Back to Blog
The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs6/24/2023 * For a twistier approach to the pitfalls of wishes, see The Bottle Imp, written ten years earlier by Robert Louis Stevenson, and which I reviewed HERE. This is short (and free to read on Gutenberg, HERE), but you can probably spend your time better elsewhere: “ The candle-end, which had burned below the rim of the china candlestick, was throwing pulsating shadows on the ceiling and walls, until, with a flicker larger than the rest, it expired.” That means that what happens thereafter is predictable: a fairly reasonable wish causes regret, so people consider using another wish to fix things, despite the warnings. He wanted to show that fate ruled people's lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow." " It had a spell put on it by an old fakir. The great weakness in narrative terms is that the moral of the story is made plain before anything much has happened: When he lets slip the monkey’s paw, the White family are fascinated. Image: “Moonlight After Rain” by Atkinson Grimshaw, 1883 ( Source.)ĭespite the weather, and the remoteness of the house, an old friend visits. the white-haired old lady knitting placidly by the fire.” “ Without, the night was cold and wet, but in the small parlour of Laburnam Villa the blinds were drawn and the fire burned brightly. This early Edwardian (1902) ghost story opens promisingly, juxtaposing the safety of home and family against the dark and stormy night outside:
0 Comments
Read More
Back to Blog
Kalynn bayron this poison heart6/24/2023 So when she discovers that she's inherited an old house from her birth family, she and her adoptive mothers agree that it might just be the fresh start they need.īut there are some very weird things about their new house – from the locked garden surrounded by poisonous plants to the dusty apothecary and the fact that strange people keep turning up on the grounds.Īs Briseis uncovers the truth about the house and her family history, things begin to take even more of a dangerous and sinister turn. But she's struggling to keep her gift under wraps, and it's starting to alienate her friends. Briseis has a very unusual power – she can control the plants and flowers around her.
Back to Blog
Dean r koontz lightning6/24/2023 If the book had been consistent, I wouldn't have been mad. Laura Shane became Sarah Connor, completely uninteresting. He went back and met Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, which could have been cheesy - and it was, a little - but it worked for the most part. The reason I'm saying "movie" is because it would make a better movie than a book (except for that excellent beginning).Īfter the beginning, I was only interested in Stefan's chapters, for the most part. It becomes an action AND a time travel movie. Then, Laura doesn't get molested, she gets out of the orphanage and it becomes an action movie with a lot of explosions. I almost didn't want to keep reading, but I had to. The first 1/4th of this book is one of the best openings to a thriller I've read. You know - "best Dean Koontz", "your favourite Dean Koontz". Before reading a Koontz, I searched online for opinions. This is the first Dean Koontz I finished.
Back to Blog
Steel-looking for cheap and abundant labor. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations-including U.S. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. With no means to pay these ostensible "debts," prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history-an "Age of Neoslavery" that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II.Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A.
Back to Blog
The seventeenth doll6/23/2023 We learn that Dowd has proposed to Bubba, and she now intends to go with him to Queensland. Roo has had a bad season, losing his place as head of the cane cutting team to a younger man, Dowd.īarney tries to smooth things over between Roo and Dowd, who falls for Bubba, a girl who has grown up with the cane cutters. In the seventeenth year, Barney arrives to find that Nancy has married however Olive has arranged a replacement, manicurist Pearl. For sixteen years Roo has spent the summer with barmaid Olive, bringing her a kewpie doll, while Barney romances Nancy. Queensland sugarcane cutters Roo and Barney spend the off season in Sydney each year, seeing their girlfriends. In the United States the film was released under the title Season of Passion. Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a 1959 Australian-British film directed by Leslie Norman and is based on the Ray Lawler play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.
