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Reviews Written by
Colleen McMahon "bookaholic" (Atlanta, GA)
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Box Office Poison
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by Alex Robinson
Edition: Paperback |
| Price: $19.77 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
All I can say is Wow..., November 30, 2007
I read this book (all 600+ pages) in one long sitting and I will definitely be back to read it again and savor it. It's the story of an interwoven group of friends and acquaintances, mostly in early post-college life, in New York in the mid 1990s. The book mostly focuses on Sherman, a frustrated bookstore employee/wannabe writer and Ed, his close friend who aspires to be a comic book artist. Around them orbit a host of characters, from Sherman's roommates Jane and Stephen, to elderly Golden Age comics creator Irving Flavor (Ed's "boss"), to Sherman's kind-of-crazy girlfriend to secondary and tertiary characters who drift in and out.
Alex Robinson has a great talent for both the artwork (he has a knack for individuating his characters so that it was easy to keep them all straight by their appearances) and storytelling. The dialogue and situations are naturalistic and believable, full of small and large real life dramas, struggles, questions and yes, laugh-out-loud funny moments. Every character has moments of showing deep flaws but at the same time nearly every one has a moment or two of deep nobility. Just like people.
I loved the clean black and white art style--I'm a big fan of Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For, and this book reminds me somewhat of her style--very distinct looks for each character, sharp clear images and (it's underrated but a downfall for a lot of indie books)--crisp readable lettering. I'd never make it through 600 pages of poor lettering!
Definitely not for kids (one of the characters introduces himself on page one as someone who you get to see naked a lot and he is not kidding), this is a story that will keep any adult reading and turning pages to find out how these characters' lives turn out. This is one of those graphic novels that I'll not only re-read myself, I'll recommend highly to friends and happily loan it out. Gorgeous work of art and storytelling, and richly deserved every award it won.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Listening to audiobook in public can lead to embarrassing outbursts of laughter, November 19, 2007
I listened to an unabridged audio version of this book and my review pertains to that version.
This is the third of Terry Pratchett's young adult books I've listened to on audio (via download from Audible), and the second in the Tiffany Aching series. Fledgling witch Tiffany Aching was first seen, along with her violent, often dim but always brave accomplices, the Wee Free Men, in the book called, not surprisingly, The Wee Free Men. In this sequel, Tiffany is now 11 and leaving home to begin her life as an apprentice witch. The plot involves her battles with a "hiver", a parasitic presence that latches onto a strong person and takes them over, eventually killing the host. The hiver is attracted to Tiffany's strong magic abilities and stalks her. How Tiffany "beats" the hiver and also learns a lot of important lessons about growing up (most of them applicable to non-witches out here in the real world) is only part of the attraction of this book. The rest is the rollicking storytelling voice and the humor of the interactions of the characters, particularly whenever the MacFeegles or Wee Free Men show up. Chaos and kicking nearly always ensue, and these are the parts that will get you in trouble with your neighbors on the subway as you laugh out loud at various points in the plot.
Stephen Briggs is a wonderful narrator, who has read all of the Pratchett young adult titles available through Audible. He does a great variety of voices, performing both women and children well, as well as making the MacFeegles' voices unforgettable and hilarious. The accents can occasionally be a little difficult to understand, but it's well worth the effort. Though the Tiffany Aching series and another, standalone book (The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents) are marketed as young adult titles and are certainly excellent for readers age 9-10 and above, there is much for adults to enjoy as well. Highly recommended!
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Disappointing..., August 18, 2007
Meh. I was hoping for more in a book of true crime by a well-reviewed mystery author, but this is just an uneditted collection of Connelly's crime-related newspaper stories from his journalist days of the 1980s and early 1990s. The stories are almost all straight newspaper stories, with all the negatives that implies--little nuance, straight facts, lots of repetitions over a series of stories about the same crime. I was hoping for something more like Ann Rule's "Crime Files" books--yes, reprints, but with some perspective and rewriting. A few of the stories were more interesting, in particular "The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight", which is a longer article telling the story of an almost comically inept gang of hitman-wannabes, who unfortunately succeeded in killing a couple of their targets. This story must have been a Sunday feature or magazine article because it had more development and room to breathe without all the repetition of background details.
