A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

I'll Be Seeing You by Suzanne Hayes and Loretta Nyhan is the other book that I was reading while I read My Name Is Mina .  I liked I'll Be Seeing You a lot better than that Mina book.  This is the kind of book that sneaks up on you and sucks you in before you realize what's happening.  It's a pretty fast read and once the letters start going back and forth between the two women, it turns into a page turner because you want to find out what's going to happen in their lives and will their men make it home from the war and then what's going happen next when they do come home and wait, it's the end of the book?!  But what happens in the post-war years to these women and their families? According to book jacket, the story reflects the authors' own story, and there's an interview at the end of the book that explains this.  Apparently, the authors are penpals over email who met through one of their blogs.  As of the day of the interview they had not ...

My Name Is Mina by David Almond is the follow up to Skellig , previously reviewed on the blog.  It is the pre-quel to the story that takes place in Skellig .  To be honest, I don't really know what to make of this book, and if I hadn't already written here on the blog in Skellig 's review that I would also read My Name Is Mina , I don't know that I would have finished the book.  While I was reading this book, I was also reading another book at the same time, so it took longer to finish both than it normally would have. The story is told entirely from Mina's perspective through the mechanism of her journal entries in which she shares eccentric writings and observations, including life musings, stories, and extraordinary activities.  She also looks back on the miserable days she spent in school and what lead to her mother's decision to pull her out of the school and home school her instead. Mina was eccentric in Skellig , but My Name Is Mina reveals the de...

Long (long) time regular readers of this blog know by now that I'm a fan of S.J. Bolton.  I've read and reviewed all of her (now) six books on the blog.  You can go here , here , here , here and here to read those other reviews.  If you haven't already read any of her books, well, I highly recommend that you do.  A good one to start with is her first, Sacrifice .  You will be suspicious of authority figures in all the books you read after that one.  Looking back over my other Bolton reviews, I see that I've said in nearly all of them that this is her most twisted and darkest yet.  And at the time it's true--until the next one comes out.   Lost is S.J. Bolton's sixth book overall and the third in the Lacey Flint series. Lacey is still reeling from the terrifying ordeal she was forced to survive when the undercover sting she was part of in the last installment pretty much went off the rails in a blaze of twisted, blackest glory.  She's c...

Stoker's Manuscript is Royce Prouty's debut novel.  It was very good, and it has everything: a coded message in a literary classic, mystery, intrigue, history, an unusual old world setting, a 'treasure' hunt, a family history/tragedy shrouded in mystery PLUS VAMPIRES thrown in as a bonus.  Incidentally this was the last book I read... I think I finished it around the end of July, and I'm currently (still) between books because I haven't yet started a new one.  What's depressing is that I have a pile of good ones at home that look really promising, and I don't know which to read first is part of my problem. Joseph Barkeley, a modestly successful purveyor of rare, collectible, and antique books in Chicago, is contacted out of the blue one day by an agent acting on behalf of an anonymous buyer who wishes to acquire a rare manuscript that's recently come up for sale in Philadelphia.  This is the eponymous manuscript of the book's title and, reade...

Skellig is an American Library Association Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book; it's a juvenile fiction book, and it's about 200 pages long with short chapters and it's a rather fast read.  A few years ago the library got a book called My Name Is Mina which was David Almond's follow up to Skellig .  I put both books on my reading list because I wanted to read Skellig first.  It turns out that while My Name Is Mina is the follow up to Skellig , Mina is actually a prequel to Skellig . Michael and his parents and baby sister (who remains nameless until the very last sentence of the book) have moved into a new house that can modestly be described as a fixer upper.  It needs lots of work on the house, on the yard and on the garage--everything's dirty, falling together, overgrown, covered in debris, and been left to ruin and neglect by the previous, elderly owner.  But Michael's parents have big plans for the house, although after his sister is born prematur...