You know I love the Sookie Stackhouse series, right?, but like with so many endings to television series, the finale was a bit of a disappointment. I'm okay with who Sookie ended up with, but the whole book was a set-up for it, and there were lots of loose ends unnecessarily tied up.
One thing I appreciate is that the series doesn't attempt to drag one secret out for the entire gazillion books. In the beginning of the second Pretty Little Liars book, you find out the big deal from book one.
It's the fault of my Facebook 50 Books in 2013 group and specifically my smart, feminist, zine friend Caitlin that I powered through the first and then second books in the Pretty Little Liars series in a large, rotund hurry. I mean who could resist this tantalizing write up: "Pretty Little Liars by I forget. It's been a long time since I had so thoroughly enjoyed such an objectively terrible book."?
Thanks to Alex Wrekk, I've been watching the Canadian supernatural procedural Lost Girl. The show is about a succubus, just like, you guessed it, this second installment of Mead's Georgina Kincaid series. For those you don't know, a succubus takes a partner's life force during sex.
This novel about 19-year-old corps de ballet dancer Hannah Ward reminded me a little of the nun memoir Through the Narrow Gate because it was about the protagonist's struggle with the sacrifices required to please her god, in this case the artistic director of the "Manhattan Ballet."
I didn't sleep for even a minute on my cross-country flight, which left JFK at 9pm and landed at SFO more than six hours later at midnight and change. Most of the time I was too busy reading Frost Burned, the latest entry in the Mercy Thompson series. (Note to Loud Melissa: you really need to get started on these, now that you've caught up with The Hollows!)
Against the wishes of her parents (but with their permission), Karen Armstrong entered a convent at 17. Her memoir reveals what being a nun was like in 1960s England--the spiritual, physical and emotional challenges, as well as the joy of feeling called and chosen to strive to be close to God.
Davidia, who doesn't speak for most of her Mississippi childhood after being beaten by her drunk of a mom, develops an insane crush on the BMOC at her school about ten years into her silence. Being a psychologically mute school weirdo without a single friend, that doesn't go particularly well for her.
West Indian immigrant Phyllisia Cathy has been plopped down in Harlem with her proud, larger-than-life father, dying mother and pretty, compliant sister.
Jeune fille is French for nanny. 19-year-old Rosie is spending a year in France escaping her life by taking care of three kids with an exacting mom and a physician dad on a houseboat in Paris. Ooh la la. While the storyline might make this book sound like chick lit, it's really not.
Today I thought of the first time I realized you [older sister] were not me. I was five and you were setting that red alarm clock and I watched you and I knew that you weren't having the same thoughts. That you wouldn't dream the same thing that night. And that we would die at different times. And that you might die first. It was the first time I ever felt alone. I feel that all the time now.
Three rows down [at a bullfight in Spain], Americans were pushing their way through, boys in backwards baseball caps and T-shirts advertising universities or pubs in other countries. They were boys with wide shoulders and loud laughs, boys oblivious to their foreignness, their wealth, and their freedoms. I felt a sudden compassionate, maternal contempt for them.