Review: The Casual Vacancy

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Audio Version


The author writes as if she's broken free of a world where children only do bad things when they are victims of adults and adults for the most part love all children and those that don't are justly punished. In other words, there's a feeling of "this is what happens when you look under the pretty rocks" to this book, and I like that sort of thing. It's over long by a bit (and still no one dares to edit Rowling, even in a new genre!) but as dark character study fiction goes, this is good stuff.


Tom Hollander as the audio narrator earns five stars all on his own. Perfect match of story to voice!



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Review: The Mill River Recluse

The Mill River Recluse by Darcie Chan

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



I'm being very generous with 2 stars, but the book does have an interesting setting and with a good setting I can wade through a lot of bad plotting and shallow characters. And that's what this book has - a silly plot that never quite makes sense and characters who get too many paragraphs for what little they have to do with the boring "mystery". The world building is good, everything else is bad.



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Review: Talulla Rising

Talulla Rising by Glen Duncan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



The idea of a monster as a mother is interesting, and for the first third of this book, Duncan turned that idea every which way. Unfortunately that left two thirds of the book with an exhausted theme. The carry over from the first werewolf book, Vampires looking to the "wulf" for a remedy to light sensitivity gets more convoluted and slightly more interesting. I'm not sure there was entirely enough new story for this book, but if you enjoyed The Last Werewolf, you'll like this well enough. By no means should you read this book first.



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