Reviews

It's weird how writers can be both original and pedestrian at the same time, isn't it? The idea for Hate List, the story of the surviving girlfriend of a school shooter, is the original part. Probably in real life a lot of people would have a hard time forgiving her or wanting to know what's going on in her head, and would really not want to know how she still loves her dead boyfriend. But that's really good, true, confounding, conflicted stuff. The pedestrian, or maybe just annoying part is how she names people: a principal named Angerson, a bully named Bruter, and the worst, a shrink named Hieler. Ugh! She even talks about the names in the Q & A at the end, how she loves them. Whatever, they didn't totally destroy the reading experience for me. :)

The best thing about this first entry in a paranormal fiction series is that the sympathetic characters are evil. The succubus, imp, vampires and demons have one angel in their posse, but the titular character doesn't think much of him. The others like the angel okay, but mostly because he's a drinking buddy.

I'm not going to tell you what this novel is about because if I'd known before I read it, I wouldn't have done so. I grabbed the bookjacketless novel off the shelf at Barnard because I loved the author's previous novel.

Alice Bag, whose name was Anglicized from Alicia in elementary school, and whose last name is a moniker from her late 70s punk band The Bags, shares her coming-of-age story in short, episodic chapters, that are not unlike punk songs. They're hard and fast and sometimes leave you wanting to slam into something. The essays are not polished, a characteristic that takes nothing away, and adds to their authenticity.

I knew Alison Bechdel was brilliant, but I didn't realize she was so smart. Her memoir about her relationship with her mother is multilayered, in that it's about psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy; literature, feminism, and aging & menopause (maybe I'm reading these last two into it a bit), as well about how Ma & Alison Bechdel did or didn't and do or don't get along.

As I write this, I'm halfway finished with the second book in the trilogy that begins with Delirium. My sister was right that Delirium is way better than Oliver's first book, Before I Fall.

First of all, thank you St. Paul Public Library for owning this small-press, originally self-published mystery and sharing it with me via Interlibrary Loan.

The protagonist is the ultimate anti-heroine, a fat, middle-aged Black lady. She's smart, capable, self-deprecating but not too, and has the obligatory detective novel quirky pet, a green cat named Seamus.

A Thousand Lives came highly recommended by someone whose taste I trust, so I'm sorry to report I felt "meh" about it. Jonestown is a fascinating (if horrifying) topic, and I learned some things I didn't know about the ministry (that it was 70% Black and that it was friends with San Francisco politicians Harvey Milk and George Moscone).

A friend sent me the unpublished manuscript of her collected writings about her unexpected pregnancy--making the decision she did, her relationship with the baby's father, pro-choice Christian spirituality, and lots of other great stuff. I look forward to the book being published so I can go into more detail about it. For now I'll just say that L is an excellent writer and while reading her book-to-be, I kept thinking of all the people I wanted to share it with.