Review: Ready Player One

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book. I liked the main character, Wade, and was happy to follow along on his adventure into virtual reality and his quest to find the egg. Wade grew as a person through the story, which made the novel more interesting than it would have been with just the adventure story. The characters that are his friends and enemies were interesting as well. The bad guys are really bad and I loved Ache, his best friend. It was quite an adventure: movies, music, video games from my youth all mixed together into an amazing puzzle. I knew it was worthwhile to know all the lines in great movies.

I was a bit hesitant starting this book as some of the Goodreads reviewers I follow complained that it had too much exposition. I guess my 19th century novel reading has made me more tolerant than some because I wasn't bothered by the amount of exposition.

A fun book full of clever ideas about how the future could be that will take genXers on a ride down memory lane.

I am counting this as my sci-fi title for the Read Harder Challenge.

Loved it!

The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am going to need to read this book again. It is a complex series of interconnections and transformations and now that I finished it and know how it began I want to read the ending again. Yes, that seems backwards, but it is how this excellent novel is constructed we start with a story set in 1999 and then we go back in 2 distinct jumps to previous periods in the house's history. The story is intriguing, the characters well-drawn, and the structure brilliant.

This is my contribution to the October Books You Loved Link Up. 
It also counts toward the What's in a Name 7 challenge as a book with a reference to time in the title.

Review: Salvage the Bones

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a powerful and beautifully written story about love. Love among siblings; the tremendously misplaced love of 15-year-old Esch (the narrator) for Manny (the father of her unborn child); the love of a man for his lost wife; the love of children for their lost Mama; and the all-consuming love between a largely abandoned boy and his dog.


The setting is the home of a very poor family in rural Mississippi in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. Ward structures the book like a diary with each day having an entry. The language is often poetic, even when describing some very brutal events. The story is told from Esch's point of view. Esch has been reading Greek mythology (her summer reading assignment from school) and sees parallels between her world and her reading (isn't that the point of reading?) which give the novel more heft than it would have otherwise. It also increases the anxiety level, which is plenty high already with what the reader knows is coming to the Gulf Coast as Katrina bears down on them. As I read there were a lot of parts where I thought I knew what was about to happen and didn't want to "watch." The pacing of the writing was so pitch perfect that I couldn't look away. The ending is what it needed to be. (Spoiler alert--it is for the most part a happy ending.)

This is Ward's second novel, she published Where the Line Bleeds in 2006. Salvage the Bones won the 2011 National Book Award.