A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

By now you may have realized that I'm a sucker for a British TV show.  Period drama, Jane Austen adaptation, both of these or none of these, it doesn't matter.  I branched out recently into Australian TV shows when one of the libraries got Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries on DVD.  I'm currently watching the first season of that show. Suspects is a British cop procedural drama; series one and two come in the same case.  "Filmed from an eye witness perspective," it also features improvised dialogue.  The latter makes the show feel like a reality TV show except it does not have in camera confessionals.  It's a gritty, realistic series that features brutal crimes; and, due to its improvised dialogue and eye witness perspective, it feels quite different from scripted dramas. The show follows three detectives: Detective Inspector Martha Bellamy, Detective Sergeant Jack Weston, and Detective Constable Charlie Steele.  In the first season each episode...

Miss Shayne returns this week with another review!  This title is new to teen collection at the library. This book follows the individual stories of Juliet and Declan and how they become intertwined. Juliet’s mother recently passed away and to help cope with the sadness, Juliet writes letters to her mother and leaves them at her grave. One day, a letter is discovered by Declan, who is doing community service in the graveyard after getting drunk and crashing a truck into a building. Declan reads the letter, relates to what Juliet wrote, and writes a response. This begins an anonymous correspondence between the two. When they are in school, these two don’t get along. Juliet is an artistic student who has had a hard time getting back into the swing of things since her mother’s passing, and Declan is an outcast who seems to only have one friend: Rev. Even though they run with different crowds at school, Declan and Juliet get along when they are writing anonymous letters to...

Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions is the first book by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that I've read.  Adichie has written several award winning, best selling novels and a short story collection.  When one of Adichie's friends writes to ask how to raise her daughter feminist, A Feminist Manifesto is the resulting compilation of fifteen suggestions for how to accomplish this task. Dear Ijeawele is very much a manifesto for how Adichie lives and thinks as a feminist; it's a codification of her own personal feminism in addition to being a primer on feminism, the ways in which society and the world conditions, raises, views, and treats women differently from men, and gender justice issues.  It is both thoughtful and thought provoking. Adichie's fourth suggestion begins with a warning regarding Feminism Lite or what I would still call subtle misogyny masquerading as feminism and concludes with the point that society has conditioned us to view po...

In Bitter Chill is the debut novel by Sarah Ward; it's the first book in the DC Connie Childs series.  I didn't realize this was the start of a series when I started reading it.  Just as when I read and finished The Dry by Jane Harper, I didn't realize that too was the start of a series.  I'm not sure how I feel about starting more book series.  But then the book series that I followed, I haven't been reading anyway, so maybe it's time for some new book series.  This series is set in Derbyshire, England.  And while the prologue didn't really grab me, once I read the first couple chapters, I was sucked in. While there is a mystery in the present day story, it's very much tied to an unsolved kidnap from 1978.  The present day chapters are sparsely intercut with chapters that flash back to 1978.  Were it not for the kidnap case in 1978, there wouldn't be a present day mystery to solve. In 1978 when Sophie Jenkins and Rachel Jones are kidnappe...