Category: Reviews

Book Review: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

On By cherylmahoneyIn Historical Fiction1 Comment

Agatha Christie is one of my go-to authors for audiobooks–I’m not sure how that happened, but there it is.  The only downside to audio is that I can’t really flip back and see just what Dame Agatha said early on after a twist emerged, to decide if she lied to me or not.  Reading (listening to) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was particularly interesting because I happened to know the twist of the ending–it turned out to be fascinating to see how she built it all up.  And she definitely withheld information, but she didn’t actually lie!

This is the third Hercule Poirot mystery, the fussy Belgian detective best known (I think) for The Murder on the Orient Express.  In classic Christie fashion, wealthy Roger Ackroyd is found murdered in his study, rendering everyone else in the house a suspect.  Poirot sifts through the web of motives, alibis and deceptions with the help of Dr. Sheppard, our first person narrator for the story.  Everyone has something to hide, and the final twist truly is magnificent.

This was my favorite kind of mystery–an intricate puzzle with piece after piece gradually fitting together until the entire picture makes sense.  There are many layers of narrative here, as most characters have something going on unrelated (but we don’t always know that) to the central murder.

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Book Review: NPCs

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, ReviewsLeave a comment

I love it when I get a good book recommendation from a friend.  I recently heard about NPCs by Drew Hayes, and was very happy to find to find it every bit as fun as promised.

The books opens with a group of tabletop gamers playing Spells, Swords & Stealth (more or less Dungeons & Dragons).  They promptly make a dumb decision and all four of their characters die in a tavern at the very beginning of their quest.  The story then shifts to the other inhabitants of the tavern–the NPCs, or non-player characters.  Fully-developed people, they have their own lives and concerns.  And a new problem–the four dead adventurers, whose deaths (though accidental) could bring the king’s wrath on their entire village.  Gnome Thistle, half-Orc Grumph and humans Eric and Gabrielle decide the only solution is to take up the adventurer mantle themselves and try to complete the quest.

I love this premise so much.  One of my favorite story angles is to tell the story from the traditionally overlooked characters (as you might be able to tell from my books…)  I love the concept that all those people just passing in the background have lives and personalities just as complex as the people the camera/story happened to be focusing on.  Hayes explores that beautifully without getting too heavy-handed about it.

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Book Review: The Golden Road

On By cherylmahoneyIn ReviewsLeave a comment

I never closed the loop on this one from the January L. M. Montgomery reading challenge.  I reviewed The Story Girl, then went on to reread its sequel, The Golden Road.  I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked the first book…and then got more clarity of my earlier impressions by rereading the second book.

The sequel picks up much where the last book ended, and continues in the same style.  The children of the King family ramble around their family farm and orchard: Dan, Felicity and Cecily, hired boy Peter Craig, neighbor Sara Ray, Toronto cousins Beverly (a boy, despite the name–also the narrator) and Felix, and cousin The Story Girl, so nicknamed because of her telling of stories.

On a surface level this book matches the previous one, but once you scratch said-surface it isn’t really the same after all.  It’s still a lot of light-hearted stories about a group of children in Prince Edward Island, and the stories still centered around Montgomery staples like family gossip, school trials, the local colorful character Peg Bowen (who the children are convinced must be a witch), and the raptures of nature.

Despite all that, I rather think the sequel has been letting its predecessor down.  I’ve always read these books as a unit before, never stopping to analyze them separately, which I think is why I never realized how good The Story Girl is…because The Golden Road doesn’t live up to it.

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Movie Review: When We First Met

On By cherylmahoneyIn Reviews2 Comments

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c7/When_We_First_Met.pngI was lately looking for something fun to watch on an afternoon, and decided after browsing Netflix to give When We First Met a chance.  Partially the premise was interesting, but also I wanted to see if I could repeat the magic of Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.  And while I think that was a better movie, I was pleasantly impressed by this one too.

A time-travel romantic comedy, I freely admit this premise had the potential to be a little bit skeevy.  Noah has been carrying a torch for his friend Avery for three years, and hits rock bottom at her engagement party to Ethan.  He’s convinced that if he could just go back to the night he and Avery met, a Halloween party where they shared an instant connection, he could get it right this time to start a romance instead of a friendship.  Thanks to a time-travel photo booth, he gets the chance to try, traveling back to that fateful night.  Repeatedly.

