A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

Pennsylvania One Book. Every Young Child. is an annual campaign that "encourages adults to read daily to the young children in their lives and to engage children in conversations and experiences around the story and illustrations."  These practices help develop early emergent literacy skills in babies and young children and provide a deeper reading experience for the child.  The campaign runs in April of each year, and each year a new title is selected.  This year's title is Daniel Finds a Poem by Micha Archer.  You can go to www.paonebook.org  for more information on the campaign, this year's title, and to see titles from previous years.  You can also access a 64 page activity guide, a fun guide, rhymes, songs, and more under the Resources tab of the main menu. While Micha Archer has previously illustrated other books, this is the first book she has both written and illustrated.  Archer is a former kindergarten teacher who has traveled the world...

I've previously read and reviewed six of Sharon Bolton's novels when she was writing and publishing under the pen name S. J. Bolton.  You can click this link to see those reviews.  Among those novels were three stand alone novels and three novels that are part of the Lacey Flint series (there's a fourth Flint novel and another stand alone novel that I haven't read yet as well as another stand alone novel that will be published soon).   Little Black Lies is a return to form for Bolton in that it's a stand alone book after four Flint novels.  Bolton also harnesses the use of a unique setting as character Little Black Lies much the same way she did for her first three novels.   Little Black Lies is a tautly written, highly suspenseful story that will keep you guessing through its final pages. Little Black Lies is set in the Falkland Islands, an archipelago located three hundred miles off the coast of Argentina.  While the islands are under British sov...

Ya'll know I love a good Jane Austen adaptation.  So when I spotted a trailer for a new, previously unadapted novella by Austen, you know I had to see it.   Love & Friendship is the film adaptation of the novella Lady Susan written by Jane Austen around 1794; however, it was not published for nearly seven decades.  Kate Beckinsale, perhaps the best known actor in the film (at least to American audiences), plays Lady Susan Vernon. Love & Friendship has a fast-paced plot and quick, smart dialogue.  At times because everything and everyone, it seems, is moving so quickly it can be hard to follow just what machinations are going on or how events are transpiring.  And the characters' connections serve up some confusion right off the top of the movie, but more on that later. Lady Susan Vernon is a conniving, manipulative widow whose social reputation is in tatters at the outset of the film due to a romantic liaison with the (married) master of Langhor...

Our guest reveiwer, Miss Shayne, returns this week with a new review! This semester I am taking a class called Research in Literary Studies. Before you get too bored, this class is strictly on everything Alice in Wonderland . We started by reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , Alice in Wonderland spinoffs inspired by the original book, and watching several Alice films. I then had to choose a book that was based on the original Alice in Wonderland and write a report on it. I’m grateful I got to pick a book to read this semester because I’m often forced into reading literature that I don’t care for, but this book was a bad choice. I decided to read Insanity by Cameron Jace. In this story, Alice Wonder has been in a mental institution for the past two years. Two years ago, she accidentally killed everyone in her class. She doesn’t remember that incident or anything she did before being admitted into the asylum. The only ray of light in her life is the tiger lily she is all...

I remember I came across The Day I Lost You by Fionnuala Kearney sometime last year before it was published, and I had to wait months for its release.  Kearney is a British writer, and this is her second novel.  I haven't read the novel that preceded this one, but from what I read of the blurb and the first few pages, both novels deal with similar themes.  Secrets and infidelity (and probably a secret love child thrown in for good measure to make everything extra messy) figure prominently in both novels.   The Day I Lost You is an engrossing read with a side of suspense--as in who's the baby daddy and will the main character bite the bullet and finally get it on with her bff now that they're both single at the same time? It's been ten weeks since Jess's daughter, Anna, was swallowed by an avalanche in the French Alps while on holiday, and, without a body to bury, every day has been a dark struggle to keep her head above water.  The only thing that's keepin...