FYI: This review contains spoilers. “The whole situation had come to be because I’d sat down one day in front of my recruiter and informed her that I wanted a job as close as possible to my house – ideally, something along the lines of sitting all day in a chair, overseeing the extraction of
The fibers that have clung to and defined the shape of Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane’s stories are the values of the Victorian world. They are male, authoritarian, and middle class. They were formed at a time when women had no voice, and few rights, and the poor were considered lazy and degenerate:
She [Sachiko] was sometimes startled at the thought that she spent more time worrying about her sisters than about her husband and her daughter, but they were like daughters—they were on a level with Etsuko in her affections, and at the same time they were her only friends. Left alone, she was surprised to note
As I’ve already stated several times before, I’m a cover whore. Most often, this leads to interesting books I wouldn’t necessarily read. Sometimes, this leads to me discovering that the beautiful cover is indeed the only remarkable feature of a book. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” goes both ways I’m afraid. Unfortunately, Spielman’s
Warning: This review contains spoilers, even though I try to not give away too much. Think of it as more than a blurb and less than a book report 🙂 Speaking about blurb — this is what it tells us about the book: Meet Nina Hill: A young woman supremely confident in her own…shell. Nina
I’m a cover whore — that’s the main reason I bought this book. I’m also always looking for a gripping cozy mystery, so one more reason to get myself this lovely little gem of a 'cozy'. Looking at the cover, you may understand why I noticed this book: a touch of vintage, the promise of
We drown out the big questions by marching behind the brass band of infinite ambition. It’s a march that apparently need never end: today’s idea of success increasingly involves attaining unprecedented levels of health, power, and celebrity. —John Naish Enough. Breaking Free from the World of Excess This quote is from 2008. It resonates with
What the blurb tells us: When Chris Kraus, an unsuccessful artist pushing forty, spends an evening with a rogue academic named Dick, she falls madly and inexplicably in love, enlisting her husband in her haunted pursuit. Dick proposes a kind of game between them, but when he fails to answer their letters Chris continues
Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way. To be frank, the first time I met her I wasn’t even attracted to her. Middling height; bobbed hair neither long nor short; jaundiced, sickly-looking skin; somewhat prominent cheekbones; her tied, sallow aspect told me all I needed
What the blurb says: So overwhelmed was Marie de Gournay by the work of French essayist and philosopher Michel de Montaigne that when she finally met him, she stabbed herself with a hairpin until the blood ran in order to show her devotion. An awkward, obsessive character, she set herself against the world in