So, Rich and Lucy had a blast seeing Taylor Swift this week, but I went to a movie last night and we saw two ducks outside the theater, so who’s the real winner here?
I left off last week about a hundred pages into The Gunners, and that’s where I should have stopped. Sometimes I think that when I end a post with, “I love it so far!” it turns out to be a jinx or something. This book had a perfectly fine premise, but it completely fell apart. Totally derivative with flat characters and an absurd amount of dramatic revelations. This was a major dud.
Things could only get better from there. Whiskey & Ribbons has had glowing reviews from a lot of authors I follow, so I felt like it was a pretty safe bet. This was an absolutely lovely book. Good story, good characters, excellent use of alternating viewpoints. Weirdly, my favorite aspect of this was the relationship between Dalton and Frances; maybe they’re not the couple you’re most meant to be rooting for? I don’t know, I loved these people, just thinking about this book is making me miss these characters. High recommend for this one.
The House of Broken Angels is another one that’s getting high praise from some big shots, and I loved this one too. Good job, blurbers! I’m just going to ignore that red squiggly underline because blurber is definitely a word. Anyway, this is a huge family saga that’s both funny and moving. It was a little hard to keep all the characters straight, because there are a lot of them, and they all seem to have a few nicknames, but that’s my only quibble. Really the worst I can say about this book is that it makes you pay attention, which you should be doing anyway. This is a real charmer.
Right now I am about a third of the way into Woman Last Seen In Her Thirties. This novel is in part about how a woman of a certain age has to readjust her mindset after realizing that at some point, older women start to become invisible. This is extremely relevant to my interests. I don’t especially love the writing, and I’m a little wary about where this is going, but I’m pretty much always going to read a book with this kind of synopsis. We’ll see how it goes!
