you call that love?! | Reading Backwards book reviews

Defiant Spitfire By Kay McMahon Not Read: April 2010 Rating: AUGH Coming out of Beyond Heaving Bosoms, I naturally wanted to indulge in some of the best/worst of the genre. I swapped for this book a short while ago and figured it was as good a place to start as any. But the Smart Bitches have just [...] 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 Landower Legacy By Victoria Holt Read: January 2010 Rating: Not Bad I don’t remember where it came from, but I wound up with a paperback of this out-of-print book. I can’t see a reason for it to be. It’s not a romance novel–it’s a novel with romance in it. So there. Caroline Tressidor is the second daughter [...] 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	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	General Winston’s Daughter By Sharon Shinn Read : June 2009 Rating: Ho hum? Well, it wasn’t terrible. There were some good points, but it certainly wasn’t Shinn’s best. (It’s feeling a little redundant saying that…) Essentially, it’s a story of imperialism, told for a young adult audience with a penchant for romance. Averie’s father is a general in [...] Full Story
Helen of Troy By Margaret George Read: May 2009, approx. 240 pages. Rating: Sigh. I get very disappointed when books I want to be good… aren’t. It comes particularly hard on the heels of a riveting series, like the Black Dagger Brotherhood. And I just gave up on The Mermaid Chair, so it’s doubly depressing to give up [...] Full Story	The Mermaid Chair By Sue Monk Kidd Read: Attempted May 2009 Rating: Disappointing. I really, really liked The Secret Life of Bees. I was happy to see Kidd had another book, but I held off on getting it. My mom and I watched the Lifetime version of Mermaid Chair a while back and it didn’t strike me as [...] Full Story	Wuthering Heights By Emily Bronte Read: March 2009 Rating: Poison I give up. I quit. I want nothing more to do with this torturous mess. I decided it was time to try Wuthering Heights because my TiVo had picked up a documentary on the Bronte sisters, which was of course full of people who think they’re the [...] Full Story
Wagner the Werewolf By George W. M. Reynolds Attempted Read: Feb 2009 Rating: Goddamn. Just… goddamn. I saw this at Strand Books and spent MONTHS hemming and hawing over whether or not I should put my money toward it. Pro: It’s a book from the 1800s about a werewolf in the 1500s. HOT DAMN it’s historical fiction^2 with [...] Full Story	The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe Read: May/June 2008 Rating: UGH This was recommended to me for my senior capstone project. I dutifully made it to the end, but gawd was it painful. Exemplifies all that I hate in a certain kind of writing, usually seen in short stories. Only this was longer. Unjustifiably so, in my opinion. [...] Full Story	Le Divorce By Diane Johnson Read: November 2008 Rating: Mmph. Right, so. I saw the movie ages back and don’t remember much about it except that I liked it more than my mother did, and she thought it was very disappointing. The book is… strange. I wish we’d read it in one of my writing classes because [...] Full Story
The Lady and the Unicorn By Tracy Chevalier Read: October 2008 Rating: Mwah! I really like Tracy Chevalier. Like so many people, I began with Girl With a Pearl Earring, and loved it. I think I love this even more, though. Based off the tapestries by the same name, the book follows the people engaged in its making in the [...] Full Story	Divine by… Mistake, Choice, and Blood By P.C. Cast Read: First half of 2008. Rating: Um? The Smart Bitches have raved about two of PC Cast’s books so I figured she was a pretty safe bet. And it was really just… so-so. Entertaining, but not madly so. I don’t know what was wrong, per se, they just weren’t as good as [...] Full Story	Lambert’s Pride By Lynn A. Coleman & Rachel Hauck Available most cheaply @Heartsong Presents Read: November 2006 Rating: WEAK. Welcome to another edition of “I had to read it for school!” Tonight we delve into the perplexing realm of “Inspirational” (ie, Christian) romance novels. Yes, it’s true–religious fundamentalists are now publishing whole lines of romance novels featuring [...] Full Story
Iphigeneia at Aulis By Euripides. Translated by W. S. Merwin & George E. Dimock. Read: October 2006 Rating: Mixed. This is the Oxford University Press edition, with both a scholar and a poet working on the translation. The play itself is only, say, 1/3 of the book itself. (Brings back memories of Ayn Rand’s Anthem.) This was a [...] Full Story	Beast By Donna Jo Napoli Read: August 2006 Rating: Charming I love retellings of fairy tales. My mother built me a collection of really gorgeously illustrated books when I was very young, and my edition of Beauty and the Beast is one of my favorites. Of course I had to read this rendition by Donna Jo [...] Full Story	The Twentieth Wife By Indu Sundaresan Read: August 2006 Rating: Lackluster. I love historical fiction. I love romance. And I love Philippa Gregory, despite not always liking what her characters do. So I should be able to get through a book like this, right? I’m still barely a quarter of the way through, and I’m putting it down. [...] Full Story
If Only It Were True By Marc Levy Rating: Disappointing Read: June 2006 A quaint little bestseller from 2001 about love that transcends (near) death. A 2005 chick flick starring Reese Witherspoon. The movie was better. It was much more real. That says a lot about the book. It was passed on to me by mother, who got it from [...] Full Story	1984 By George Orwell Rating: Phwoar Read: April 2006 I read this once before, in junior year of high school. I didn’t like it so much then. But now I’m in awe, sort of like the JK Rowling phenomenon. I really like it this time. And I’m amazed by the theory and complexity. It is so [...] Full Story	Wizard’s First Rule By Terry Goodkind Darest thou to try for it @Amazon.com? Rating: CEE-RAP. Read: Yonk ago, during high school. This is the worst first novel attempt I have ever had the misfortune of trying to read. No, seriously. Terry Goodkind gets his name up all over the place but I don’t care. I have a serious [...] Full Story
The Barefoot Princess Christina Dodd Rating: Hmm Read: Feb 2006 Ok, so. Here’s how my week has been. Couldn’t take Claritin cuz I have an allergist appointment later. Thought that was why I was stuffy on Tuesday. Turned into a horrific, raging cold thing on Wednesday. So I went to the drug store on 13th for Day/NyQuil, Gatorade, [...] Full Story	The Blind Assassin By Margaret Atwood Rating: Hmn? Read: Dec 31st ’05-Jan 21st ’06 Look at how specific that timeframe is! I bought the book after years of oggling it on New Year’s Eve as something to read on the train ride home. My friends stayed for Times Square but I skipped out and got home perdy much [...] Full Story	Sex & the City By Candace Bushnell Cheaper than the DVDs: Amazon.com Rating: Typical Read: July 2005 I adore the show to BITS. But, I read Bushnell’s 4 Blondes perhaps two years ago and was thoroughly unimpressed. She’s the Fitzgerald of her generation in that she writes about the American ‘aristocracy’, which is a thoroughly jaded, degernate, and utterly [...] Full Story
The Shape-Changer’s Wife By Sharon Shinn (WHY, Sharon, WHY!?) Rating: Poor. Read: 2003/2004ish I had high expectations for Shape Changer’s Wife, since I began with Shinn’s Summers at Castle Auburn and the Archangel/Samaria series- all of which are stellar. Unfortunately, SCW fell very, very short of what I had hoped for. There simply is not enough action to [...] Full Story	This Side of Paradise By F. Scott Fitzgerald Rating: One big fat middle finger up Fitzgerald’s arsehole. Read: Over the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, 2001. Frankly, the most self-indulgent piece of tripe I’ve ever been forced to read. It was a summer reading assignment, and one of two terrible books I brought on a visit to [...] Full Story