lory_enterenchanted's Reviews (582)

Read with a brave English student. There are certain sentences I cannot make head or tail of, so I expect she is even more befuddled. 

Grasping the gist, I think it’s a story about a haunted person. The children could have healed from whatever happened to them, but not under the ministrations of this obsessive governess (who probably had something happen to her in childhood, too). 

The distant, uncaring “master” with whom her obsession begins — is he reminiscent of someone in her earlier life? He starts off the motif of people who don’t want to and can’t connect with each other, except in a selfish exploitative way, which is brought to such a deadly climax through the governess. 

What struck me was her weird determination to skew the world into her personal view of it. The children never give any objective sign of actually seeing the ghosts, yet she is determined that they do. Anything can be twisted into evidence supporting her personal vision (is that the real “turn of the screw”?) 

It’s impossible to tell what truth James wanted us to discover, so it remains a frustrating story. I can only imagine that something happened to the governess to mess up her mind to such an extent that truth cannot be found there.

I read a book in German! Definitely not one of Ende's best, marred by dated and ignorant attitudes toward gender, race, and culture, but around the edges a fun, light adventure story could be detected. Vocabulary was good for my intermediate level.

I'm not sure what to say about this book, a glimpse into a troubled mind and heart that never comes quite to clarity. It is certainly poetic and powerful but does not have enough distance to understand what is happening. And that may be the point; if so it is successful. To judge it seems like judging someone's therapy session.

I enjoy most of Novik's books except the Scholomance ones, so I liked these stories too (and skipped the one set in the Scholomance world). Favorites were the title story, a retelling of Ariadne and the Minotaur, one that imagined Elizabeth Bennett as a dragon rider, and an intriguing glimpse of Novik's next worldbuilding project. 

The novelty of the gimmick has worn off on me already. It was readable but not much more.

Things look up again in the Oz series, in an adventure that brings Dorothy's family to Oz  and sees the return of the Nome King. Humorous portrayals of human foibles along with commentary on the tendency of evil to overreach itself, and a novel nonviolent response.

Just ... no. Quirky sparkly magical non-realism is not for me.

Clever and funny or hopeless and sad? This is really dark humor, with a high body count that belies the flippant tone, and a serious injury left  untreated for an unrealistically long time. The twists and turns kept me reading, along with the intrusive narrative voice, but I was let down by the solution, which felt trite.

Fascinating memoir of a theatrical life in the latter days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and then in early Hollywood. One could make a great movie centered around the road trip Salka takes with a young companion at the end, carrying suitcases full of letters from her earlier life--flashbacks to those times. The finale would be her tussle with the anti-Communist faction. What a lot one could show through this woman's contacts and experiences!

I found this frankly quite unimpressive. Nice window dressing, but with nothing particular behind it, no psychology, no motivation, no narrative shape. Ho-hum.