Completely forgot to review this when I finished it, can now barely remember it. Moderately entertaining but uninspired Gothic in which the heroine spends 90% of the book sorting papers in a spooky attic and searching for her perennially missing dog, with occasional interludes in which someone whomps her over the head, shoots at her, or ties her up ( Read more... )

The opening page of Holland's thriller Grenelle is so bad in so many different ways that I feel compelled to quote the entire thing:

The scandal, a typhoon in a thimble, broke one windy autumn morning and caused, at the beginning, and before anyone connected it with that sad, unexplained death, far more raucous and ribald amusement than it did ( Read more... )

Welcome back to insane cracktastic Gothic land ( Read more... )

While it apparently can’t compete with gems from the 1700s and 1800s, featuring mad monks, demon dwarfs, and attempted rapes in hot air balloons, Trelawny
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Kit wouldn't rest until she exorcised the spirits of her scornful ancestors from the mammoth house which she now possessed. Or so she thought, until the house strangely began to take possession of her. In the mysterious attics which spread like tentacles over the roof, legends of the past came to life. Somewhere there lurked what remained of her ( Read more... )

Three suspense novels, all of them entertaining reads, none of them in the first rank of those author's works. I'd recommend any of them as airplane reads, since they'd keep you glued to the pages, but could be abandoned without too much of a qualm when you're done. Well, personally, I wouldn't abandon the Holland, but that's because it's out of ( Read more... )

Three YA novels, three not-entirely-satisfying reading experiences.

Rats Saw God
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Another Gothic novel by Isabelle Holland. With apologies to The Princess Bride, let me explain-- no-- it is too much-- let me sum up:

Candida is approached by Diana, a childhood not-friend, to be her companion in the apparently haunted Tower Abbey:

"And you think it's a possible twin sister who is haunting you?"Since Candida has just lost her job ( Read more... )

Since this is even more Gothic in some ways than Nine Coaches Waiting-- more unusual-to-the-genre elements but also more coincidences-- I shall italicize the most Gothic elements once more. Antonia Moncrieff, a beautiful editor with a thirteen-year-old son, receives a surprise inheritance: a big house. Yep, girl meets house. This one is a ( Read more... )

My back hurts too much to concentrate to the level the memoir requires and way too much to train, so yay for livejournal and a pillow stuffed behind my back ( Read more... )