contemporary | Reading Backwards book reviews

Hissy Fit By Mary Kay Andrews Read: January 2011 Rating: Enjoyable Chick lit that isn’t all about the romance! It’s a nice change of pace. Keeley Murdock is an interior designer in the small down of Madison, Georgia. It’s the rehearsal dinner for her marriage to a rich, influential young man from a good family. Then she [...] Full Story	d e a d . w i n t e r Zombie apocalypse. The scenario has been reworked again and again, and has become pretty predictable. Something spreads through the population, turning almost everyone into shambling, undead creatures in search of braaaaains. A ragtag group of unlikely companions hole up together to beat back the hoard. The odds are stacked heavily against them. Luckily, S. Dave Shabet has put a new spin on the old story. He’s got one hell of a framing device. Full Story	The Merry Gentry Series, books 6-8 By Laurell K Hamiltom Read: April 2010 Rating: Phwoar I tried really hard not to let them all run together, but they did. Rather than try to pull the last three books apart, I’m just going to shove ‘em in one post and mention what lasting impressions I have. A Lick of Frost I was [...] Full Story
Least I Could Do By Ryan Sohmer & Lar deSouza Read: March 2010 Rating: W00T!! http://leasticoulddo.com/ Absolutely love this one. A webcomic that revolves around a manslut named Rayne, the kind of guy you should hate… but I think I have a little crush on him instead. Rayne is a guy in his mid 20s, and he is a [...] Full Story	Mistral’s Kiss By Laurell K. Hamilton Read: March 2010 Rating: Slam First, I would have to declare that Mistral is not terribly important to this volume. Let it be known that the titles are farking arbitrary. (Just to spite me, Lick of Frost is going to be ALL ABOUT FROST, I just know it.) Anyway, Goddess and [...] Full Story	A Stroke of Midnight By Laurell K. Hamilton Read: March 2010 Rating: Whirlwind Time moves differently in the sithen. Merry says, “I wish we had more time!” and suddenly they do. Time is moving glacially outside the hill, giving them all they need… to catch a killer. The book begins with a press conference, sometime in the afternoon (I [...] Full Story
Seduced by Moonlight By Laurell K. Hamilton Read: March 2010 Rating: Engrossing First, let me just say that that cover is a total plot-tease. It shows a woman’s belly, with a nice little round to it, and her hand just so… The series is about a woman trying to get pregnant. You are plot-teasing me, you stupid cover [...] Full Story	A Caress of Twilight By Laurell K. Hamilton Read: March 2010 Rating: Engrossing To be perfectly honest, I’m going to speed through this review, and #3, Seduced by Moonlight. These books slam into each other and it gets hard to pull them apart. Anyway, we now know the plot arc for the whole series. Merry’s aunt, Queen Andais, wants her [...] Full Story	A Kiss of Shadows By Laurell K. Hamilton Read: March 2010 Rating: Wham My mummy picked up one of the books in this series, and must have liked what she saw. She didn’t read it, she went and ordered all eight books. Mummy hates starting a series that she can’t finish, or at least be able to read a [...] Full Story
Lover Avenged By J.R. Ward Read: Feb 2010 Rating: Devoured I don’t know what it is about JR Ward, but her books are amazing. Once begun, it is impossible to stop. Everything else gets put on hold. And that took a serious chunk out of my work this week, as this beautiful, beautiful volume is over 600 [...] Full Story	Tithe By Holly Black Read: February 2010 Rating: REAL As someone who tends toward fantasy, I’ve heard over and over again that in order to make the fantastic seem believable, you have to ground it in the real. I never expected to find a book, any book, that would seem to mimic my own life so [...] Full Story	Chosen by Desire By Kate Perry Forever Kate Perry is a pretty kickass chick. Her childhood dream was to be a ninja, and she’s now a seventh degree Kung Fu blackbelt. The serious study required in kung fu appears to have colored her novel, giving the ‘paranormal’ elements of this paranormal romance a more grounded feel than most [...] Full Story
Baby Proof By Emily Giffin Read: January 2010 Rating: Better than expected I wasn’t expecting anything fantastic. I believe I bought it as part of a B1G1F sale, mostly because I wanted another book. The table was full of copies of the same 5 books–never a good sign, it implies they can’t sell them. But I took [...] Full Story	A Knight in Shining Armor By Jude Deveraux Attempted to Read: January 2010 Rating: AUGH Wot the shit is this?! Today, RB stands for RIDICULOUSLY BAD. Hey Jude don’t make it bad Take a sad song and make it better Remember to let her under your skin Then you’ll begin to make it better Better, better, better, better, better, Yeah,Yeah,YeahNa [...] Full Story	The Lovely Bones By Alice Sebold Read: January 2010 Rating: Lovely The sort of book that stays with you for a long time. Susie is fourteen when she is lured off by a neighbor, raped, and murdered. She watches from her heaven as her family struggles to cope with the aftermath. Her father is obsessed with finding her [...] Full Story
