A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

The book Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik is the literary extension of the internet sensation #NotoriousRBG that celebrates Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States.  The internet movement was spawned by Ginsburg's impassioned dissents that followed the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and left Ginsburg as the sole female justice until the appointment of Justice Sonia Sotomayor.  There's a tumblr, merchandise, hashtags across multiple social media platforms, and now a book.   Carmon and Knizhnik put forth a well researched book that includes photographs and interviews with Ginsburg herself as well as her family and friends.  In addition to following Ginsburg's life, the book also illuminates the justice's career, including her work with the ACLU prior to her appointments to the D.C. circuit Court of Appeals and subsequently...

I mentioned this short story collection in my previous review of Fall of Poppies .   Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre  is edited by Tracy Chevalier and features stories written by many of today's popular authors, such as Audrey Niffenegger, Francine Prose, Emma Donoghue, and others.  All of the stories are inspired by the British classic Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, specifically by one of the most famous lines in English literature: "reader, I married him."  While most of the authors have read Jane Eyre , at least one or two had never read the novel before penning the short story for this collection, which I thought was interesting. I have also never read Jane Eyre ; however, I have seen the 2011 adaptation that starred Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender (you know, because British period drama).  I'm not as familiar with the story as I am with Jane Austen's novels (via the film adaptations; we all know I'm a Jane Austen fan), but ...

Fall of Poppies: Stories of Love and the Great War is a short story collection to which multiple popular authors, such as Jessica Brockmole, Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and others, have contributed stories.  It is an engrossing read that I think anyone who enjoys historical fiction and/or love stories will enjoy.  The title itself is pretty much self explanatory regarding the common threads connecting all the stories: they are all love stories set against the backdrop of World War I.  Many of them are tied to the end of the war and/or Armistice Day. I enjoyed this short story collection more than the previous one I read (and will review next); however, I was reminded why I'm usually not a short story reader while I was reading Fall of Poppies .  Generally short story collections do not keep my interest because of the brevity of the stories and, for me, reading story after story gets tedious after a while.  At one point in the middle of this collection, I...

Miss Shayne returns with a review of the first book of the Endgame trilogy.  Stay tuned for her reviews of the rest of the trilogy later this summer! This is the first book in the Endgame trilogy. Years ago aliens enslaved humanity and left them with a message: one day, they will return, and the world will end, and only one of the original 12 bloodlines will survive. In the present day, twelve people from the ages of 13-20 compete in a worldwide scavenger hunt by solving riddles in order to find three keys. The winner of the scavenger hunt will save their bloodline, and everyone else on the planet will die.   Because the premise of this book sounds ridiculously close to The Hunger Games , people have refused to read it. This book has taken a lot of heat from people who haven’t even read it, which makes me sad. Though there are minor similarities, this book is completely different from The Hunger Games . It is different from most of the other books that I’ve read ...