I found the beginning of this book oddly worded. It read more like the script for a play to me, which I did not care for. After that, the story alternates between what happened before the death of Jenny and after. I found that this did nothing to enhance the story, but instead, made it less en...
“In what day in what month of this queue of years would she find that she had become a rootless stranger, a speck in the urban sprawl?” – Stir-fry page 13If there was one book that I read and I thought ‘this book is me’, this book is it. It is a book that stayed with me and even if I someday f...
Have I ever been so in love with a book of short stories as this? The only one I can think of that would come close is Margaret Atwood's Good Bones, but that was less a book of short stories than it was a collection of prose poems and reimagined faerie tales. No, this is it. And Emma Donoghue is ...
“Clothes outlived people, she knew that. Clothes were more of a sure thing.”“Slammerkin” refers to both a loose woman and a loose gown, and the sartorial is a constant motif in this story about a teen-aged prostitute named Mary Saunders in London and Monmouth, a Welsh border town, in the 1760s. ...
12/20/2013: Here it is January 24. Oops. I got derailed over Christmas, and I’m just getting back to the important work of book reviews! Of course, since much of the point of writing these reviews is to help me remember what I’ve read, and it’s now a month since I finished this book, I…um…don’t r...
I hadn’t read any Donoghue, so thought a collection of short stories would be a good introduction and safer than investing in a novel (burned by Sarah Waters, I won’t assume a mainstream writer will necessarily be good).These are terrific. If there had been more lesbian stories, it would have got...
Diese und weitere Rezensionen findet ihr auf meinem Blog Anima Libri - Buchseele Emma Donoghues „Zarte Landung“ ist gleichzeitig faszinierend und anstrengend. So gegensätzlich wie die beiden Protagonistinnen in diesem Roman waren auch meine Empfindungen beim Lesen.Einerseits war es für mich irgen...
"Climbing to the witch's cave one day, / I called out, / Who were you / before you came to live here?/ And she said, / Will I tell you my own story? / It is a tale of a kiss."Do you ever find a book and just know it's going to be everything you love in the world? Only you can't read it right away...
I’ve known for so long that reading books are no different from going on trips–we pack our imaginary suitcases and fly elsewhere according to our whims. Reading historical fiction gives us the bonus perk of time-travel so apart from the freedom in choosing our dream itineraries, we’re also very m...
Set in the nineteenth century, Isabel Miller's classic lesbian novel traces the relationship between Patience White, a painter, and Sarah Dowling, a farmer, whose romantic bond does not sit well with the puritanical New England farming community in which they live. Ultimately, they are forced to ...
Emma Donoghue is an Irish-Canadian playwright, novelist and literary historian with a gift for immersing herself in the past and presenting it for modern readers in the form of well-crafted stories. Her bestselling, award-winning novel Slammerkin (2000) captures the underworld of prostitution in ...
His study is real cold; the back of his big chair is smooth like an icicle. I know every object in this room, but it is as if I have never stepped across the threshold before.The newspaper folded on the desk says January 18, 1901. I still can’t get used to it, this century I mean. It sounds most ...
There was nothing I knew how to make or mend. I was innocent of all effort; I was blank as a page. As a child in my parents’ manor I used to play a game because I knew no better. I would walk into the kitchens ten minutes before dinner and lift my little hand. Stop, I woul...
Until he sold the Great Novel for a hefty enough sum to pay the rent on his apartment for a few years, pragmatism seemed to be called for. In the distant past, the writer had tried every joe-job he could think of; he'd picked grapefruit and filed insurance applications, fried pancakes and sold fi...
However, it was inspired by almost fifty cases of so-called Fasting Girls—hailed for surviving without food for long periods—in the British Isles, Western Europe, and North America between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. These girls and women varied widely in age and background. Some o...
I’m looking out the window for it, but Grandma says it would be in the backyard, not the front, anyway it’s not hung up yet because it’s only the tenth of April. There’s bushes and flowers and the sidewalk and the street and the other front yards and the other houses, I count eleven of bits of th...
Year in which the King rode to Drummond Castle: 1496. Number of Lairds who had already given their daughters to the King as mistresses: unknown. Month in which the King rode to Drummond Castle: April. Number of languages spok...
They sold melatonin for jet lag and chromium picolinate for sugar cravings. There was chocolate-free chocolate and honey-pickled ginseng. In the next aisle, two huge young men debated whether powdered pearl would help them achieve definition. There were trays labelled JUICE-YOUR-OWN WHEATGRASS; N...