I am so torn about the rating of The Belles by Dhonielle Clayton. Part of me was won over by the interesting world Clayton created where people are born alike, with red eyes and grey skin, and hair the texture of straw. What is considered “beauty” – a variety of skin tones, hair colors and types, and body shapes – does not come naturally unless they are a […]| faintingviolet
What a kooky mystery book. My mom was visiting for the last few days and she and I love to get our blankets and read (which we indulged in doing) so she was perfectly placed to ask me wha…| faintingviolet
Did you know that this year is the 40th anniversary of the movie Clue? Because it is! One of the Read Harder tasks this year is to read a book about a piece of media you love, and I love Clue. It’s one of my absolute comfort watches. Author John Hatch also views the movie as one of his favorites, and possibly more of a favorite […]| faintingviolet
Here’s the problem – this is a well-written book. The craft is there. But… I just couldn’t care about what is happening with the characters and kept having to make myself pick it back up between reading other books, which is not at all how I normally approach Romance books. There were times where the characterization felt inconsistent, in the […]| faintingviolet
Invariably, something that is bothering an author is going to make its way into the book they’re writing. That something for Jackie Lau in Magically Generated is GenAI. While I am largely on the side that Lau takes via her main character’s rants, I thought the note was hit too often and it wasn’t necessary because Lau already had enough character depth with Nora to have the reader empathize with […]| faintingviolet
One of my coworkers and I love to chat movies. When his birthday came this year I went on the hunt for a book about Hollywood that I thought would be up his alley and while I couldn’t put my hands on my first choice for him Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris (a book I […]| faintingviolet
When I finished reading In a Jam by Kate Canterbary in July, I ordered the second book in her Friendship, RI series as quickly as I could. I was so pleased with Canterbary’s style that I knew I wanted more of it. While I four-star loved In a Rush, it paled slightly in comparison. If In a Jam was a 4.5 rounded up, In a Rush is a 4.25 rounded down. Which is not a huge difference, but […]| faintingviolet
A couple of weeks ago an essay that Hallie Rubenhold had presented for the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2020 as part of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Lecture came to my attention, and I slid it into the TBR. The Problem with Great Men hits on so many of the things that are bothering me professionally these days and reminds me why I got […]| faintingviolet
Are you looking for a primer on how the enforcement of what became known as the Hayes Code on the movie business in the 1930s impacted what came before and after 1934? I might have the bo…| faintingviolet
Sometimes a title just does it for you. A Libertarian Walks into a Bear – as a title – makes me smile every time. Make of that what you will. Its author’s writing style is also sly and occasionally funny which works to balance out the serious nature of a lot of what is being […]| faintingviolet
Playing around with tropes is part of the fun of reading in any given genre. Seeing how an author chooses to put the pieces together, which ones they decide to leave out of the equation entirely, h…| faintingviolet
To begin at the end, when I finished this novella, I immediately put in requests at the library for the second and third books in the Chaotic Orbits series because I enjoyed it that much and was ve…| faintingviolet
About a month ago a large sinkhole opened in the interstate a few miles from where I live, and it has wrecked absolute chaos on my commute since as it closed the eastbound lanes of said interstate,…| faintingviolet
