book reviews

The Doubtful Guest Author: Sarah Waters I've read and enjoyed all of Sarah Waters' books and felt like I knew what to expect from this one, too: a suspenseful, twist-filled thriller with a historical setting, gay/lesbian main characters, and complex layers of double-crosses. Instead, I feel like I just read an Emma Donoghue based-on-a-weird-historical-news-story novel — not that that's a bad thing, it’s just... different. Spinster Frances Wray, in her late 20s (ouch), and her widowed mother live in genteel poverty in post-WWI London, gradually failing to make ends meet since the business failure and death of Frances' father. Reluctantly, [...]

Fool Me Again Author: Robin Hobb Back in 2013, I attended an author reading with Robin Hobb and her cover illustrator Jackie Morris (who, by the way, lives in Wales and has a bunch of cats and is extremely funny and charming). Hobb was there to promote her then-newest book, the conclusion of the Rain Wilds Chronicles trilogy, but at the Q&A I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Will there ever be another Farseer book?” I’m sure she gets this question constantly, but she answered graciously, if ambiguously, that it was always possible. Sneaky, sneaky… she must have been working [...]