nick Dybek’s new novel, When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man, is an introspective coming of age story that focuses heavily on a young man’s loss of innocence. …It’s also basically Shakespeare’s Richard II as populated by the men of The Deadliest Catch. I’m serious. The basic story is this: Cal (rhymes with Hal), […]
Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel, 2312, is pretty frakking great. Sci-fi cussing aside, the novel’s very well executed and quite beautiful. 2312 is a futuristic exploration of human expansion into the rest of the solar system, and focuses on Swan Er Hong (an artist from colonized Mercury), and her attempts to unravel the weird events […]
When you are finished with Toni Morrison’s Home, you are going to want to read it again. Immediately. Home is worth every second of your attention, and you should give in to your urge to re-read. It’ll stand up, I promise. The book begins with a memory and then we wake up, nearly amnesiac, to […]
Madeline Miller’s novel, The Song of Achilles, is Patroclus’s story. Miller’s novel reinterprets The Iliad through the lens of Patroclus—Achilles’ companion, friend, and lover—and she anchors the whole thing on their relationship. This book isn’t quite as good as it wants to be. The prose … tries too hard for poeticism, instead of just being […]
You may or may not have read my I-Hate-Mr.-Darcy-Books rant. If you did, bully for you. If you didn’t, you can catch up here. As the moniker I’ve given it implies, I do not like Mr. Darcy books. At all. For various reasons, but mostly because they’re not really very good. Anyway, we’ve been down […]
THIS BOOK IS A SLOG. Do you know when I finally started to get interested in this story (and even then, not super invested, just mildly interested enough feel like I didn’t have to make dying whale noises whenever I picked it up)? Page 245. PAGE TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY FRICKIN’ FIVE!!! And I only […]
Christopher Buckley’s latest novel, They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, is half brutal satire of Washington politics and half quirky/absurdist indie movie waiting to happen. And it’s even pretty funny. As a basic litmus test for whether you’ll like this book, think about Thank You For Smoking. If you liked it, great, this is very similar […]