maribou | Deflowered Briar Magician; Ophelia's Necklace; When We Were Miscellaneous

The Recently Deflowered Girl, illustrations by Edward Gorey
*snerk*.
(5/275)

The Tale of Briar Bank, by Susan Witting Albert
Suffers from the tweeness that the earlier books in this series managed to somehow miraculously avoid. Said suffering seems mostly due to the intrusive narrator being WAY too intrusive (think Lemony Snicket only not tongue-in-cheek). There were enough bright spots to keep me reading the series - it's just that every time I really got into the story I was pulled away for a little lecture on something that didn't actually need to be said.
(6/275)

The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia, by Laura Miller
If you love Narnia but you have reservations but you love Narnia.... you will enjoy this book:). I loved it.
(7/275)

Everything Is Miscellaneous, by David Weinberger
I thought this book rocked. But a caveat: I was really sick when I read it and there were a few times where I could tell there was slight rhetorical wiggling going on, but I was too sick to tell if it was justifiable sleight-of-hand for reasonable purposes or hamfisted trickery. But it was only a few times. And I love how thoroughly he covers the history of organization and cataloging in such a concise way, and interweaves it with his understanding of present and future.
(8/275)

Ophelia, by Lisa Klein
Retelling of Hamlet from Ophelia's point of view. I may be developing as big a soft spot for Hamlet retellings as I have for Arthur retellings. Was good. Was too sick while reading it to really know much other than that I liked it.
(9/275)

The Necklace, by Cheryl Jarvis(ARC)
The message of this book is that upper-middle-class white women are people too. Um, no, that's not it, but I seem to have mislaid what it actually was. The writing was good on a paragraph level, but there were way too many things that got brought up, and then dropped without really getting resolution about the plot thread (important in nonfiction just as much as in fiction), and I think any one of the people involved's biography would've been interesting individually where I couldn't start feeling like many of them were much of a sameness the way I did here ... overall, omg the hype on this book made it seem like it should be about the BEST THING EVER and well, it just wasn't. Praps if I'd felt better I would've also felt more charitable.
(10/275)

When We Were Romans, by Matthew Kneale (complimentary copy)
Told in the voice of a 9-year-old, the story of what happens when his mother decides he and his sister are at increasing risk of harm from his father, and whisks them off to Rome for the summer... sweet and sometimes very sad and sometimes very funny. The narrative protagonist is wonderful, and I am a connoisseur of those.
(11/275)