Back to Blog
The queen of spades by alexander pushkin6/23/2023
Back to Blog
King 11 22 636/23/2023 And he discovers time and again just how the past fights back against his plans to change it. There, he falls in love with southern small town life, with his students and with a new librarian named Sadie. Jake then heads to Texas to prepare for 11/22/63, taking a job at a rural high school outside of Dallas. Jake tests his powers to alter the future by shooting the murderous father of a janitor from his high school, knowing that this will save the family from immediate death and destruction at the hands of this monster. Life in the past gets complicated almost immediately, though. And as silly as it sounds, King makes it work that there's a portal back to that year in the back room of the teacher's favorite local deli.Įpping lays plans to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald and thus save President Kennedy and the world from terrible things. Our reviewer, Alan Cheuse, is glad King took it up.ĪLAN CHEUSE, BYLINE: Steven King has written a time travel novel about a Maine high school English teacher named Jake Epping who travels back to 1958. Kennedy, a what-if science fiction take on a subject that's been tackled over and over again by historians. It's about the assassination of President John F. His newest effort, though, has loftier ambitions. Stephen King could probably turn a book about paint drying into a bestseller.
Back to Blog
Currently-lives in Brooklyn, New York City.Awards-Pulitzer Prize, Biography American History Book Prize National Book.Education-B.A., Yalae University Cambridge University.Where-Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA.At a critical time to look back to our roots, Alexander Hamilton will remind readers of the purpose of our institutions and our heritage as Americans. In the first full-length biography of Alexander Hamilton in decades, Ron Chernow tells the riveting story of a man who overcame all odds to shape, inspire, and scandalize the newborn America.Īccording to historian Joseph Ellis, Alexander Hamilton is “a robust full-length portrait, in my view the best ever written, of the most brilliant, charismatic and dangerous founder of them all.”Ĭhernow’s biography is not just a portrait of Hamilton, but the story of America’s birth seen through its most central figure. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow presents a landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who galvanized, inspired, scandalized, and shaped the newborn nation.
Back to Blog
Archangel's Enigma by Nalini Singh6/23/2023 Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability. New York Times bestselling author Nalini Singh returns to her world of dark passion and immortal power-and to one of the most seductive and impenetrable heroes ever to stalk the Guild Hunter landscape. But first they must survive an enemy vicious enough to shatter the greatest taboo of the angelic race and plunge the world into a screaming nightmare. and tempt her to walk into the magnificent, feral darkness of his world. As they race to find the Sleeping archangel before it's too late, Naasir will force her to question all she knows. Enlisted to accompany Naasir, Andromeda, a young angelic scholar with dangerous secrets, is fascinated by his nature-at once playful and brilliant, sensual and brutal. For only he possesses the tracking skills required-those more common to predatory animals than to man. Nalini Singh has brought her A game to the table to once again to remind us why she is one of the top reigning Queens of PNR. Shut Up & Read: Archangels Enigma by Nalini Singh: 568 54: 01:59PM Turning Pages At. Archangels Enigma takes a seemingly incompatible couple and wields her magic to produce a romance that defies the odds while stoking the flames of excitement for book nine. When rumors surface of a plot to murder the former Archangel of Persia, now lost in the Sleep of the Ancients, Naasir is dispatched to find him. Read 1,370 reviews from the worlds largest community for readers. Naasir is the most feral of the powerful group of vampires and angels known as the Seven, his loyalty pledged to the Archangel Raphael.
Back to Blog
Meltdown by Andy McNab6/22/2023 Like most issue books, this is not an easy read, but it's poignant and transcendent as Charlie breaks more and more before piecing herself back together. Through intense, diarylike chapters chronicling Charlie's journey, the author captures the brutal and heartbreaking way "girls who write their pain on their bodies" scar and mar themselves, either succumbing or surviving. Feeling rejected, Charlie, an artist, is drawn into a destructive new relationship with her sexy older co-worker, a "semifamous" local musician who's obviously a junkie alcoholic. But things don't go as planned in the Arizona desert, because sweet Mikey just wants to be friends. After spending time in treatment with other young women like her-who cut, burn, poke, and otherwise hurt themselves-Charlie is released and takes a bus from the Twin Cities to Tucson to be closer to Mikey, a boy she "like-likes" but who had pined for Ellis instead. Seventeen-year-old Charlie Davis, a white girl living on the margins, thinks she has little reason to live: her father drowned himself her bereft and abusive mother kicked her out her best friend, Ellis, is nearly brain dead after cutting too deeply and she's gone through unspeakable experiences living on the street. After surviving a suicide attempt, a fragile teen isn't sure she can endure without cutting herself. |