O’Leary, Beth. The No-Show.

NY: Berkley, 2022.

This is the fourth rom-com by a British author whom I discovered with her first effort, The Flatshare, and which was quite enjoyable. Her second and third books were only so-so, I thought, but this one’s pretty god, so I guess she isn’t a one-shot wonder after all. So, there are these three women, all single, all in their late twenties. There’s Siobhan, a successful life coach with corporate clients, who returned home to Dublin from London after a traumatic breakup with her boyfriend and now flies all around the British Isles lecturing and doing one-on-one sessions and TV talk shows. She’s hard-nosed about men, to protect herself from further heartbreak.

Continue reading “O’Leary, Beth. The No-Show.” →

Korelitz, Jean Hanff. Admission.

NY: Grand Central, 2009.

I had been aware of Korelitz and her ever-growing reputation, but I hadn’t yet gotten around to reading any of her novels. Then I came across an extended review article showcasing her work, and this this one in particular caught my eye. I have long had a thing for novels with in a college or university setting, and this one, which takes place at Princeton and focuses on one of the school’s harried admissions officers, seemed right up my alley. In a sense, a top-level school’s admissions people are its gatekeepers. They decide which ten percent of the many thousands of annual applicants (all of them well-qualified) gets to attend, which can be literally a life-changing experience for the brilliant seventeen-year-old who doesn’t come from a wealthy family with a two-century Princeton ancestry.

Continue reading “Korelitz, Jean Hanff. Admission.” →

Chambers, Becky. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy.

NY: Tor, 2022.

A new book from Becky Chambers is always cause for pleasurable anticipation. Both the subjects she writes about in the broad realm of science fiction and the style in which she does it are quite unlike any other writer in the field. Moreover, this short novel — barely a hundred pages — and the one that came before it, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, are different from Becky’s earlier work. While there were exciting scenes in the “Wayfarer” books, she managed to work thoughtful commentary into them, too — but the “Monk and Robot” stories are much more deeply and speculatively philosophical. In fact, the very nature of the two main characters, one organic, the other non-human, makes that inevitable (and also remind me of some of Ursula LeGuin’s earlier work).

Continue reading “Chambers, Becky. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy.” →

Li, Grace D. Portrait of a Thief.

NY: Penguin, 2022.

Ordinarily, I have no qualms with DNF-ing a book that just isn’t working for me. Life is too short, right? And usually, that decision is because the writing is too amateurish, or there are a dozen misspellings per page, or some other fatal weaknesses. But I’m quite disappointed that this one doesn’t live up to the hype because it seemed so promising. Here’s the set-up: Will Chen is an American-born Chinese senior in art history at Harvard. He doesn’t really know what he’s going to do after he graduates and he’s kind of anxious about it. He’s working part-time at the Sackler Museum one night when thieves break in, smash some cases, and steal a number of Chinese historical artifacts, and he picks up and pockets a small jade tiger one of them dropped. Shortly after, he’s contacted by the youngest billionaire in Beijing and given five first-class tickets with an invitation to come and see her. He gathers his sister and three of their friends and goes off to hear her pitch.

Continue reading “Li, Grace D. Portrait of a Thief.” →

Lauren, Christina. Twice in a Blue Moon.

NY: Gallery Books, 2019.

“Christina Lauren” (which is actually a two-woman writing team) has become a very dependable source of highly original romantic novels. And I avoided the term “rom-com” because they’re often much more serious than they are “comic.” The protagonist this time is Tate Jones, just turned eighteen as the story opens, and a resident of a tiny town on the Russian River in Sonoma County, California, but she’s in London for two weeks with her grandmother, Jude, to celebrate graduating high school. And the two women have only been there a day when they run into another pair of Americans in a pub — Sam Brandis, who is tall and broad and twenty-one and very good looking (and white), and his grandfather, Luther, who is expansive and friendly and outgoing (and black), and the four of them quickly form a London sightseeing team. Moreover, Tate and Sam take to spending most of their nights lying on the grass in the Marriott’s back garden and talking about everything for hours. Sam’s a country boy who loves to write stories. Tate doesn’t really know what she’s going to do but she’s in love with everything about Hollywood.

Continue reading “Lauren, Christina. Twice in a Blue Moon.” →

St. John, Eva. The Quantum Curators and the Missing Codex.

Mevagissey, Cornwall: Mudlark’s Press, 2021.

This is the third installment of what has turned out to be a surprisingly good alternate-world SF series, even though it’s published by a tiny press in Cornwall and I found it through Kindle Unlimited. It would take far too long to re-describe the background and what has come before, so I’ll simply refer you to my reviews of the first two volumes. I’ll just note that the last one ended with the appearance of Arthur, High King of Britain, and that this one picks up from there.

Continue reading “St. John, Eva. The Quantum Curators and the Missing Codex.” →

Kane, S. W. The Bone Jar.

Seattle, Thomas & Mercer, 2020.

[Apologies for running late this time; I was down with Covid all this past week.]

“Kane” is the nom de plume of Sian Williams and while her bio at Amazon implies that she has written other crime novels, this is the only one I have found listed anywhere, under either name. In fact, it appears to be her debut novel, the first in a (presumably pre-planned) series featuring DI Lew Kirby of the London Met, who is attached to one of the 24-hour homicide squads posted around the city. So, it’s the middle of the hardest winter London has suffered in decades, almost everything being shut down by the continuous snowfall and frigid temperatures, and a security guard at the long-abandoned and closed Blackwater Mental Asylum near Battersea has come across the body of an elderly woman laid out on a dust-covered bed in one of the wards.

Continue reading “Kane, S. W. The Bone Jar.” →

Thorne, Sally. The Hating Game.

NY: Morrow, 2016.

This rom-com has an interesting set-up. Ever since Lucy Hutton, book-lover and library denizen, went on a school field trip to a publishing house, she has been determined to become a publisher herself one day. Now she’s twenty-eight and the personal assistant to Helene, the French-born the president of Gamin Books — which, in practical terms, makes her Number Two in the company. But Gamin was in danger of going under because of the economy, so it merged with Bexley Books, another publisher with troubles. And Lucy’s opposite number, the personal assistant to Mr. Bexley, is Joshua Templeman. Now the previous heads pf the two firms are frequently contentious co-CEOs of Bexley-Gamin and their two PAs have glared at each other all day across their joint office for three years. And each of them hates everything the other stands for.

Continue reading “Thorne, Sally. The Hating Game.” →