It's going to be rather hard for me to say anything about the book without giving away plot points that need to be discovered on your own, but I do want to say how much I appreciated the author's ability to craft a tightly woven story, saturated in fear. So to whomever you are, I thank you for reviewing this book and convincing me that I needed to read it. Of course I think it helped that I was on a Gothic fix at the time, so it sounded even better. All I know is that after reading that review, I knew I had to give it a go. I can't remember who's review I first saw that made me want to read this book. And she must descend into the darkness at the heart of the Wraxford Mystery to find the truth, even at the cost of her life. Years before, a family disappeared at Wraxford Hall, a decaying mansion in the English countryside with a sinister reputation. Constance is left alone, her only legacy a bequest that will blight her life.įor Constance's bequest comes in two parts: a house and a mystery. Constance takes her to a seance: perhaps she will find comfort form beyond the grave. Constance Langton grows up in a household marked by death, her father distant, her mother in perpetual mourning for Constance's sister, the child she lost.
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Will Smith's transformation from a fearful child in a tense West Philadelphia home to one of the biggest rap stars of his era and then one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood history, with a string of box office successes that will likely never be broken, is an epic tale of inner transformation and outer triumph, and Will tells it astonishingly well. Along the way, Will tells the story in full of one of the most amazing rides through the worlds of music and film that anyone has ever had. One of the most dynamic and globally recognized entertainment forces of our time opens up fully about his life, in a brave and inspiring book that traces his learning curve to a place where outer success, inner happiness, and human connection are aligned. But I can now read books with male protagonists without getting bored, and while descriptions of filth might still induce a flinch or two, I can usually soldier through them. Happily, my reading horizons have broadened, although to this day, I believe dialect is something quite easily overdone and very easy to get wrong. No, I preferred stories starring female protagonists who were perennially clean (or I never heard otherwise) and spoke the Queen’s English. Also, not being myself a fan of being dirty, I didn’t really like to read stories where the characters were dirty and their dirtiness was a matter of description or discussion. I also refused to read any books that used overly dialectal dialogue (especially if that dialect was in any way backwoods-y). I was fond of thinking of myself as an avid reader, but I refused to read (unless required) any books that had boys as main characters (too boring, according to me, then). When I was a young child, I had pretty distinctive “likes” and “dislikes” when it came to reading. Marra is thirty years old, though she often feels a bit younger, but I’ll give her some grace: she got sent to a convent at fifteen and prior to that she was a sheltered princess her naivete isn’t exactly her fault. There’s simply no choice: Marra must kill her sister’s husband. But what is Marra, a useless, minor royal with no real power or influence able to do? Her comfort and ability to ignore the outside politics comes with a price: she is devastated to learn that Prince Vorling, her sister’s husband, is abusive and controlling, and her kingdom’s safety is balanced on his knifepoint. Marra is shipped off to a convent to avoid her having any children that may try to lay claim to their throne, and she spends her next fifteen years doing honest, hard work with the nuns of Our Lady of Grackle. Luckily her oldest sister is the one married off-and then her next-oldest sibling (to the same man!) after their sister dies in a tragic accident. Marra is the youngest of three princesses in her royal family’s modest kingdom, and if you ask her, she isn’t really suited for the royal life. It’s not doing the book inside justice (although I’ve seen images of the inside of the hardcover book and it’s much cuter, but alas I am more of an e-book gal). This feels very YA, even though this is an adult book, and not something I’d really look at twice. Bonus Factors: Found Family, Loyal Pets, Magic Journalist Dorian Lynskey’s book The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 discusses the novel’s origin, development, and impact. It is also one of the world’s most famous works of fiction. The book’s power is such that its concepts – such as Big Brother and the Thought Police – are familiar to millions of people who haven’t read the book.ġ984 can be (and is) read as a dystopia, a prophecy, a satire, a political thesis, a science fiction novel, a psychological thriller or horror story, a gothic nightmare, a postmodern text and a love story. Not a decade, year or even week goes by without something happening that brings us back to George Orwell’s novel-world 1984. At around that time, Amazon introduced an update of Astro, its household robot, and received complaints because, as one user explained, “its sharp tracking system for monitoring people was almost creepy.” In late October, speaking about Ukraine, a Russian legislator noted, “The special military operation not only takes place on the battlefields, but also in people’s minds, in their souls.” That same week, it was discovered that the Chinese government had set up “police stations” in nearly 20 countries to monitor its citizens abroad. A still shot from Michael Radford's film '1984', based on George Orwell's novel of the same name. Meticulously researched and including hundreds of interviews with Dylan's closest associates, the brand new chapter also covers the last ten years of Dylan's life, and the last (and previously unpublished) interview with Dylan's first serious girlfriend. It gives the complete picture of the man, the artist and performer. This new edition of Howard Sounes' critically-acclaimed classic biography of Dylan includes a new chapter that brings the legend's life story right up to date. In doing so he not only defined the direction which popular music would take in the second half of the twentieth century, he also defined the lifestyle which would come to be associated with the rock artist. A true revolutionary, he was also the first pop performer to adopt the attitudes and lead the life of a bohemian artist. 