Okay, but I expected more from someone with Connelly's reputation.
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2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Audio adaptation is great fun!, August 18, 2007
This review pertains to the unabridged audio adaptation of this book.
A hoot. A novel set in an alternate universe peopled by superheroes and, more importantly, supervillains. The story is told in turn by Doctor Impossible, mad genius, and Fatale, the newest member of a superhero team. Fatale's story is mildly interesting, but Doctor Impossible steals the show with a pitch perfect telling of his life's story and the travails of being a supervillain. Not quite a complete satire but certainly not serious. I listened to the unabridged audio of this and highly recommend it; the reader for Doctor Impossible's half of the story is wonderful and spot-on in his narration. A slight but certainly enjoyable book, particularly for anyone with affection for superhero comic books.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Fabulous, Fun and Even a Little Educational, August 18, 2007
I loved, loved, loved this "graphic novel" (not so much a novel but a collection of stories). The Adventures of Rabbi Harvey is a collection of Jewish folktales told as Western adventures featuring Rabbi Harvey of Elk Spring Colorado. Rabbi Harvey's stories involve his own travels and encounters with double-crossers and odd types like the boy who insists he is a chicken, as well as moral dilemmas brought to him for his rabbinical ruling. Since I'd read/heard some of the stories previously, I am assuming that many of them are based on traditional Jewish folktales but some seem to be original stories. It's a nice mix and all are deftly and humorously illustrated, with funny asides from the rabbi, onlookers, even the occasional animal or inanimate object (when a traveling merchant attempts to cheat a woman out of a bag of money he is supposed to deliver, throwing only one coin on the table, the head on the coin wonders, "Why am I not surprised?"
There is a distinct Jewish flavor to the tales, set in a neverland of all-Jewish Western towns, and I definitely recommend this book for older kids and adults alike who want a fun and easily digested book of Jewish stories. But even for non-Jews, this is an entertaining book of stories with moral points of view, told with a sense of humor. HIghly recommended, this one is a keeper for me and I sincerely hope there are more Rabbi Harvey books to come.
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Premeditated Murder
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by Ed Gaffney
Edition: Mass Market Paperback |
| Price: $6.99 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Good First Effort, August 18, 2007
I picked up Premeditated Murder, the first novel by lawyer-author Ed Gaffney, because I'd heard of him through his wife Suzanne Brockmann, one of my favorite romantic suspense authors. Overall I found the book readable and the main characters enjoyable, although the plot of the story ended up being sort of far-fetched and some of the storylines almost totally extraneous.
The main plot involves two close friends and law partners, Zack Wilson and Terry Tallach, who take on a nightmare indigent defense case. The perpetrator freely admits to a massacre in which he shot 6 people dead in cold blood, and further admits to carefully planning and preparing to carry it out. He has a reason for his behavior but it is nearly unbelievable--yet it is the only shot the lawyers have at avoiding a near certain guilty verdict and death penalty.
Intertwined with this is a tumble of other plots--one involving a likeable US President-by-accident who uncovers a frightening top level government plot, an aspiring investigative reporter in Detroit who is doing her best to figure out another branch of that plot, and a planned terrorist attack on the Fourth of July--that all somehow come together in the murder case. Certain of the storylines, such as one involving a cop and an injured teenager, ended up going nowhere, and others, like the one with the reporter, were sketchy. Their only relevance seems to be in setting up characters for later reappearances.
Nevertheless I did find myself turning pages quickly even though I was less than totally satisfied by the end. I did like the main characters well enough to try another Gaffney book, and hope that the potential I see in the pacing, dialogue and likeable characters develops as he continues to write.
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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
Insightful and Frightening, August 18, 2007
Martha Stout has written an invaluable book for professionals and laypersons alike. In it, she asserts that statistics show that about 1 in 25 people are sociopaths--people who are unable to feel empathy with others and who thus find it terrifyingly easy to act in completely selfish and immoral ways.
The classic image of a sociopath is a serial killer like Ted Bundy. These are fortunately a tiny percentage of the sociopaths out there--as Stout points out, the serial killer's desire happens to be to physically torture and kill other people. What he has in common with other sociopaths is that they are all utterly selfish in pursuing their own desires. The serial killer has one type of desire but far more common are the sociopaths who seek more mundane goals, of acquiring wealth and influence, or of simply bringing down everyone around them or even merely living off the efforts of others.
