emilyusuallyreading's reviews
746 reviews

I read this book for my Young Adult Literature class at university. I'm not a big high fantasy fan and if you are, you may very well love Sabriel. For me, however, I struggled to make it to the last page and actually skimmed through the last few chapters.

As a character, Sabriel didn't truly compel me. She is so focused, so capable, so steady in the face of danger and sadness, that I had trouble relating to her.

The entire story felt formulaic. It follows Valerie Frankel's "The Heroine's Journey" perfectly. Sabriel is the exact replica of Frankel's description of the "warrior woman." While the story is exciting, it is so carefully paced that I found myself struggling to keep up.

Honestly, necromancing and bringing back the Dead freaks me out and I don't like to read about it. Again, if you do, this may be the book for you. It just wasn't for me.

I read these books for the first time a long time ago, back when I was still in grade school.

Reading The Fellowship again has brought back nostalgia and also allowed me to glean pieces of Tolkien's brilliance I never caught before.

I'm not a huge fantasy fan, but one cannot help but be astonished by the world-building in these books. The languages, the cultures, the adventures are so compelling and beautifully written. My biggest struggle in getting through this book (and it took me forever to finish reading) was the dense language, the slow plot, and the lack of emotion-driven character development.

What I Liked
The premise of Kindred is fascinating. The idea of a black woman in the twentieth century going back in time to meet (and rescue) her white and black relatives from the early 1800s caught my attention immediately. Dana is married to a white man, Kevin, who is brought back in time with her at one point, and this adds even more depth to the plot.

Kindred does an excellent job of placing a modern reader into the mindset of what it would have been like to be a slave in the nineteenth century, treated as subhuman property instead of as an individual with aspirations and independence and true value.

What I Didn't Like
At times I felt that Butler over-simplified the descriptions of the culture at the time. It was as if she did not want to do too much research, so she would skip over what life was like in the 1800s and reveal it instead by having Dana and Kevin feel shell-shocked when they got back to the late 1900s. The dialogue of the slaves and slave-owners was also a little too contemporary, in my opinion. Aside from using "Marse" as a title, the slaves spoke with essentially as clear of English as Dana did (although they frequently made comments about how white she spoke) and one could not tell the difference between Rufus and Tom's speech and the speech of someone living in 1976.

3.5 Stars

What I Liked
Tosca Lee is one of my all-time favorite authors. She writes beautifully. After a few lines of reading, I am completely immersed in the worlds she creates and unable to break free until the last page.

I gained so much historical knowledge and context through Legend of Sheba. Lee also does an amazing job at making Biblical characters feel more real to me. Instead of having the feel of the flat figures on a felt-board, Bilqis and Solomon stand brightly off the page and I now have a glimpse of perhaps what these people were actually like so many years ago.

What I Didn't Like
This is controversial, but Tosca Lee seems to suggest that Song of Songs was written about the queen of Sheba, but some glaring contradictions bothered me. Song of Songs talks about a virgin, about that she grew up as a laborer, etc, etc.

Spoiler

The fact that Solomon and Bilqis never marry but spend their time as lovers makes me a little uncomfortable. I understand that this was Solomon's greatest weakness, but this sin was depicted a little too much as beautiful romance and not enough as something that was wrong. I found myself over and over again rooting for the two to finally be together, which meant that I was virtually rooting for Solomon to disobey God.

What I Liked
Donald Miller has a candor about his writing that is extremely compelling. This is what drew me into Blue Like Jazz and he keeps this style throughout everything I've read of his. The brutal honesty of Miller captures so many of my own doubts and frustrations and revelations. He makes some excellent points in this book.

What I Didn't Like
I know one of the main points of this book was that Donald Miller didn't want to write a formulaic self-help book. I get that. His reasoning makes sense. However, this book doesn't really have structure at all. Miller writes in tangled reflections about his childhood and adulthood, as well as discussions about life boats and circuses and Santa Claus, and I found myself struggling to keep from skipping to the point of each long tangent.

No, this isn't a formulaic self-help book. There also isn't much of a point to it at all. Blue Like Jazz was hugely effective in capturing my experiences as a young adult seeking Christ, but Searching for God Knows What is a pretty accurate title. I found myself ending each chapter thinking, "What is he trying to say here?" While there were definitely a few scattered points that left me floored, and while I loved the explanation of the Gospel at the end, I'm still not sure why Miller wrote the book. What was he ultimately trying to say? Why does he want anyone to read?

The book becomes a little political for my taste. Even though I agree with a majority of Miller's statements (so I'm not speaking from the perspective of someone who is resentful and offended), it comes over a little bit like, "Christians are relying way too much on hierarchy and patriotism and the opinions of others and on being 'right'... but if you believe this about politics, you're wrong."

What I Liked
This is the second book by Ira Levin I've read. He does a masterful job of building tension until my nerves are a knotted tangle. I don't know how he does it, but a story about a young housewife and her nosy neighbors had me so anxious and worried I could barely focus on the page in front of me.

What I Didn't Like
Yes, I live in the 21st century. No, I was clueless about the ending to this book. And it completely let me down.

What I Liked
Anita Amirrezvani is a beautiful wordsmith. Her sentences and stories held me captive. What a lovely piece of historical fiction.

I learned so much about 17th century Persia and the history of the beautiful Persian carpets that I've seen and admired. I also love that Amirrezvani chose to leave her narrator nameless, to honor those artisans who created such rugs and did not sign their work.

What I Didn't Like
There were some erotic scenes in this book. Too explicit for my taste and frequent enough to cause me to hesitate to recommend this novel to my friends and family.

This book is beautiful. Jane is such a strong character. The language of each paragraph is captivating, every single word. I was surprised by every twist and turn to the story and delighted (and equally saddened) by the ending.

The character of St. John was so believable. His stiff, gentlemanly nature and his frigid treatment. I found myself hating him so much for

Spoiler

rejecting Jane's friendship after she gave him so much of her fortune!

.

The stories about the worst of the dust storms are harrowing. I cannot imagine how anyone survived in the high plains at this time, and yet my grandma was one of them. She tells me of a memory when she was five years old and a dust storm hit during school. She and her classmates huddled in the classroom, frightened, and they could see through the window that the midday sky was as black as if it was the middle of the night. I was raised in the Texas Panhandle and I've seen small dust storms that gritted my teeth in dirt. I can't even picture in my mind the dusters that once damaged this area.

The book is long and dense, with details about this time period that may be delicious to a historian but that disinterested me. I found myself skimming through several chapters of this book, and left relatively unexcited.

I'm a huge fan of Lewis Carroll, and I adore the stories of Alice in Wonderland. They're so bizarre that at times it's difficult to maintain understanding of the plot, but it's easy to become wrapped up in the whimsical, fantastical world.