Private detective Cormoran Strike is back on a new case in The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith (a pseudonym for Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling). After solving the high-profile murder of supermodel Lula Landry in last year’s The Cuckoo’s Calling, Strike has had almost more business than he can handle, most of it filled with divorce cases, jealous lovers and jobs for the tabloids. It’s not particularly fulfilling work but it’s allowed him to finally start clearing his debts, even if he’s running himself ragged in the process, causing his leg, which was amputated after an explosion in the war in Afghanistan, to become increasingly more painful.
It would be next to impossible for me to write a review of The Fault in Our Stars at this point. The book has become a part of the pop culture landscape, an iconic work that will forever be a part of a generation’s vocabulary. It’s also been out for two years and has surpassed the point where any review that I could write would mean anything to anyone. So instead, I decided to do one of my “not quite a review” posts, with some general thoughts about the book and my experiences with it, because the last thing it needs at this point is one more review.
Warning, this review contains spoilers for the previous books of the series, Divergent and Insurgent.
Allegiant, the third and final book in the Divergent trilogy by Veronica Roth, picks up right where its predecessor left off. At the end of Insurgent the factionless had taken over, doing away with the faction system and killing the leader of the Erudite. A video had been found which revealed that the city was sealed and the faction system put in place in order to fix the problems of the outside world, and that when enough Divergent had appeared they were to emerge into the larger world to fulfill that purpose. Tris and Tobias/Four had reconciled and decided to no longer keep secrets from each other. What we were left with at the end of book two was a long list of questions and an uncertainty as to what could possibly happen next.
Thomas wakes up in a dark room and can’t remember anything from his past except his name. The room is an elevator, slowly rising until doors above him open to the sky and he finds himself in a glade surrounded by teenaged boys, just like him. The glade is surrounded by towering walls and beyond those walls lies the maze, a deadly mystery whose walls change position every night and which is filled with murderous, biomechanical creatures. Each day, some of the boys run out into the maze, mapping its movements and searching for a way out, but they have to be back by sunset so that they’re not trapped in the maze with the creatures when the doors close automatically.
There was a bit of a stir when the warmly received The Cuckoo’s Calling was discovered not to be Robert Galbraith’s debut novel, but that he was in fact a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling. The reasons behind the pseudonym seem pretty obvious considering the critical and public reaction to Rowling’s previous novel, The Casual Vacancy. Using a different name allowed Rowling anonymity, where her book could be taken on the value of its content alone, without the hype, expectations and preconceptions that would have come from releasing “J.K. Rowling’s new novel”. And, tellingly, Galbraith got some very good reviews before the secret slipped, with several reviewers finding it hard to believe that The Cuckoo’s Calling could be a debut novel.
The Cuckoo’s Calling is a pretty straight-forward detective story, but is relentlessly entertaining and filled with memorable characters. It tells the story of the death of Lula Landry, a supermodel whose fall from her penthouse apartment was ruled a suicide by the police. Continue reading
The Casual Vacancy, J.K. Rowling’s follow up to the Harry Potter series is a bit difficult to review, or even to classify. It’s one part political drama, one part small town comedy, while also being largely an ethical fable about our attitudes toward others, the interconnectedness of our lives and the consequences of our actions. It’s a seedy, foul-mouthed take on a host of issues that can feel both exaggerated and painfully realistic and believable at the same moment. And while on the surface The Casual Vacancy has little in common with Harry Potter, both stories begin in the same fashion, with death.
The opening of The Casual Vacancy is a far cry from the double murder that began Rowling’s other series, starting instead with the rather pedestrian death of Barry Fairbrother as he collapses in the parking lot of the local golf club on his anniversary due to an aneurism. Continue reading
The Love Pirate 