Stout does a good job with some composite portraits of sociopathic types and certainly aids one in identifying the sorts of people you might run into in your own life, even if you are unlikely to run into a serial killer type (fortunately). There isn't much on how to deal with them except to identify and avoid, but the tools for comprehension that she offers are invaluable.
The book is useful reading for just about anyone, but I especially recommend it for people in law enforcements or other professions where you deal with criminal behavior as it definitely helps in seeing patterns of behavior (and knowing approaches to take in investigations, interviews etc) that you might not pick up on otherwise. Excellent book and a quick read to boot.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Interesting but confusing, August 18, 2007
This was my first 8th Doctor/Sam novel, and the first Doctor Who novel I've read that precedes the ones from the current series. At least the first in a long time--I read a few of the Target novelizations back in the day, and I can say that this is head and shoulders above those.
In this story, the Doctor and Sam are forced out of the time/space continuum into a standoff between two rival empires, those of Nimos and Emindar. An Emindarian luxury liner has been dragooned into standing watch over a bizarre ship/structure/derelict that appears to possess mysterious power and technology; the Nimosians have arrived in a military ship to press their salvage claim. As both groups attempt to land on and explore the craft, bizarre and frightening attacks on them commence from ghostly figures--attacks which soon spread to the two ships.
The book kept me reading well enough, and the plot setup is suitably creepy. Characterizations are quite thin and there are plenty of extraneous characters who didn't seem to have much to do except, eventually, go mad and die. It was hard to feel any sympathy for anyone. The most intriguing part of the plot turned out to be the most incomprehensible as well, as the source of all the attacks appears to be a vertible gordian knot of time paradoxes within paradoxes, all of which made my head hurt by the end and which I never really sorted out. Overall the novel was an interesting but not entirely satisfying experience, but would do as a stop gap between new episodes of the ongoing series. I would give another of the 8th Doctor novels a try.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
The Spellmans put the fun in dysfunctional..., June 25, 2007
Kind of a cross between chick lit and a mystery about a truly dysfunctional family of private investigators who tail each other, run criminal checks on significant others and generally act nuts. The main character is Isabel Spellman, who at age 28 is trying to have a real life and get out of the family business, and also solve a 12 year old missing person case and keep her boyfriend a secret, all at the same time. I loved the narrative style, which intersperses transcripts, lists and narration. The book is mostly zany and humorous, and the family too eccentric to be really believable, but still enjoyable. One reviewer on the book cover called it a grown up Harriet the Spy, and I find that apt--both books have a cast of unbelievably eccentric types that couldn't exist in the real world but who make perfect sense interacting in their own universe. A quick and fun read. I look forward to more from this author!
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Nice start to a historical/mystery novel series..., June 25, 2007
I listened to the unabridged audio edition of this book and my review pertains to that edition.
Silent in the Grave is a Victorian mystery with a heroine, Lady Julia Grey, who is recently widowed, slowly coming to believe her husband may have been murdered. She enlists the help of the mysterious and volatile private investigator Nicholas Brisbane, who both infuriates and attracts her. Despite the Harlequin imprint, this is far more mystery/historical novel than romance, although there is a developing something-or-other going on between the two. This is the first of an apparent series so the relationship aspect is there as a long-term thread, not something resolved in this first book. The book seemed overlong at times but I did like the depth of the atmosphere and details of late Victorian life in a rather eccentric family. It's not a fast moving book and I'd guessed a lot of the twists, but the last third of the book really picks up speed and concluded satisfactorily.
The book is told in the first person, and the dithering of the heroine can be irritating. It took me a long time also to get used to the narrator, who is definitely NOT English, doing an assortment of British accents. At times the accent falters noticibly and although I was able to get past it, I can see where it would annoy a lot of listeners to the point of having to turn off the book. It would be nice if they found a real English person to narrate other books in the series.
Although I became impatient with the slow pace at times, I did enjoy the book as a whole and look forward to more books in the series.
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(Atlanta, GA)
