courtneydoss's reviews
785 reviews

The plot of E.M. Forster's A Room With A View isn't exactly original. A young woman torn between love and responsibility, love and security, love and her reputation. It's the same old song and dance performed by a different musician. Original or not, I honestly really loved this book. Short and sweet, I found Lucy Honeychurch to be lovely and George to be a much better love interest than he initially seemed. I get that George Emerson is not everybody's cup of tea, but there was just something about him that made my heart dance on Lucy's behalf. And he's lightyears better than stupid, insufferable Cecil Vyse.

This story is incredibly short, so there is really no reason why anyone curious about it shouldn't just read it.

I don't know what I was expecting when I started reading The Legend of Sleepy Hollow but it sure as hell wasn't this. All this time I thought that Ichabod Crane was the hero of the story, and it turns out he was just a ridiculous, greedy butthead who gets the shit scared out of him by a local ghost story. A review I read called Ichabod a "simpering little queef" which I think is about the funniest thing I've ever heard and super accurate, so I'm including it just for fun.

Mexico as a country gets a bad rap. It's often portrayed for what it has become known for over the years, overrun with bikini clad tourists and dangerous cartels. But Mexico has not always been what it is known for now. It is a land that contains so much history, so much beauty, so much culture, and I love that Silvia Moreno-Garcia has really brought that magic back through her writing. Calling upon the indigenous roots of a proud and ancient culture, Moreno-Garcia has brought the rich mythology of Mayan people to the forefront of an accessible, compulsively readable novel. For that alone, she deserves five stars.

However, the story is a strong one as well. Casiopea begins as a Mexican Cinderella, mistreated and abused by her family members whose primary distaste for her comes from her indigenous heritage. Stumbling upon the remains of a god, Casiopea is thrust into a hero's journey that takes her far away from her small village and transforms her into her fully actualized self. Sure, there's a touch of a love story, but this book is so much more than that. It is about the acceptance of one's origins, having the courage to break away from negative situations to conquer your dreams, and the sacrifices we are willing to make for what matters to us.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is fast becoming one of my new favorite authors. I can't wait to see what she does next.

I really enjoyed this book. Let's get that out of the way right now. It was fun, well paced, and served up quite a bit of unexpected drama that I really dug. I also liked the romance aspect, which was very sexy and fun. Plus, I love me a romance that centers around a fat chick, or really just anybody that is not classically beautiful.

With that said, why is it that every time there is a fat protagonist in a book, she has to be in peak physical condition and just so happen to have a belly? Like, let's be real here. Some fat women aren't strong. They aren't in excellent physical health, and that shouldn't matter. Like, I know plenty of thin women who eat like pigs and never work out. I know plenty of fat women who do the same thing. I know plenty of thin women and fat women who work out obsessively. The point is, we don't need to see all of the things a fat girl does to not be fat in order for her to be forgiven the grand sin of not being able to lose weight.

Okay, I'm off my soapbox now.

But yeah, read it if you want. Just try to avoid spoilers because its better that way.

The story of Dr. Jekyll and his alter ego, Mr. Hyde, is so iconic that even without having read it, I'm sure that most people can tell you what it's about. As I read this book, the story of Hyde stomping a young girl played like a movie in my head from some long forgotten film that I just spent far too long trying to identify without results. I really enjoyed the moral of the story; that giving into one's dark side ultimately changes a person to the point where the best and worst of them are no longer indistinguishable. This story is super short, and really well done. I recommend it highly.

This book has been sitting on my Unread-on-Kindle shelf forever. I'm pretty sure I purchased it when it first came out in 2017, and tried to read it once before, but finally I have finished. And, it was good. The concept of stealing poor children and pimping them out to rich people, sometimes literally, is awful and its even worse when it turns out that it is based on a true story. Georgia Tann was a real person, and stories like the Foss children's were happening to hundreds of families at her hands. It's horrifying, and I hope that Georgia Tann is burning in hell.

Where this book fell flat for me was in the present day. The whole plot focusing on these rich modern day people finding out about their poverty stricken roots was unnecessary. I get that it was meant to show how far the Foss kids came from their poor home and then the orphanage, but it could have conveyed the same message with far less time spent focusing on it. The interesting part was the story of the Foss kids, not the rich Staffords. Also, I was sad that certain family members were never found after a certain point, which while realistic was really a bummer.

Still, this was a decent story and really made me curious about the reality of the situation.

Grady Hendrix is probably one of the coolest horror writers in the world. Seriously, he does an amazing job of creating an unsettling atmosphere, grossing the reader out with gore, and giving his stories a sense of urgency, but he is also really good at making his stories fun. Amongst the tension and fear, he tosses in something vaguely ridiculous to give the reader a bit of comic relief. This book, like everything he writes, is great.

I'm in the minority when I say that this book did absolutely nothing for me. The characters weren't particularly memorable, the flashbacks often felt like a slog, and its greatest strength (the locked room scenario) was used merely to remind the reader that hey, these people who are kinda dull and dumb are in danger so all this stuff actually matters!

I always drag my feet reading popular memoirs and then am super surprised when it ends up being good.

Tara Westover's family is nuts. Like, hoard canned goods, bury rifles in the backyard, medicine is of the Devil nuts. Realistically, her father is the only one who sounds like he has a clinical problem, though he'd never admit it, but Tara's mother is an enabler and many of her siblings have been brainwashed into following their dad's ridiculous ways of thinking - mostly because they are poorly educated and haven't been taught why their father is wrong. Tara, however, is among the minority of her siblings in that she manages to get out of their hometown and become properly educated. She learns about history, such as the Holocaust, as well as art, math, and science. She eventually goes on to be well educated by anyone's standards, but it comes with its fair share of conflict with her conservative, conspiracy loving family.

By the end of the book, we find that Tara's family has all but disowned her because of her objection to straight out abuse by one of her brothers, but for me one of the more interesting aspects of it all was what I learned after the fact; namely that Tara's mother, given an alias in this book but real name LaRee Westover, has written a rebuttal to it all called Educating. Among the reviews is one by Tara's sister-in-law who calls the whole rebuttal dishonest. So, it seems, Tara Westover's drama is far from over. I feel badly for her, and feel like seeing her mother's attempt to discredit her memoir makes it all the more believable.

I mean, maybe I've read too many thrillers, but the fact that this book states in its description that what it pretends to be for the first half is not what it is really gives away the actual twist. Also, who didn't see the ending coming? And, there's that trademark farfetchedness that really drives home the fact that you're reading a Greer Hendricks, Sarah Pekkanen book.

3/5