Tag: Henry Holt & Company

ARC, Books

Book 965: Flamer – Mike Curato

Geoff W

I was not expecting this one to be such a gut punch. I don’t know why because looking at the cover with the flames, the derogatory name, and the unhappy boy scout it should’ve been obvious, but still it got dark.

There was so much in this that I identified with from growing up as a boy scout, being chubby, and figuring out my sexuality. It was like looking in a very unflattering mirror with added identities for the protagonist who was half Filipino and making the transition from private middle school to public high school.

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Books

Book 788: Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell #1) – Hilary Mantel

Geoff W

I clearly was not in a hurry to read this one. It has been on my Kindle since I purchased it in December of 2011 and that was TWO years after it won the Booker Prize! I avoided it for some time because I was waiting for the remaining two books: Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020), but I also avoided it because it’s a freakin’ tome. It comes it at just under 560 pages.* Thankfully the next one is shorter (436), but the last is 200 pages more coming in at 764 pages! OOF that is going to be a commitment when I get around to it.

I also actively avoided it because that was around the time that I came to realize that in general I find myself enjoying the runners up to the Booker Prize more often than the actual winner. There’s like a mental hurdle I don’t think I can quite make the leap over to fully appreciate and see the beauty in most of the winners. I knew this was long and I knew that it had A LOT of description and the formatting was weird (minimal quotation marks, the point of view), so I knew it would be a big challenge for me.

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ARC, Books

Book 99: The Land of Decoration – Grace McCleen

Geoff W

Yesterday I wrote about reading my first Advance Reader’s Copy of a novel and promised the review and here it is. As mentioned yesterday, this is an advance copy provided by the publisher and I did not receive compensation to review this novel. The views and opinions in this post are my own.

It’s hard to know where to begin, thus yesterday’s post, but I’ll just delve right in. As with most of the novels I read I’ve only selected a few things to focus on for this post.

Overall, I thought the novel was interesting and well written. Judith, raised by her religious father, is a 10-year old living in England and is facing what she believes (and her religion often believes at various intervals) is the end times. Told from Judith’s point of view the story did have some issues occasionally, but this worked well for most of the novel. Her language, and even her emotional reactions/descriptions, often times switched into what I felt was an older child. Although described as quick and advanced for her age and not having habits like most children, I can see why Judith’s voice would come across older, but sometimes it was just too much of a stretch (and not like she was mimicking adults, but almost like her voice was lost in the writer’s voice).

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