Book Review: “On the Other Side” by Carrie Hope Fletcher
Book Reviews / July 18, 2016

When 82-year-old Evie Snow dies peacefully in her sleep, she finds herself back at her former apartment building in her younger years and unable to reach her personal heaven. Upon discovering that her soul is too heavy to move on to the afterlife, Evie realizes she must unburden the secrets of her past life that have weighed her down for over 50 years.

Book Review: “The Weird Sisters” by Eleanor Brown
Book Reviews / November 12, 2014

The book introduces us to the Andreas sisters – three young women, two of whom are in their twenties and one in her early thirties – who reunite in the small college town where they were raised to care for their now-ill mother. The three sisters must now deal with their past, present, and future while simultaneously dealing with each other, something they haven’t done since they were little.

Book Review: “A Dirty Job” by Christopher Moore
Book Reviews / August 24, 2014

In the weird version of San Francisco featured in the same author’s “Love Story” trilogy of vampire novels—”Bloodsucking Fiends”, “You Suck”, and “Bite Me”—lives a textbook specimen of the creature known as the Beta Male. His name is Charlie Asher. He runs a second-hand shop (inherited from his father), shares a four-story apartment building (ditto) with his lesbian sister, and can’t believe his luck when a beautiful Jewish girl marries him and has his daughter. But then death swoops down in the form of a seven-foot-tall record store owner whose name, like his wardrobe, is Minty Green. Suddenly Charlie is a widower, a single father, and because he could see Death coming for his wife, he’s Death as well.

Book Review: “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” by Neil Gaiman
Book Reviews / August 17, 2014

The narrator never tells us his name. He never says exactly whose funeral brings him back to the town where he grew up. Until he arrives at the shore of the pond beyond the farmhouse at the end of the lane he used to live on, he doesn’t even know what has brought him back here. And then he remembers it all.

Book Review: “The Enchantress Returns” by Chris Colfer
Book Reviews / July 29, 2014

Collection spells are not just for debt collectors who want to put the hoodoo on a delinquent customer. In Chris Colfer’s “Land of Stories” series, they are the framework for a quest-like adventure through a magic world teeming with fairy tale heroes and villains. The first book, “The Wishing Spell”, was all about a shopping list of magical items that twins Alex and Conner Bailey needed to assemble in order to get home to the “Other World” (namely, ours). It could only ever be used one more time, and the Evil Queen from “Snow White” wanted to get there first. Now in their second visit to the Land of Stories, Alex and Conner are trying to complete one collection spell, while the Enchantress from “The Sleeping Beauty” races to finish another.

Book Review: “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” by Ian Fleming
Book Reviews / July 8, 2014

We’ve run into this problem before: First it was a novel. Then it was adapted, more successfully than faithfully, into a movie. Then came a film novelization, a novel designed to be more faithful to the movie than the movie was to the original novel. They did it to Pierre Boulle’s “Planet of the Apes”. More recently, it happened to Cressida Cowell’s “How to Train Your Dragon”. It even happened to another book by Ian Fleming. And so your dilemma is this: Which book do you buy or borrow, to read or give to your kids? Which counts as the classic?

Book Review: “Boys of Blur” by N.D. Wilson
Book Reviews / July 5, 2014

Random House sent me a copy of this latest book by the author of the “100 Cupboards” and “Ashtown Burials” series. I thank the author and his wife for arranging it and apologize for once again taking so long over such a short book. Released in April 2014, it is as Heather Wilson described it to me, a mash-up of “Beowulf + football + Florida swamps.” As befits a book based on an epic poem—the classic work of Old English literature, in case you slept through your high school literature class—N.D. Wilson’s retelling is filled with heroes and magic and dreadful monsters, features a seemingly invincible being of ancient and evil power, and has the ring of poetry flowing through its paragraphs of prose.

Book Review: “Rot & Ruin” by Jonathan Maberry
Book Reviews / June 26, 2014

I have never really taken much interest in zombie apocalypse literature. But something about this book appealed to me to that extent. Maybe it was the fly-leaves’ depiction of several collectible zombie cards, depicting not only notable zoms but also a few slayers and other legendary figures haunting the Rot and Ruin—which is to say, just about everywhere outside the fence surrounding the town of Mountainside, California, and the struggling band of survivors that calls it home.

Book Review: “Cosmic” by Frank Cottrell Boyce
Book Reviews / June 20, 2014

Two 12-year-olds from Waterloo, UK (near Liverpool) tell their parents they are going to the Lake District for a school camp, when in fact they are going to the moon. Kids these days! It’s only the latest prank pulled by young Liam, who has made a study of ways to get in trouble by being tall for his age and stubbly-chinned. When adults mistake him for one of them because of his height and mature looks, it’s as if he can’t help himself. It starts at an amusement park, with a thrill ride other kids his age are too short to try. Then there’s his first day in high school, when the headmistress mistakes him for the new teacher. By the time his father catches him trying to test-drive a Porsche, you would think Liam’s fever for mischief has run its course. But you would be wrong. This thrill ride goes all the way to the moon.
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