From the back cover: Gemma Doyle isn't like other girls. Girls with impeccable manners, who speak when spoken to, who remember their station, who dance with grace, and who will lie back and think of England when it's required of them. No, sixteen-year-old Gemma is an island unto herself, sent to the Spence Academy in London after tragedy strikes her family in India. Lonely, … [Read more...] about A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray: B-
Books
The Brimstone Wedding by Barbara Vine: B+
From the back cover: "It's crazy thinking I can tell her," says Genevieve Warner, thirty-two years old, thirteen years into a loveless marriage, and recently swept into her first passionate love affair. "She's so old. She'll have forgotten what sex is." But Stella Newland, the gracious, dignified, dying woman that Genevieve cares for in an English nursing home, has not … [Read more...] about The Brimstone Wedding by Barbara Vine: B+
Eat or Be Eaten by Jinko Fuyuno and Yamimaru Enjin: B-
Masaki Ashizawa is employed by a management consulting firm and is renowned for rehabilitating struggling restaurants and persuading his clients to his way of thinking. His current project involves finding the perfect chef for a new French restaurant being secretly opened by Chef Yanaginuma, a big name in the business, and when Ashizawa tastes the cooking of Chef Tsubaki, he … [Read more...] about Eat or Be Eaten by Jinko Fuyuno and Yamimaru Enjin: B-
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler: A-
From the back cover: Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. After saving a drowning white boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life. During numerous such … [Read more...] about Kindred by Octavia E. Butler: A-
The Private Patient by P. D. James: B
Book description: In James's stellar fourteenth Adam Dalgliesh mystery, the charismatic police commander knows the case of Rhoda Gradwyn, a 47-year-old journalist murdered soon after undergoing the removal of an old disfiguring scar at a private plastic surgery clinic in Dorset, may be his last. Dalgliesh probes the convoluted tangle of motives and hidden desires that swirl … [Read more...] about The Private Patient by P. D. James: B