Parenthetical.net

This is the second book in the Chaos Walking trilogy, the sequel to The Knife of Never Letting Go. The last 150 pages were separated by a work day for me, and it was possibly the least productive day ever. I should’ve just finished the damn thing at the circ desk, except that [...]

[Read more →]

I’m not even going to try to summarize this one, except to say: interweaving of Snow White & Rose Red, Rumpelstiltskin, and probably some other tales into a lyrical novel with the most sexual creepiness I have had the misfortune to encounter in awhile. This is an excellent example of a book marketed to [...]

[Read more →]

Another conference speaker with whom I was unfamiliar. She’s also a jazz singer, and gave us a lovely impromptu a capella performance (just reinforcing the sense that I was at a folk festival).
I’ll admit, I found her book tiresome. The prose is lovely, I guess, but it was a Woman’s Sexual Awakening and [...]

[Read more →]

Three three-dimensional best friends, families that genuinely love each other, disability and homosexuality just tossed in like the normal parts of life they are, and it’s even set in Boston! Sold.
The plot is complicated — there’s a deaf kid, a theater production, a wacky road trip to New York (does it count as a [...]

[Read more →]

My main gripe with the first Bartimaeus was how much Nathaniel’s chapters dragged as compared with Bartimaeus’s. The Golem’s Eye ameliorates this problem by giving us plenty of the ever-delightful Bartimaeus, and adding a third point of view: Kitty, the young Resistance leader. Nathaniel is also older now, and more of a love-to-hate [...]

[Read more →]

Boyfriend E, video game fan extraordinaire, caught sight of this lying on my coffee table and cracked up. He played the original game as a kid, of course (if someone wants to fix that Wikipedia page, by the way, it could apparently use some fixing), and expected from the cover that this would be [...]

[Read more →]

As a desperate attempt to engage his lazy, inattentive 7th grade math class (hey, Hauntmeister, this one’s for you!), Mr. Collins forms an afterschool club at his inner-city Cleveland school. Their mission? Build a 7-level tetrahedron, to beat the 6-level record. Four African-American kids (two boys and two girls) join for a [...]

[Read more →]