There’s a little bit of Groundhog Day here, in that Noah keeps reliving the same night and trying to do something different each time, but with a very cool twist.  After each Halloween party, Noah bounces back to the present, the morning of Avery’s engagement party, and gets to see the effects of the choices he made.  His life (and Avery’s life) becomes radically different each time depending on how that crucial night went.  Not too surprisingly, he makes everything worse the first time.  And the second time.  And…  You get the idea.  I loved seeing the (admittedly slightly exaggerated) effects of his choices as each possibility plays out.

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Book and Movie Review: To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before

On By cherylmahoneyIn Reviews, Young Adult2 Comments

As part of my goal to read more love stories in 2019, I decided to give To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han a chance.  I really enjoyed the movie version, so I figured it was worth trying the book–even though I wasn’t really a fan of The Summer I Turned Pretty, also by Jenny Han.  Well.  It turned out this was one of the rare times when the movie really was better than the book.

The fundamental premise of both the book and the movie is slightly absurd–teenager Lara Jean writes love letters to her crushes, not to send them, but just to put her feelings into words.  She writes them, addresses them, and then puts them away to save.  But then her letters get mailed by mistake–including the one to Josh, her sister’s (very recently) ex-boyfriend.  In a panic to hide her feelings for Josh, Lara Jean tries to convince him that she’s really in love with Peter, one of her other letter recipients.  Peter just broke up with his long-time girlfriend, and suggests that he and Lara Jean pretend to date, to make his ex jealous and to throw Josh off the track.

Like I said, it’s kind of absurd, but worth going along with.  At least in the movie, which had a lot I liked.  It’s a cute, funny teenage romantic comedy, with a silly premise but believable and likable characters.  I like that it has a lot of diversity–Lara Jean and her two sisters are biracial, Korean and Caucasian; besides their parents’ interracial relationship, none of the guys she crushes on are Asian.  Mostly white, one is African-American (and gay).  But what I liked best was that Lara Jean used her words, a lot.

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Movie Review: Christopher Robin

On By cherylmahoneyIn Juvenile, Reviews2 Comments

I missed Christopher Robin when it was in theatres last year, but I watched it just last week at home.  If I did end of the year ratings of the movies I watched, this would be a serious contender for best of the year!

The movie begins where the Winnie-the-Pooh books end–they overlap with the first scene of the movie and the last scene of The House at Pooh Corner.  I always thought this was one of the saddest scenes in literature, as Christopher Robin is growing up and going away, and has to say good-bye to Pooh and his other friends.  The scene is faithfully and beautifully reproduced.  Bring your tissues!  The movie then goes on, Christopher Robin grows up, and somewhere over the years he loses his way.  He becomes, to borrow a phrase from J. M. Barrie who also wrote of children growing up, a “man who doesn’t know any stories to tell his child.”  But then Winnie the Pooh comes out of a tree outside Christopher Robin’s house in London, and wants to bring him back to the Hundred Acre Wood.

I have a soft spot for the Winnie the Pooh characters, and this was a charming delight of a movie.  The characters are beautifully rendered, in terms of portrayal and the excellent CGI for the stuffed animals.  They truly feel like Milne’s characters brought to life, and the details are all spot-on.  I notice when movie adaptations get it wrong, and this one got it so very right.

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Book Review: The Inimitable Jeeves

On By cherylmahoneyIn Historical Fiction, Reviews1 Comment

In my quest for more funny reads this year, I turned to P.G. Wodehouse and an audiobook of The Inimitable Jeeves.  I am happy to report much hilarity was found.

This is the thirdish Jeeves book I’ve read–the previous two were both short story collections and turned out to have some overlapping.  This one was more properly a novel, but still very much episodic.  The premise was much the same as it was throughout the short stories: English gentleman Bertie Wooster gets into some sort of social scrape–or has a friend in said-scrape, in this book frequently Bingo Wilcox, who falls in love a good half-dozen times throughout the book–and turns to his utterly unruffled manservant Jeeves for help.  Or, alternatively, he tries to go it alone because he and Jeeves are on the outs, probably because Bertie is making a firm stance around a flamboyant article of clothing which Jeeves disapproves of.  Either way, Bertie usually manages to make the situation worse before Jeeves ultimately solves it with an ingenious manipulation of human nature.

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