Fond of: In The Killer Next Door by Alex Marwood the character The Lover is creepy. Like Buffalo Bill creepy, taking embalming to a completely different level. He was a perfect villain. He has you terrified of him but not to the extent that the reader is looking over their shoulder scary. The Killer Next Door had […]
Fond of: Not only do we get one returning character, but three. Stephen, Holly, and Frank Mackey are older and smarter than they were the last time we met. I loved seeing their development and the stubbornness all three took on. Like In The Woods, where a teen is the focus and inevitable culprit I […]
Fond of: I thought The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet was a nice, modern adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Even though I know it was based on The Secret Diaries of Lizzie Bennet YouTube series it was still a little reminiscent of Disney’s Lizzie Maguire. I also liked how the author incorporated places into this retelling. […]
The Here and Now first reminded me of Lois Lowry’s The Giver. We begin at a ceremony to basically scare the shit out off youngsters with extreme rules and the creation of sameness. Hm, I vaguely questioned whether Ann Brashares was jumping off the stir for The Giver movie but eventually moved on. The Here […]
Black haired girl’s (Maud) form of death was unexpected That was the only unexpected thing Characters were as flat as cardboard yet I enjoyed the writing in itself The culprit for Maud’s death reminded me of Daisy from The Great Gatsby Teacher/Student affairs have been done before and The Death of the Black-Haired Girl didn’t […]
Good plot Older than they were: The teenagers acted like they were in college rather than high school, mainly exhibited through a “Risky Business” style party. Layla was annoying, and lived up to the Eric Clapton song of her namesake Didn’t particularly care for any of the characters except for Felix as he seemed like […]
When I began The Secret of Raven Point my first impression was that this is a novel of devotion. How far would you go for someone you love? It sounds a little sappy, like a Nicholas Sparks novel, the difference is that Juliet has grit. That trait is what carries The Secret of Raven Point. While […]
hydraulic fracturing: the forcing open of fissures in subterranean rocks by introducing liquid at high pressure, esp. to extract oil or gas. Fractures started out with so much potential but never came into fruition. We begin with the main character Frank talking about suicide running in his family and how he had struggled with it. Next […]
Flavia grows up just a little in each novel and in The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches it is evident that she has matured and felt like a parent dropping their child off for the first day of kindergarten. While some of the innocence is lost her skills in deduction have increased. This mystery series is […]
I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series growing up. Twenty years later, I still set aside time for Hallmark’s Little House on the Prairie Marathons and am just as enraptured by her books as I was at age eight. It recently came out the Laura’s daughter Rose may have been the steamroller behind the […]