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9.5/10
Review: Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Title: Neverwhere Author: Neil Gaiman Genre: Fiction, Fantasy Publisher: Harper Collins Release Date: July 1, 1997 Format: Kindle + Audiobook Pages: 352 Source: Purchased Richard Mayhew is an unassuming young businessman living in London, with a dull job and a pretty but demanding fiancee. Then one night he stumbles across a girl bleeding on the sidewalk. He stops to help her–and the life he knows vanishes like smoke. Several hours later, the girl is gone too. And by the following morning Richard Mayhew has been erased from his world. His bank cards no longer work, taxi drivers won’t stop for him, his hundred rents his apartment out to strangers. He has become invisible, and inexplicably consigned to a London of shadows and darkness a city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, that exists entirely in a subterranean labyrinth of sewer canals and abandoned subway stations. He has fallen through the cracks of reality and has landed somewhere different, somewhere that is Neverwhere. For this is the home of Door, the mysterious girl whom Richard rescued in the London Above. A personage of great power and nobility in this murky, candlelit realm, she is on a mission to discover the…

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9.9/10
Review: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Best Reads , Fiction , Reviews / March 12, 2017

Title: The Underground Railroad Author: Colson Whitehead Genre: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Publisher: Doubleday Books Release Date: August 2, 2016 Format: Kindle Pages: 320 Source: Hartford Public Library From prize-winning, bestselling author Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Colson Whitehead first learned about the Underground Railroad as a schoolboy and visualized it being like the NYC Metro.  That visual is key to his tackling the horrific history of slavery in the US and the attempt of one woman to find freedom in a world that does not see her as human. Whitehead…

Reading Stats: The Underground Railroad
Reading Stats / March 12, 2017

Unusual that I read this in a short window — in part because it was borrowed from the library and because of its popularity, to renew I’d have to put a hold on it and wait.  That being said, once I was 30 pages in I wanted to finish. Read the review: The Underground Railroad  

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8.5/10
Review: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Title: Water for Elephants Author: Sara Gruen Genre: Fiction, Historical Publisher: Algonquin Books Release Date: 2006 Format: kindle & audiobook Pages: 335 Ninety-something-year-old Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant, who gave them hope. Any novel written in the first person runs the risk of a common, unremarkable narrator, far more than a third person narration. Part of the joy of reading Gruen’s Water for Elephants is the memorable narrator in Jacob Jankowski, particularly when it is the elderly version of Jacob speaking. He describes himself as “90. Or 93.”  The elder Jacob’s narrative is interwoven with that of a Jacob in his twenties. The elder’s storyline — Jacob in a nursing home — is amusing and sad at the same time, but ends wonderfully, bringing the story to full circle. Jacob’s descriptions of the fellow home residents, the caregivers, his family, and the vagaries and trials of growing old are amusing and touching.  Jacob feels abandoned by his family and frustrated by the limitations of his life.  He gets into a fight with another resident…

Reading Stats: Wicked
Reading Stats / March 7, 2017

Listened to the audiobook, mostly on 2x which put me about the speed I normally read a book at.  A part of me wanted to complete the book faster.  I totalled 6 sessions between 08 Feb and 27 Feb 2017. For my review, click here: Review: Wicked

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6.5/10
Review: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
Fiction , Reviews / March 7, 2017

Title: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West Author: Gregory Maguire Genre: Fiction, Fantasy, Fairytale Rewrite Publisher: Harper Collins Release Date: September 29, 2009 Format: kindle & audiobook Pages: 432 Source: purchased When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum’s classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious Witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? Gregory Maguire has created a fantasy world so rich and vivid that we will never look at Oz the same way again. Gregory Maguire’s novel transforms the world of Oz, expanding on Baum’s original works and most importantly, telling the story of the Wicked Witch of the West. In Elphaba (later to be known as the Wicked Witch of the West), we have a classic outsider. Her green color and manner set her apart, but so does her upbringing. As she grows up, her political activism again separates her and makes her a target. She is told she is cursed, and despite her brilliant mind, and deep passion for protecting those oppressed, she believes this to be true. Maguire’s Oz…

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8.9/10
Review: Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

Title: Station Eleven Author: Emily St. John Mandel Genre: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Dystopian Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Incorporated Release Date: September 9, 2014 Format: Kindle Pages: 337 Source: purchased 2014 National Book Award Finalist An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. Emily St. John Mandel wrote Station Eleven with a more literary slant to her post-apocalyptic world than the bulk of end-of-the-world narratives out there. You won’t find many action-filled scenes of crazed road-warriors or zombies or gun-toting survivalists chasing down the ‘good-guys’.  There are no long explanations of how society collapsed. Instead, the story focuses on a handful of characters, before and after a plague that wipes out most of the world’s population. The major players in the story are all connected, yet they connect through tenuous threads, and there is no big moment where their stories converge. Kirsten a child actor when the end came, now travels with a symphony and acting troop that performs Shakespeare. Shakespeare and his world…

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8.6/10
Review: The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee
Fiction , Reviews / March 2, 2017

Title: The Queen of the Night Author: Alexander Chee Genre: Fiction Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Release Date: February 2, 2016 Format: Kindle Pages: 561 Source: purchased In the Paris of the Second French Empire, what did it take to rise from courtesan to diva? From a ferociously talented writer who is “the fire, in my opinion. And the light” (Junot Diaz) comes a blazing portrait of a woman who creates her own fate. Lilliet Berne is a sensation of the Paris Opera with every accolade except one: she has never created an original role, every singer’s chance at immortality. When she is approached with an offer to do just that, it comes with a caveat—the opera must be based on a secret from her past that she has thought long buried. Who has exposed her? In pursuit of answers she’s drawn back into her past. An orphan who left the American frontier in search of her mother’s family in Europe, Lilliet was swept up in the glitzy, gritty world of Paris at the height of Napoleon III’s rule. There she transformed herself from hippodrome rider to courtesan, from maid to Empress Eugenie to debut singer, weaving a complicated web of romance,…