Posts tagged novella

Every Heart a Doorway

In Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway, kids are being reformed at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. Eleanor’s students have been to magical worlds, through doors opened only to them, and they’re having a…

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Bad News

Well, nuts. I practically lit Bad News, the second book of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose series off of the first super-innovative, funny, dark, mind-blowing first novel of the series and meh. It turned out…

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Never Mind

I know that a little extra excitement about a book really triggers my hyperbole button and it’s hard to dodge the exclamation points whizzing from my pores, but it’s happened again and I can’t shut…

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Getting the Banana

If you’re looking to develop an appreciation for Banana Yoshimoto, fans will grab you by the shoulders and push you until you are nose-to-cover with her mini little novel-plus-one, Kitchen. And they’re right. This is…

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Sense of an Ending

Picture yourself. Age, low 20s. Maybe you get a general idea that includes your favorite denim cutoffs and Martin Zellar covering Neil Diamond. Your hair styled like a teenage boy, a skateboarder, and you loved…

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Crash and burn

Back when I was in my 20s, and before 9/11 made saying such things tacky, one of my friends used to refer to the systematic dismantling of ones life as “Crashing the plane.” When we…

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Always a pleasure

Daniel Pecan Cambridge lives in a prison of disorder. His life in Santa Monica is a highly structured life in which he must find a way to the Rite Aid that doesn’t involve stepping off…

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A parade of bad ideas

There is this pit that so many writers fall into when they have a character in crisis: They send the muddy-brained protagonist on a road trip. In the case of Joshua Mohr’s novella Termite Parade,…

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Back to basics

I stopped reading. Well, I was still reading, but I was retaining little and caring even less about one of those National Book Award noms that I took for granted I would love because of…

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The ties that bind

Mari is manning the front desk at the ramshackle sea-side hotel owned by her mother the night before the start of the busy season when a second-floor scuffle breaks out between a guest and a…

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Smell ya later

It’s a tricky thing, reviewing a book that’s a recommendation from a friend (or in this case an I Will Dare reader). Well, I guess it’s only tricky when you didn’t enjoy the book. If…

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