The Rogue Book Reviewer

Hey everyone! As promised, I am working through American Gods,  while simultaneously   listening to Jim Butcher's Storm Front. In the meantime, I thought you may like to know a bit more about me.  I am a lifetime book lover, which I'm sure is unsurprising, given the fact that I'm working on a book blog.  I'm a big fan of young adult novels, historical fiction and romance, fiction, sci fi and fantasy and I have just started getting into memoirs. These will be the most common genres featured on the blog. You will notice some of the stuff I review is quite old (case in point, American Gods ) but I have never read them, so you'll be getting my take.  I chose to be the Rogue Reviewer because I very often disagree with reviews- I will adore books that people hate, and hate books that win literary awards. It happens. The same is true of movies I review.  I will also occasionally have some featured reviews from some of my favourite readers, especially those tha...

Well now. I can't help but feel like Mr. Gaiman is capitalizing on the success of Marvel's Avengers, but at the same time... this is NEIL GAIMAN, PEOPLE. Norse Mythology is going to be so accurate and detailed that I can't wait.  Interestingly enough, I've never actually read a Gaiman book, but his reputation (and work on Doctor Who) precedes him. I'm a fan without ever having cracked a novel. His rep is THAT incredible. I bought American Gods and plan to read it this month so I can stop sounding so silly raving about a book that's not even out yet, by an author I've never read. I know it's cliche to pick American Gods as your first Gaiman, but it just looks so good! I swear, there's no paid advertising in this post...

This was my first attempt at reading a Carolina Slade mystery by C. Hope Clark and I honestly was not sure what I was walking into as it is also outside of my usual genre.  The result? Clark has given credence to the saying “You never know if you’ll like it until you try it.” I absolutely loved it. I am very good at judging the end of books and up until I was reading the black marks on the white page I was not sure of how it would play out and even now I’m sitting here thinking “Wow… that person did it?!” And it made perfect sense.  Clark writes engaging characters who are absolutely believable as real people. They are nuanced, flawed and react to situations as any normal person would. Relationships are built, maintained, created, broken down and fixed in such a way as to make the reader think that this is how they would handle the same situation.  Her attention to detail is fantastic without being over the top so you get lost in the minutiae. It is easy to see Slades hou...

Loved it.  This book was one of those books I picked up in the bargain section and thought, ooh! Pretty cover! Read the flap and bought it.  Fast forward to a year (if not more) later. I looked at my ever-growing pile of "books I bought to read but haven't read yet" pile and the cover caught my eye again. Okay, lets go. I absolutely loved it. I was hooked, and read the whole thing in about six hours. I'm a fast reader but even I was impressed. Then I got sad because I didn't have the second one but the next day, I went to my pile to find something else to read and BAM! Dreamless.  I loved the characters, I loved the story line, I loved the recommendations at the back (I'm currently reading The Goddess Test by Aimee Carter and really enjoying it). I don't have a single bad thing to say about any of the books in the series, aside from the fact that I discovered them too late so Goddess had to be ordered in and I had to wait for it. Definitely a new fan for M...

I have to say I wasn't a fan. The book relied heavily on Russian folklore which I found interesting as I have no background knowledge in it, but I felt that there was very little in terms of plot, character, or relationship development. It seemed very... Clear cut, obvious? Drudgery is the word that comes to mind more than anything. It's a lot of the drudgery tasks that come along with being a witch and a lot of waiting. You could pick any character aside from Maks and Lissa and lift them out of the book without actually having any impact on the book itself. Rafe seems like a romantic foil that was thrown in to allow Lissa to grow as a person but he just seems too easy and kind of boring. There's a lot of unnecessary plot with him and the church ladies as well. You could take any plot line out and again, have no impact on the story as a whole. I guess I just expect more from fantasy novels and there isn't really any explanation of what "kin" is. It reads lik...

I am very sad to report this: 5/10. I have been looking forward to this for ages. I read it in about two hours and I am very bummed that I didn't enjoy it as much as I was hoping to.  Maybe it's coming off of Anna Kendrick's Scrappy Little Nobody which was full of personal anecdotes, Lauren Graham feels more like a slightly more detailed resume. There is very little about her personally, and every anecdote is tied into something she has done as an actor or a writer.  That being said, Lauren Graham is notoriously closed off about her personal life but if you're not going to throw in some other details then why write a bio? Memoir? What's the right term for this? I should learn that before I become an editor. Either way. I'm super disappointed. I was expecting a lot more related to Gilmore girls. Anecdotes from the set (there is one chapter devoted to her thoughts on each season which is very short, and one chapter devoted to A Year In The Life which is equally sh...

Highly recommend. It's funny, insightful, relatable. It's 1am and I just powered through. I still feel strongly that if Anna Kendrick and Hey-Hey the rooster from Moana had a baby, that baby would be my (admittedly fucking weird) spirit animal. I love it. She's hilarious. 5/5.  I think my favourite thing about Anna Kendrick's book is that if you take the tone in her tweets, it completely translates to her book. She's got that element of self - deprecating, not-quite-an-adult-even-in-her-late-twenties thing down and her tone makes you feel like your BFF is telling you all about the stuff you missed while she was away trying to make it as an actor.  I also love that nothing is off limits. She very easily flows from childhood, to adolescence, to early adulthood, spinning a tale of a growing girl who doesn't know what the hell to do with boys, to her first encounter with sex, to the tiny apartment she still had after winning her first Oscar.  Seriously, the most ...

Well. I finished it.  I sense an impending trilogy, though we already know that Adelaide is Moth from The Virgin Cure.  It is one of those things that I felt that it could have been done in 200 pages, instead of five. I ended up skipping over quite a few of the newspaper outtakes, or rather skimming them for pertinent information but I found them more distracting than anything.  I felt that there was very little character development for anyone other than Beatrice, and  even that wasn't so much development as watching her learn something we already knew she was very interested in. I'm sure the next book will be about Mr.Palsham and maybe Sophie which may be more interesting but I feel like this one sets you up for what is coming, rather than the current goings-on. It shows the relationships between the women and Brody, without giving much more than cursory backstory. A set up book shouldn't be 500 pages. I'm not sure that I will read the next one. Maybe if I'd star...