The Book: Horns, by Joe Hill
The Story: Ig (as in Ignatius…huh?) is kind of going through a rough patch. Last year, his long-time girlfriend, Merrin, was murdered and while he was never formally charged, everyone in his small town assumes that he was responsible. His brother is a famous talk show host and everyone loves [...]
After doing my flashback on Forever Angels last week, it got me thinking about how I really did have a thing for sad, twisty books when I was middle school aged. I’m not really sure why. I had a pretty normal family life, didn’t know a ton of people who had died, [...]
The Book: Heart-Shaped Box, by Joe Hill
The Story: Judas Coyne (a stage name…. get it?) is kind of this aging “hardcore” rocker guy. He wears black clothes, has facial hair, has girlfriends that are 20, 30 years younger than him, and has this collection of gross/scary stuff, a used noose, a snuff film, a skull [...]
The Book: Blockade Billy, by Stephen King
The Story: This is just an old man telling a story from the earlier days of baseball, when he was the third base coach for the Tigers. Due to circumstances out of any one’s control, a new catcher had to be found asap just days before the first game. [...]
The Book: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clark
The Story: Summing up an 800 page book in a few paragraphs is maybe the hardest thing ever. Here is my attempt:
We’re looking at England in the early 1800’s. There are a handful of people that are studying old magic, but only one man, Mr Norrell, [...]
The Book: Looking for Alaska, by John Green
The Story: This is a pretty basic YA novel: Miles is kind of quirky. His particular quirk is that he loves to know people’s last words before they die. He has about a zillion that he’s memorized and he reads tons of biographies so that he can collect [...]
The Book: The Ice Queen, by Alice Hoffman
The Story: I know it’s strange, but I didn’t even realize until I went to write this review that during the whole course of the book, you never find out the name of the narrator. Hm. Weird.
Anyway, the narrator is a librarian in New Jersey and she’s [...]
The Book: The Doctor and the Diva, by Adrienne McDonnell
The Story: Sometimes I avoid certain historical fiction only because I feel like it tells the same story over and over. This story, I have to say, was totally unique and unlike anything I had read before.
It is the early 1900’s and Erika (an opera singer [...]
The Book: Eye Contact, by Cammie McGovern
The Story: In a small patch of woods outside of an elementary school, a young girl is murdered. The only witness to the murder is Adam, a nine-year-old autistic boy. Even on a good day, he is almost completely non-verbal, but after this, he totally shuts down.
His mom, Cara, [...]
The Book: A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick
The Story: It’s early-ish 1900’s and Ralph Truitt puts an ad in the paper looking for a reliable wife. He gets a lot of answers, but one of them really strikes him. Through letters and pictures, he and Catherine Land decide to get married. We meet both of [...]