Category Archives: Book Review

Contents May Have Shifted

The quirky and unusual “travel novel” Contents May Have Shifted by Pam Houston takes you on a roller-coaster ride both around the world and through the author’s stormy relationships with men. Pam Houston is also the author of the hilarious Cowboys Are … Continue reading

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Filed under Book Review, Fiction, General Fiction

YA Yes I Am

Do you recall me stating that I absolutely do not read Young Adult (YA) novels? I am constantly saying how glad I am that I catalog the YA books, since I’m never tempted to put one on hold. Despite having … Continue reading

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Filed under Book Review, Young Adult

Heartwood 2:3 – Spurious

“Somehow or another…you have to find your own path through contemporary culture. You have to dig your own burrow, following various transverse connections between things.”    – Lars Iyer Sometimes a book will really set off the fireworks. Spurious, by Lars … Continue reading

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Filed under Book Review, Fiction, General Fiction, Heartwood, Humor

Blueprints of the Afterlife

Early reviews sing the praises of Ryan Boudinot’s new novel, Blueprints of the Afterlife. Novelist Charles Yu  calls it “a mind-bending tour of the edges of technology and possibility.” Reviewer Andrea Appleton remarks that “each scene is rendered in such captivating, … Continue reading

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Filed under Book Review, Fiction

Working in the Shadows

We often don’t think about how the food we eat comes to be on our supermarket shelves. Turns out, there’s a lot of very hard, dangerous, and sometimes mind-numbingly boring work that goes into it. In Working in the Shadows, author Gabriel Thompson decided … Continue reading

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Filed under Book Review, Nonfiction, Society & Politics

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

When my sister saw that I was reading Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self she worried about me. Relax! I’m not a danger to myself or others. This slim volume is realistic fiction, not self-help.  This is a collection of … Continue reading

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Filed under Book Review, Fiction, Short Stories

Heartwood 2:2 – Kelroy

The big literary celebration this year will be the bicentennial of Charles Dickens’ birth (Feb 7), but 2012 also marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the only novel by a little-known American author, Rebecca Rush. Her novel Kelroy was largely overlooked upon its … Continue reading

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Filed under Book Review, Fiction, General Fiction, Heartwood, Historical Fiction

Ashes

I am so over zombie books. At least I thought I was until I picked up Ilsa J. Bick’s Ashes. At the beginning of this young adult novel we meet Alex who has a brain tumor and has been given 6 months … Continue reading

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Filed under Book Review, Fiction, Horror

New Noir

I’ve always been drawn to psychological novels that show the dark side…the internal struggles that complex intelligent characters have to wrestle with. These three new superbly crafted novels definitely have that “noir” feeling, with their cinematic intensity and vivid characters. … Continue reading

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Filed under Book Lists, Book Review, Fiction, Mystery & Crime, Suspense & Thriller

Heartwood 2:1 – By the Sound

Edward Dorn’s By the Sound revolves around the day-to-day lives of two couples struggling to do more than just scrape by while living in the Skagit valley in 1958. There is some very fine writing about our lowland environment that is … Continue reading

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Filed under Book Review, Fiction, General Fiction, Historical Fiction