The ramblings of a bibliophile.
I’m really glad that I read this novella before Sucker Bet. If I had’ve started this after Sucker Bet, and realised that it was a tale about Sasha… I probably would have been seriously pissed off. She was kind of a bitch in the novel. But this novella made me sympathise with her and actually like her. Or at least, admire her a little more for her strength and gumption…
This was a great finish to a really fun little series. Alright, there are three novellas which follow it chronologically, but I read them before reading the full length novella, and they don’t really add to the greater storyline. However, Sucker Bet does and it provides some much needed answers to the political and social intrigues which are peppered throughout the four main novels.
As someone who is halfway through her PhD and just entering the world of academics… I can completely understand Richardsons’ incredible need to just… crack. Right down the centre. With absolutely no finesse. Alright, I don’t actually want to crack, and I definitely wouldn’t do what he did… but we’ve all had our moments of instability, and I found Beagle’s take on this in this short story incredibly entertaining and intriguing.
At one point or another, we all feel like we’ve been overlooked in high school. Or at least, everyone that I know feels that way… but this story took that feeling to a whole new level. And kind of a whiney one. I really liked the concept, and loved the writing (hence the four-star rating), but I seriously had to take a star off for Paige’s down right insanity…
This is kind of a strong story. It intertwines death, feminism and the choices we make in life. And it truly asks the question: what is right and what is wrong? Where are the shades of grey? Or in the case of this story, where are the shades of the Grey Ladies? After all, they haunt through this story in an eerily familiar way with each flick of a page.
I’ve been putting off reading the next instalment in The Monstress series until it would complete a little more of one of my reading challenges… and when it finally came up on that week in my challenge… well, I completely devoured this. It probably helped that I was having a kind of dark week, and the darkness in the illustrations and storyline of this graphic novel hit the spot perfectly… now I just have to save up the money for the next book in the series…
Eating competitions fascinate me. They’re weird, random and something that I couldn’t fathom doing myself… mostly because I already feel way too sick whenever I overeat even slightly. When I found out that actually being sick is a huge taboo and has its own name (a reversal of fortune), I was drawn completely into the tale. It had me laughing out loud, smiling, and chuckling at the ways in which Holly Black was able to take a fairly typical trickster tale and turn it on its head.
This story was a little familiar. Although it took the author’s little spiel about why he wrote this story to really drive home just why it was so. It was reminiscent of the Allied Forces leaving Vietnam after the war. Both leaving lovers behind, and, in some cases, trying to bring them home with them. Something that I can’t quite fathom. But by placing an American at the centre of the story, it made it much easier to understand.
I liked how all of the moments in this story were measured in short bursts of time. Almost as though each moment was actually worth sixty-six seconds and it was only in those short periods of time which the tale could be told. Breaking up the time and storyline in this way created an incredibly fast paced and intense short story. One that had me racing along with it every step of the way.
Arranged marriages are something that I don’t understand and have never had first hand knowledge of. Which means that any story which features this are going to be completely fascinating. After all, I read because I want to understand the world and things around me better… so this story was completely fascinating. Impossible to put down and made me feel like I could understand the world around me a little better…
