Month: June 2020

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Book Review: Middlegame by Seanan McGuire

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middlegameMiddlegame
Seanan McGuire

Tor.com, 2019
★★★☆☆

This was definitely very good, no doubt about it, but I think I liked the idea of it far more than I liked the execution. The idea, at its core, is just so, so very cool! It’s all about alchemy and incarnating ideas into human bodies and trying to control the universe. It’s awesome! Very confusing at first, but not so much that I couldn’t follow along, and things (mostly) make sense at the end, even if some ideas remain rather abstract.

I just am not sure that I am a fan of which parts of the story were prioritized: Roger and Dodger’s lives. There was just so much time spent on them growing up and getting to know one another and this book is so long. Continue reading “Book Review: Middlegame by Seanan McGuire” →

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Book Review: The Mermaid & Mrs. Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar

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The Mermaid & Mrs. Hancockthe mermaid and mrs hancock
Imogen Hermes Gowar

Harper, 2018
★★★★☆

I think the best way to describe The Mermaid & Mrs Hancock would be: uneven, meandering, and unbalanced, in terms of both pacing and genre. It’s almost as though it can’t quite decide what it wants to be. Somehow, it is too long and yet not long enough.

Oddly enough, a book with this kind of pacing normally wouldn’t be able to hold my attention, but I was never once bored! I think that is to do with two factors. One is my own personal interest in Georgian London as well as the history of prostitution. Harlots is one of my favorite shows. The amount of historical detail Gowar displays here is simply astonishing. It stops just shy of being too much, but because of this detail I could picture everything so, so clearly; I felt like I was inhabiting this time period. Continue reading “Book Review: The Mermaid & Mrs. Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar” →

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The Mid-Year Book Freak Out Tag 2020

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We’re halfway through the year already. Incredible. It feels like it’s gone by in the blink of an eye, but it’s also felt like approximately three thousand years. Anyway.

My reading this year has been pretty steady; I’ve read 56 books thus far. At the beginning of, you know *gestures at everything* I was still reading a ton of books, but now I seem to be falling into a reading and writing slump, so there’s that. Alas. Continue reading “The Mid-Year Book Freak Out Tag 2020” →

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Book Review: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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Mexican Gothic
Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Del Rey, 2020
★★★★★

The Guardian describes Mexican Gothic as “Lovecraft meets the Brontes in Latin America,” which is rather apt. Moreno-Garcia has written a delectably Gothic, deliciously weird, and appropriately horrifying tale of a young woman tasked with rescuing her cousin, allegedly imprisoned in a dilapidated old mansion, potentially being poisoned by her husband’s family.

Continue reading “Book Review: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia” →