thegreatmanda's Reviews (459)

This is a Kinsey Millhone book, and it’s the last one we’ll ever get. You’re either here for that, or you’re not. If you’re the sort of person who reads a book like this and then complains about anachronisms, just move along. Seriously. “But airport security wasn’t that great until 9/11!” That varied a LOT by individual airport, and it wasn’t non-existent - the 21st century did not suddenly invent hijackings. “But I was a teenager in 1989 and I knew how to dupe a VHS, why doesn’t Kinsey know?” Because Grafton wasn’t writing this in a vacuum. Maybe she wanted to believe a young person might pick this book up at random some day and get interested in Kinsey, and maybe she wanted that young person to understand how different copying a recording during the VHS era was. Maybe she was just old, sick, and angry about dying, and wanted her editor to leave her book the hell alone. Who knows. My point stands - if you’re reading this book to make those kinds of arguments, just put it down and go read something else instead.

For my part, reading these last few Kinsey Millhone mysteries has been like revisiting an old friend I had missed. I’m glad we got as many as we did, I’m glad to have read them, and I’m sorry that this particular version of the alphabet ended in Y instead of Z.

Haunting, and painfully beautiful - Station Eleven is set against a backdrop of pandemic and apocalypse, but is about the people who experience it, and how those experiences define their lives.

Survival is insufficient.

I would rather break the world than lose you.

This work is a short collection of poetic love letters, set in a sci-fi world left intentionally vague. In the sense of being made purely of beautiful words written upon ripples in a pond, it gets 5 stars.

As Red herself might say, looked at in another way, with human eyes, as a novella, it gets 1 star.

As lovely as so many parts were to read, there wasn't much behind the words to make me want to keep going. I always had to remind myself to keep reading, even though I was always glad when I did.