needs more demons?

I wanted to read The Book of Lost Things even though I disliked Connolly’s The Gates. I had an intuition that The Gates was a less well-developed book, maybe even rushed a bit to capitalize on the market created by The Book of Lost Things.
And I was right — The Book of Lost Things is [...]

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The phrase that kept coming to my mind to describe Boneshaker while I was reading it was “purely awesome.” The back cover copy gives away a little too much of the setup for my taste, but I will say that it shifts between being a steampunk adventure story and a gritty, claustrophobic zombie novel so [...]

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A Brother’s Price is a fantasy novel with a nifty feminist twist: it’s set in a world where male children are much rarer than female children. Spencer posits that this leads to a matriarchal society in which men are valuable chattel — or, in other words, occupy a similar role to women in the vaguely [...]

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I liked Black Rubber Dress quite well right up to the final chapters. Sculptress and amateur-sleuth-by-virtue-of-nosiness Sam Jones (don’t call her Samantha) sells a piece of artwork to a London investment bank, which — along with the titular garment she wears to the unveiling — gives her an entrée to, and a pleasantly outside perspective [...]

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[editorial note: this review/essay/whatever was originally published as three separate entities over the course of a month.]
surprise benefits of pseudo-vegetarianism
I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink in fits and starts over the past two months — it’s on the library’s short-term loan list, so I request it, read as much as I can before it’s due, [...]

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