I had a really hard time getting into this book, and I’m not sure if it had more to do with my current state of mind (extreme stress and borderline depression #2020sucks) or with the long, rambling sentences which alternate between extreme highbrow and earthy lowbrow (perhaps in imitation of the young adults who are […]
Well, this one certainly won’t qualify for Book Riot’s Read Harder 2020 task about a murder mystery with no women victims! And it was a bit of a difficult read because of that–there are a number of reviews on Goodreads complaining about the level of violence in the book. For a reading challenge about setting, […]
I read this in March 2020, just as everything was shutting down. Due to my stress level (#2020sucks), I did not write a post or make any notes. I did, however, highlight passages in my Kindle copy. I remember not really liking this book. But, in looking at the passages I marked, I felt like […]
Wow! If you want a good look at race relations in the 1930s, this is your book. It takes place in the Sabine River bottoms–which occupy several hundred miles along the border between Louisiana and Texas, south of Shreveport to just north of the Gulf of Mexico. Somewhere I read that the Sabine also marks […]
OOF! When I first tried this one, I just could not get into it. So I put it aside, figuring I’d find something else for North Carolina’s cities… and struck out on that front. So I went back to Redemption Road, and… well, it wasn’t quite as bad as before… but it wasn’t great. I’m […]
This one is a wonderful book for our challenge–the saltwater coastal marsh where Kya lives is a vibrant vital part of her life, and an integral part of the story. The marsh birds are present not just in their calls, but in their individual feathers and characteristics–some of them incredibly detailed: the crest feathers of […]
I’ll be reading more by Ron Rash (though perhaps not for this challenge)! One reviewer on Goodreads quipped that Ron Rash’s novel Serena is “like Macbeth in a logging community, with a Greek chorus,” and I kept coming back to that description as I read–especially in the Greek chorus bits! I was also reminded of […]
I recently started listening on Audible to Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, and discovered the salt water marshes along the North Carolina coast. So far, this is an entrancing listen, and the wonderful descriptions of the marshes make me wish I had a hard copy of the book so I could share some […]
I’ve been putting off New York for a while now, but as I finished Hawaii, I decided to come back to the opposite end of the country–and to my roots. I was born and raised in a small town in upstate New York. I have family in the urban areas of upstate–Binghamton, Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, […]
This one reminds me a bit of the thriller I read and posted about in New Hampshire Pre-Visited–it really didn’t do it for me in terms of plot or characters, but there were some great descriptions of Idaho and Lake Coeur d’Alene that I really wanted to post. I’m reading my way across the USA–5 […]