Timeless by Gail Carriger
An Alexia Tarabotti novel, The Parasol Protectorate: Book the Fifth Seeing as this it the fifth, and final, book in this series, knowing anything about the plot probably counts as spoilers...
24 March 2012
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
Mabel and Jack have left home and family behind and travelled to Alaska, to the edge of the world, trying to turn the wilderness into a farm that will support them....
19 March 2012
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway
Joe Spork is mild mannered clockmaker. He wns and runs a shop fixing clockwork devices, from clocks to Victorian dirty toys. He doesn’t make a profit, in fact, he barely scrapes...
5 March 2012
Specials by Scott Westerfeld
Book 3 in the Uglies series. Read for the Not just for Stormtroopers sci-fi challenge & the 2012Science Fiction Experience. At some point in the future a biological oil-eating weapon brings...
16 January 2012
Beauty by Robin McKinley
A retelling of the story of Beauty & the beast Read for this year’s RIP challenge. Check out the RIP review site. Honour is the youngest of three girls. Her mother...
18 September 2011
The hum and the shiver by Alex Bledsoe
Bronwyn Hyatt is coming home. A war hero. Or so some people say, others say she hasn’t changed a speck from the trash Tufa slut she was before she left, but to her family all that is important is that she is home. Back among the Tufa. And who are the Tufa? Well that no on seems quite sure of. They’ve been in the mountains of east Tennessee since before anyone can remember. Closely knit, and prizing musical ability, they live apart from other people. And Bronwyn is a true, pure-blooded Tufa, a First Daughter. But a haint is visiting, and there are ominus signs everywhere her people look.
7 July 2011
Embassytown by China Mieville
Embassytown is a human colony on the planet Areika, the inhaitants are known by the local humans as the Hosts, and they are unique among life-forms as they cannot lie. Their Language is so tied up with meaning that they physically cannot speak what is not true. Avice grows up on Areika, but she has the talent of immersing, which is a sort of navigation through space, and so goes off-world. but one of her platonic husbands is a linguist, and fascinated by Language, so they return to Areika. And just in time to witness the whole world go to hell with the arrival of a new Ambassador.
1 July 2011
I capture the castle by Dodie Smith
Cassandra Mortmain’s father is a famous writer; unfortunatley he has been suffering from writer’s block for years. Her mother is dead, but she has a lovely stepmother now in Topaz. She also has a younger brother Thomas, and and older sister, Rose. And then there is Stephen, who has grown up with them, not forgetting the dog Heloise and the cat Abelard. They live in a ruin of a castle in England, and have no income. Which means no money for clothes, repairs, rent, or food. They have sold everything worth selling. And then the two Cotton brothers arrive on the scene.
18 June 2011
X-Men: First Class dir. by Matthew Vaughn
Charles Xavier and Eric Lensherr weren’t always the famous Professor X and Magento. This is their origin story, the origin story of the original X-Men. Set in the 1960s with the Cuban Missile crises at boiling point, the pot of tensions is being stirred further by Sebastian Shaw, a mutant who has been doing the rounds since the 1940s. He believes that mutants are the superior race, and that they must destroy the inferior human race in order to take their rightful place as masters of the earth. Lebensraum and all that.
6 June 2011
Hanna dir. by Joe Wright
Hanna is sixteen years old. She lives with her father in the woods in isolated Finland. And when we first meet her she is stalking a deer through the snow, shooting it with a bow and arrow before finishing the injured animal off with her knife. To say she hasn’t had the most normal of upbringings is not an exaggeration. Her father has trained her to survive, to adapt, fight, and to kill. Now that she is growing up she wants more. She wants to experience the rest of the world. But to do so she must first help kill her father’s old enemy.
23 May 2011
Pretties by Scott Westerfeld
In the world of Uglies once you turn sixteen you also get to turn “pretty”. That is you undergo surgery that’ll get rid of all your old imperfections and instead make you beautiful according to the conventions of evolution and society. In book one Tally was the last of her friends to turn sixteen, and so was left alone when they all turned Pretty and moved to Pretty-town.
Spoiler warning for book one in effect.
7 April 2011
Spartacus : Gods of the arena dir. by Steven S. DeKnight
First things first, this is an awesome show. Awesome! Anyone who says different is just plain wrong!
When I first started watching Spartacus : Blood and Sand I have to say that I wasn’t overly impressed. Obviously influenced by the style and look of 300 it seemed to be a show that existed only to show glossy violence and sex. And boy did it ever show that. But after the first few episodes it developed into a very enjoyable, almost addictive, show. But then its star was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and so film making was delayed as he underwent treatment. And so instead of a second season we got a prequel. Spartacus : gods of the arena. Don’t be fooled by that name in the title, this has no Spartacus as all, instead it tells the story of how John Hannah’s Lentulus Batiatus comes to run the family ludus, and how Crixus becomes a gladiator.
23 March 2011
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