Our white trash heroine, Angel Crawford, wakes up from an overdose and finds that she’s changed. Changed in an I-w...moreThe Beginning: ”You should be dead.”
Our white trash heroine, Angel Crawford, wakes up from an overdose and finds that she’s changed. Changed in an I-want-to-eat-brains sort of way. That’s a bit of a challenge for a white trash, unemployed high school dropout with a criminal record, an alcoholic father who likes to smash her around and a loser boyfriend.
I had so much fun listening to this. I really liked Angel. With all her bad decisions and low self-esteem, she has a kind and good heart. Even as a zombie. And I’ve always loved stories of people trying to get their life back on track, trying to make something of themselves – especially when they come from nothing and are facing new challenges (like being a zombie).
I would have liked to see more of Angel's trashy side, though. She kept saying ”My usual reaction would be to …”, ”Previously I would have responded …” etc. etc. I wanted her to say and do these things, and not just her trying to get her life back on track. Perhaps Rowland worried that readers wouldn’t like Angel as much, but I think it would have made her development more believable and the book even more fun. But I loved Angel anyway and may stop by some other time for the next book in the series, Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues.(less)
The Beginning: Mma. Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa, at the foot of Kgale Hill. These were its assets: a tiny white van, two desks, two cha...more
The Beginning: Mma. Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa, at the foot of Kgale Hill. These were its assets: a tiny white van, two desks, two chairs, a telephone, and an old typewriter.
The book tells the story of Mma. Ramotswe, the no. 1 lady detective in Botswana – a plus-sized lady with a big heart and a strong mind who opens a detective agency. We follow Mma. Ramotswe in her quests to solve her cases through a number of stories, all connected to form a larger picture of Mma. Ramotswe and Botswana.
I liked the stories and the characters, and the book was well-crafted and original. But to be honest, this genre is not really for me. I don’t care that much for detective stories and I prefer books with a strong plot over books that consist of shorter stories. That being said, this one was really good within its genre. It entertains and touches your heart. It’s cute. Perhaps too cute … I can’t decide. Decide for yourself from the quote below: I told him to go in peace and he said that I should stay in peace. So we left one another and I never saw my friend again, although he is always there, in my heart.
You get a pretty good idea of the atmosphere in the book from this quote. It’s a life-affirming quote, it’s very sweet, but just way too much … It’s an attitude that I like in life, but I don’t want it in my literature. So this will probably be the end of the line for me and the lady detective. It’s just not my thing.
Oh, and the bag in the picture is my second hand Joop! from the lovely Marbles Vintage in Amsterdam. It seems lately I can’t write anything without mentioning that shop!
First line: Things I say to distract Jeremy so I can take a break from making out:
I read this very first sentence on the flight to Amsterdam. It made...more
First line: Things I say to distract Jeremy so I can take a break from making out:
I read this very first sentence on the flight to Amsterdam. It made me laugh. And the book continued to amuse me throughout. It’s about a girl, Mallory, who discovers that her boyfriend is cheating on her – online! He has an online girlfriend. Devastated, she blames not only her cheating boyfriend, but also technology. She then finds an old list written by her grandmother as a teenager, and Mallory starts to long for a time when things were much more simple: I bet she wore really cute cat-eye glasses and giggled over milkshakes on Friday nights with her quarterback boyfriend who never cheated on her with someone named BubbleYum.
So Mallory decides to go vintage. No more smart phones, no more GPS, no more social networks. And a lot of vintage clothing …
I’m a sucker for all things vintage, so naturally I had to pre-order a copy of this one as soon as I heard of it. I was surprised to find that our heroine was only sixteen years old. When I bought it, I thought she would be somewhere in her twenties. But laughter on the very first page made up for it.
It was a cute and fun read, light and entertaining – perfect for a holiday. But it was nothing special, and I would never have read it if it wasn’t for the vintage theme.
How I would love to have the dress on the cover of the book! And it would go really well with the Molly Holly brogues I’m wearing in the picture … For more book reviews or pictures of vintage clothing, please stop by my blog The Bookworm's Closet(less)
First line: The castle was falling apart, but at 2 a.m. under a useless moon, Danny couldn’t see this.
This book seemed to have it all: a troubled pro...more
First line: The castle was falling apart, but at 2 a.m. under a useless moon, Danny couldn’t see this.
This book seemed to have it all: a troubled protagonist ashamed of his past, a man who may – or may not – be seeking revenge, flashbacks to the troubles of adolescence, a castle, a crazy old lady, a mystery, a torture chamber (and I’m not talking about the kind you see in Fifty Shades of Grey), a mass-murder attempt and an actual murder. But I just didn’t care. Something was missing, the something that makes you want to keep reading long into the night, the something that makes you think about the characters when you’re not reading, the something that makes the book stay with you long after you’ve finished it.
The writing annoyed me. Jennifer Egan tried to be creative, I’ll give her that. She just overdid it. She toyed with the concept of a story within a story and kept reminding us that this was just a story being told by a narrator. It wasn’t elegantly done, like Paul Auster or John Fowles would have done it.
There was one part of the book that I really liked, and that was the crazy old lady (aka the baroness). She was fun. I wanna be like her when I get old. And we have one thing in common: from the bottom of our fashion-hearts, we despise men in shorts: You would never see a European man in shorts – never! A man’s legs out in the open like that, it’s … it’s miserably low-class. (page 82).
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