'Engagingly written and scrupulously researched' ObserverĪn UPDATED EDITION of Howard Sounes' classic, definitive biography to mark the legendary Bob Dylan's 80th birthdayīob Dylan was the first figure in the history of popular music to challenge the domination of the three-minute pop song and to bring serious ideas and poetry into the song lyric. Of course David Remnick sheds light on these subjects, but where King of the World really shines is in the ring itself. "By now we all have our notions about what Ali meant - to his time and to the history of his sport. Most of all, King of the World does justice to the speed, grace, courage, humor, and ebullience of one of the greatest athletes and irresistibly dynamic personalities of our time. He gives us empathetic portraits of wisecracking sportswriters and bone-breaking mobsters of the baleful Liston and the haunted Patterson of an audacious Norman Mailer and an enigmatic Malcolm X. In charting Ali's rise from the gyms of Louisville, Kentucky, to his epochal fights against Liston and Floyd Patterson, Remnick creates a canvas of unparalleled richness. No one has captured Ali-and the era that he exhilarated and sometimes infuriated-with greater vibrancy, drama, and astuteness than David Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lenin's Tomb (and editor of The New Yorker ). Six rounds later Ali was not only the new world heavyweight boxing champion: He was a new kind of black man who would shortly transform America's racial politics, its popular culture, and its notions of heroism. The bestselling biography of Muhammad Ali-with an Introduction by Salman Rushdie On the night in 1964 that Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) stepped into the ring with Sonny Liston, he was widely regarded as an irritating freak who danced and talked way too much. The novel follows Russia’s top female sniper during the Second World War, Lyudmila ‘Mila’ Pavilichenko. I finished the book as soon as it was out! What is The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn about? It’s just taken me a while to write this review. That’s been the case with The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn. And I’ll usually devour it within a week of it being released if I didn’t get an advanced review copy. As soon as I see a new book from her, I’ll mark it as “want to read” on my Goodreads account. Whenever you see a book from Kate Quinn, you’ll want it to be an automatic “want to read.” That’s certainly the case with The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn.Īfter the likes of The Huntress and The Rose Code, Kate Quinn has become one of those authors I immediately look out for. Charlotte suffers no matter where she is - in her own time there are subjects she's good at and others she's not, but she and Clare aren't the same, so she's constantly in trouble for work not done, and in her own time her piano teacher can't understand why one day she struggles with her scales (Charlotte) and the next, she can play her pieces easily (Clare). That's all very well, except that Emily, a sharp child, has woken up to the fact that there's something odd going on, and challenges Charlotte who, without Clare actually there to back her up, tells. A day later, in her own time, she finds another notebook - Clare has written to her, having worked out that there's clearly something very odd about the bed they share, suggesting that they keep each other up to date via the books - Charlotte is to write in Clare's diary - and that Emily not be told. The next night, the same thing happens, and to clarify for herself what's going on, she opens the book by her bed - 'Clare Moby PRIVATE' - clearly a diary, a diary dated 1918. She muddles through, allowing the extroverted Emily answer all the 'new girls' questions that are fired at them from all directions and collapses into bed, only to wake up the next morning back in her own time. Her 'little sister' Emily thinks she - 'Clare' - is having an unusually slow day. They are the bellwethers of our generation. Water protectors at Standing Rock ushered in a new era of militant land defense. In 2019, the mainstream environmental movement - largely dominated by middle- and upper-class liberals of the Global North - adopted as its symbolic leader a teenage Swedish girl who crossed the Atlantic in a boat to the Americas. The path forward is simple: it’s decolonization or extinction. But as we show here, it’s the soundest environmental policy for a planet teetering on the brink of total ecological collapse. “Land back” strikes fear in the heart of the settler. Vigilante, cop and soldier often stand between us, our connections to the land and justice. We have been made “Indians” only because we have the most precious commodity to the settler states: land. Ĭolonialism has deprived Indigenous people, and all people who are affected by it, of the means to develop according to our needs, principles and values. This is an abridged excerpt of the introduction to The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth by The Red Nation, originally published at the Progressive International’s Wire. |