Louder Than Words: Marni By Marni Bates HCI Teens Louder Than Words is a series aimed at teenagers about teenage experiences. Atypically, the volumes are also written by teenagers. It may seem bizarre to ask teenagers to write memoirs—as Marni says, her siblings laughed—but Louder Than Words is dedicated to “reinforce[ing] the message that the experiences of teenagers and [...] Full Story	Chocolat By Joanne Harris Read: December 2009 Rating: Delicious I saw the movie ages ago, but I don’t remember it very well. A good deal of the book felt familiar, which means the movie did bear some similarity to it. Not that anyone would really care when they could gaze on a GORGEOUS Johnny Depp. The [...] Full Story	Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding Read: 2003-ish, October 2009 Rating: Even better. I’ve fallen behind in my reviews, so this will have to be a bit quick. Edge of Reason is even better than the original Bridget Jones. It’s longer, and more involved. It also has much more of her excellent friends. And, yes, this is the [...] Full Story
Bridget Jones’ Diary By Helen Fielding Read: October 2009, repeatedly since ~2002 Rating: v.v.v.v.g. Bridget Jones is a classic of our time. She can’t be anything but. Plenty of people have gone on and on about how this book changed womens’ literature to chick lit (for better or worse). When I first read it, I was sixteen and [...] Full Story	The Photographer By Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, Frédéric Lemercier Read: October 2009 Rating: Wow There’s no other word for it than, “Wow.” Every few pages, there it is again–Wow. Didier Lefèvre was a photographer, who became involved with Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). In 1986, he accepted an assignment to enter Afghanistan with an MSF mission, [...] Full Story	Whom God Would Destroy By Commander Pants Read: October 2009 Rating: Fun What could be more appropriate than to talk about god and mental illness? Even better, how about people who aren’t as ill as they seem? Commander Pants (yes, that’s his nom de plume) has written a novel that cleverly forces one to question human nature while making [...] Full Story
Death Mill Mansion By Will Hartzell-Baird Read: September 2009 Rating: Clever Do you see that adorable little pyramid thing dusting the title on the book cover? You see that? That’s the most adorable killer robot you will ever see. Its name is XR-36, but it secretly thinks of itself as Octavius. It can’t announce this because XR-36 is [...] Full Story	Julie & Julia aka The Julie/Julia Project aka 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen aka My Year of Cooking Dangerously aka a movie with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams By Julie Powell Read: August 2009 Rating: Nifty Yeah, this is one of those books that is suddenly on everyone’s mind–or just was, anyway. The movie version [...] Full Story	The Hebrew Tutor of Bel-Air By Allan Appel Read: August 2009 Rating: Disappointing The back copy for The Hebrew Tutor paints a picture that is enticing: Under threat of nuclear war and the gorgeous California sun, the two [Norman and Bayla] forge a tentative truce. They may not be learning Hebrew, but through the miracle of motorcycles and the epiphanies [...] Full Story
Girls With Slingshots By Danielle Corsetto Read: July 2009 Rating: Squee! http://www.girlswithslingshots.com GWS is one of those comics that’s been around for years and often pops up when you’re reading other comics. It took me a long time to get around to it for some reason. Something Positive is doing a crossover, though, so I gave it a [...] Full Story	Mating Rituals of the North American WASP By Lauren Lipton Read: June 2009 Rating: Urgh? For the Feminist Review At its core, Mating Rituals of the North American WASP is wholly typical. Girl goes to Vegas. Girl gets drunk. Girl wakes up to find she married some stranger. Girl flees back to New York. Boy calls her up to tell her that, yes, [...] Full Story	YU+ME: dream By Megan Rose Gedris (art and words) Read: July 2009 Rating: Coolness I wound up at YU+ME after Megan’s brilliant guest comic for Jeph Jacque’s award-winning Questionable Content. Me and everyone else. It took me about one day to read the 600+ page archive. YU+ME: dream is an interesting comic. It’s a story of true [...] Full Story