Reviews

Anna lives in a blue-colored world, filled with roses and birds and flute music.  But once she finds a tattered doll abandoned in her high school, Anna is pulled into the harsh and gritty life of Abel Tannatek, the school’s peddler of drugs—and more.  Abel spins stories and tales for his little sister, who is on the verge of being yanked from her home with A

This Robert Greenwald documentary of the Koch Brothers, Charles and David, is very much an attack on the conservative billionaires.  The accusations from Greenwald are from his very liberal political views.

In her previous memoir, A Year of Magical Thinking, author Joan Didion writes about the death of her husband. More recently in Blue Nights she writes about the death of her daughter, Quintana Roo. The recent memoir differs from the previous in that the tone is lower, the story more tragic.

12·21 is a thriller of the pandemic variety. This time, instead of a bacteria or virus being the cause of a widespread killer disease, the culprit is a prion. What’s a prion? What I gathered from the book is that prions are proteins that can reproduce on their own, they can become infectious, and they are the cause of Mad Cow disease.  Not pleasant.

First in the new Watersong trilogy, Wake takes us to the quaint seaside tourist town of Capri where 16-year-old Gemma is the star of the high school swim team and has finally made the boy next door notice her.  This summer there are three new girls in town.  Tall, beautiful and supremel

A wakes up every day in a different body. Guest for a day, A tries to do no harm, walk through that person's life changing as little as possible. Until A meets Rhiannon. Waking up as Justin seems like any other day. Justin is kind of a slob, kind of a slacker, and not all that extraordinary. A thinks it will be just like any other day, making it to class, figuring where Justin sits at lunch, if he has an after-school job. Everything changes when A meets Justin's girlfriend Rhiannon. She is beautiful and different, and A is drawn to her.

Until recently, Occidental cultures felt superior to the Oriental cultures, but the west is now discovering inspiration in their centuries old wisdoms, art and architecture. Early travelers and missionaries wanted to impact the Occidental world, not to learn from it.   If you were to pick up this book to learn about the types of tea leaves, you may be disappointed.

I don't generally like reading negative reviews and I like writing them even less. But sometimes a book affects you so powerfully in all of the worst ways, you have to say something. This is how I feel about Lev Grossman's The Magicians.

Burke strays from his usual mystery genre, but not from his geography.   This Civil War tale is in part a story of his ancestors, Robert Perry and Willie Burke, and is set in and around New Iberia, Louisiana.  Willie is one of the main narrators of the story whi

Some kids are identified by their parent's profession: the preacher's kid, the doctor's kid, the principal's kid, the mayor's kid. Jazz is defined by his father's profession: serial killer. Billy Dent is the most notorious super-serial, claiming 123 victims in his decades long spree. Worse than being the serial killer's kid was that every day was take-your-kid-to-work day for Billy. Jazz learned how to separate a hand from it's fingers, how to stalk a victim, and how to commit the perfect crime without getting caught.