Americas | 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	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
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 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	Until Forever By Johanna Lindsey Read: Feb 2010 Rating: Convoluted There’s a LOT of fun to poke at this thing. Before I have fun, let me say that it wasn’t awful. It wasn’t really good, either. BOOK-IN-A-MINUTE, Git-style (Yes, that means spoiler) Roseleen: I am a history professor with a penchant for old weapons. Look at this [...] 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	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	The Untamed By Kasey Michaels Read: January 2010 Rating: Bit weak I’m really not a fan of romances along these lines–they usually star a modest white woman being swept away be her “Savage” lover. Somehow the Native American man and his sheltered lover manage to bring peace and harmony to their peoples, blah, blah. Not too different [...] 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	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
Tintin in America By Hergé Read: September 2009 Rating: Trippy I now know why this volume confused the hell out of me as a kid. Firstly, it’s the first in the series, as published widely, but it’s technically the third book. So there are references to Tintin’s past adventures, and he has a hell of a reputation. Such [...] 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	God’s Brothel The Extortion of Sex for Salvation in Contemporary Mormon and Christian Fundamentalist Polygamy and the Stories of 18 Women Who Escaped By Andrea Moore-Emmett Read: August 2009 Rating: Hard-hitting My bestie has often lamented that I do not read enough nonfiction. So naturally the last time I was at her place and saw some nonfiction [...] 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	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	Silent To the Bone By E.L. Konigsburg Read: July 2009 Rating: Excelsior Ok, this was bloody good. There’s only one thing that bothered me at all, and the rest was really good. Our narrator’s best friend, Branwell, is witness to–or perpetrator of–a horrible crime. He is so deeply affected by it that he cannot speak. The crime is the [...] Full Story
Marrying Malcolm Murgatroyd By Mame Farrell Read: A long time ago?, June/July 2009 Rating: Good A really adorable book. Do not write it off because of the cutesy word, adorable. It’s a very serious book. I think I read it onceuponatimeago because it seemed quite familiar, but I think I was too young for it at the time. [...] Full Story	Impossible By Nancy Werlin Read: June 2009 Rating: Excellent There must have been some great turnover in the AuthorSphere. Newer YA writers–ie., books published after I stopped reading them (around age… 13?)–are clearly onto something. I mean, really, really onto something. It’s not just The Disreputable History. It’s How I Live Now and Libba Bray and [...] Full Story	The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks By E. Lockhart Read: May 2009 Rating: Brilliant Wow. This is one of the coolest books I’ve picked up in quite a while. Somehow a hardcover wound up on the Bargain table at Borders, and when I learned that A) Frankie was a girl, B) She was leading the Loyal Order of Basset Hounds, and [...] Full Story