L.A. Coroner: Thomas Noguchi and Death in Hollywood by Anne Soon Choi This book implies it’s about celebrities for true crime fans, and I kind of thought it might be, since the titular L.A. Coroner who was involved with so many famous cases and autopsies. But it’s not a memoir, it’s a biography, and there’s …
Category: Book Review
Apr 09
Book Review: Unicorn Mountain
Unicorn Mountain by Michael Bishop This is a fantasy book that doesn’t fit neatly into categorizations. It feels less like a fantasy book than a character-driven literary novel that happens to have unicorns and spirits in it. We have Bo, who’s dying of AIDS and has been ostracized by his family for being gay. Libby, …
Apr 05
Book Review: The Willows
The Willows by Algernon Blackwood This is technically more of a short story than a novel, but someone had mentioned it was the inspiration for The Hollow Places, which is a book I adored, so I thought I’d check it out. Actually, the critique of The Hollow Places asserted that T. Kingfisher hadn’t just used …
Apr 02
Book Review: All Systems Red
By Martha Wells I loved Martha Wells’ City of Bones and Death of the Necromancer, which I read decades ago, but I hadn’t seen anything by her in a hot minute, until this series started coming up on my feed. This isn’t a novel-length work; it’s more like a novelette or long short story, which …
Mar 29
Book Review: The Sentence
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich The logline got me to put this book on my wishlist: bookseller is haunted by a ghost. I expected maybe something cute and a little bit spooky, like a cozy mystery with supernatural elements. But this book is much deeper than that. I hadn’t realized it dealt so much with …