Reviews

Gated by Amy Christine Parker is a high anxiety filled novel that continues to build until the very last chapter. Lyla is seventeen, and has been living in a cult called the Community, since she was 5 years old.

This is one of my favorite movies of all time!  It was written, directed, and starred in by Albert Brooks (best known for his Academy Award Best Supporting Actor nominated role in Broadcast News) and has Brooks’ offbeat perspective from start to finish.  The mo

Two Graves is the final book in the Helen trilogy by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child which begins with Fever Dream in 2010 followed by Cold Vengeance in 2011.  In the first bo

Some book clubs plan their reading list and meeting schedule a year in advance. Friends, that is not my book club. We’re what I’d like to call "charmingly" disorganized; we often don’t know when or where we’re going to meet until the day before.



So when we spontaneously decided to meet at the Taproom this Tuesday to talk about Michel Faber’s Under the Skin , I knew I had to get reading… fast. Because books about Scottish alien cannibal women do not lend themselves well to spoilers.

A friend of mine, who loves mysteries, recommended Evidence of Life by Barbara Taylor Sissel.  She said it is a book to put on my To Read list, but after reading the intriguing summary I gave it a higher priority and read it immediately. 

I've got a literary crush on Daniel Woodrell, who's the author of Winter's Bone and once lived right here in Johnson County, Kansas, before settling back down in his ancestral home in the Missouri Ozarks near the Arkansas border.

I was sitting on the patio of my favorite bakery on a drizzly Saturday morning, eating a croissant, when the woman doing a crossword next to me noticed the title of the book I was reading: Methland. "Excuse me," she said, "but can you tell me a little about that book?"

From the masculine equestrian outfits that made her Louis XV's favorite, to the regal counterrevolutionary gowns in green and violet that exposed her as an enemy of the state, Marie Antoinette's fashion statements were always unfailingly both fabulous and controversial. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber paints a comprehensive portrait of the fashion icon, from Dauphine until death.

I like to think of myself as a modern woman -- cool, level-headed, doesn’t cry easily, likes Duran Duran, but not too much. 



Leave it to Rolling Stone editor Rob Sheffield and his ruminations on Pat Benatar, Whitney Houston, Sleater-Kinney and Pavement to make me cry like a baby. It also wreaked havoc on my bank account as I went on an iTunes downloading spree. Hanson's "MMMBop," anyone?

Coauthored by John Green and David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson follows the crossing paths of two high schoolers, who incidentally both happen to be named Will Grayson.