Welcome to my weird world!
Ending off the A Good Girl's Guide to Murder trilogy, I would say the first book is the most mystery-heavy, the second is overall the best one, and this third one I would put as the most outside-the-box and squirmy, because it will make you really unsure by the end if everything was worth rooting... Continue Reading →
Back when Turning Red was released, in my opinion a superb, important and groundbreaking animated film, critic Sean O’Connell said he felt he couldn’t relate to the problems the female protagonist was facing, and outrage was sparked over the review, calling it sexist and socially blind. The outrage was warranted. The entertainment industry expects girls... Continue Reading →
I should've caved to my gut and tried out Mindy McGinnis' works long ago. This time, McGinnis' work is based off of the Edgar Allan Poe short story, The Cask of Amontillado, which I'd never heard about in my life before, and McGinnis kind-of kind-of-not-so secretly puts Amontillado as the name for this grungy American... Continue Reading →
I’ll have to check the statistics, but I think this sequel to A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder might just be the best mystery novel I’ve ever read. In the last book, straight-A good-girl-type Pippa Fitz-Amobi decided on her high school capstone project to investigate a five-year-old killing of high-school sweetheart Andie Bell, the perpetrator... Continue Reading →
This is so not your average biography. When I was 10 years old, thanks to Gary Paulson, I had a burning desire to build a shelter in the forest and sleep in it for a night. And Into The Wild reminded me of that desire. Into the Wild is a 1996 biography that had slipped... Continue Reading →
Last summer, the upcoming movie adaptation of this book, with Daisy Ridley and Ben Mendehlson as the stars, was filming for two days at a local conservation park. I've gone on walks through there thousands of times. It was all over our local news that this was happening. The day before filming, my mother insisted... Continue Reading →
I've said in past reviews I'm not a fan of short stories, because they tend to not be long enough to have us fully understand and love the characters, and if we do end up growing to like them, their time with us is over too fast. But I only say that to stories so... Continue Reading →
The sort of undercover work the protagonist does in A Good Girl's Guide to Murder is enough to make James Bond, Sherlock Holmes and even Hercule Poirot green with embarrassment at how many levels she is above their investigative skills, not the least of which is she's still just a teenager, doing a case that... Continue Reading →
I ended up reading the illustrated/photographed edition of this book, something which majorly contributed to my enjoyment or fascination. I'm not completely sure I'd have given this book the same grade if it weren't for the photos of real-life old paintings, ruins, museums, fields and sights that show up helping us feel we're there even... Continue Reading →
I was able to read this in a day, and even though some of the snippets of letters Lee fabricated drag the story, it was really easy to tell why Lee's first two publications from 1972 and 80 were such hits. She has a way with vocabulary and sentence rhythm that is both fancy and... Continue Reading →
William J. McGinn 