The State of the Stacks - 7/15/16

The Best American Essays, 1990 - edited by Justin Kaplan

I collect these books, because I think they sound like such a good idea, and then never get around to reading them. So, this year, I'm going to start reading them. From my shelves.

The Twelve by Justin Cronin

A re-read, because I have the third and final in the trilogy which just came out this spring. I have enjoyed the first two novels very much, and I'm looking forward to completing the story. From my shelves.

Resistance: A Woman's Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France by Agnes Humbert


My current non-fiction read. From my shelves.

Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver


On loan from my mom. I'll be seeing her in a couple of weeks, so I'm hoping to return this to her then.
















What's on your nightstand??

What's Making Me Happy This Week

We all know of my love for Hamilton: The Musical. This past Saturday, creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, along with primary actors Phillipa Soo and Leslie Odom, Jr., took their last curtain calls on Broadway. It was a lot of fun to be able to watch that curtain call live. Before their last show, The Schuyler Sisters gave us one last, beautiful song to remember them by -





I cannot stop watching this. The level of brilliance required to conceive of, and then execute, something like this - amazing.







 I know I'm not the only one enthralled with the story of A Song of Ice and Fire. (Game of Thrones for those who just watch on HBO). This combines my love of the books with my nerdy love of history.....spoiler alerts, this follows the timeline of the novels, so fans who just watch the show might find a few differences.....







What cool things have you discovered lately?

Book Thoughts: Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Page

Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Page
published 2014
452 pages


Synopsis -

I didn't ask for any of this. I didn't ask to be some kind of hero.

But when your whole life gets swept up by a tornado - taking you with it - you have no choice but to go along, you know?

Sure, I've read the books. I've seen the movies. I know the song about the rainbow and the happy little bluebirds. But I never expected Oz to look like this. To be a place where Good Witches can't be trusted, Wicked Witches may just be the good guys, and winged monkeys can be executed for acts of rebellion. There's still a yellow brick road - but even that's crumbling.

What happened? Dorothy.

They say she found a way to come back to Oz. They say she seized power and the power went to her head. And now no one is safe.

My name is Amy Gumm - and I'm the other girl from Kansas.

I've been recruited by the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked.

I've been trained to fight.

And I have a mission.
My thoughts -


I.......hmmmm.

I REALLY, REALLY wanted to like this book. And I didn't not like it, exactly. I found the premise to be extremely interesting, and the new characters the author introduced had a lot of potential. My problem is that by the end of the book, basically nothing that the author promised in the book description had actually happened.

That's not to say NOTHING happened. There were lots and lots of things going on, almost all the time. Every page had some new situation Amy had to extricate herself from. It just wasn't the situations I expected - this just wasn't quite the book I wanted it to be. So, probably, my bad.

But also, Amy never really became a character in her own right. She seemed like a girl who had a lot of things happen to her, but I never quite got to the point where I cared. As a character, she isn't the person I am actually interested in in this story, and as a reader that's concerning to me.

Now, as I said before, I didn't NOT like it. There were enough seeds that piqued my interest that I will be reading at least one more book in the series. I'm hoping for more depth, however, or I might never know if Dorothy does, indeed, die.

Finished - 6/25/16
Source - South Side library
MPAA rating - PG for fantasy violence
My rating - 3/5