Month: July 2012

Room by Emma Donoghue

[rating=4] Riveting. Read this nearly in one sitting. Incredibly well crafted, ‘Room’ is a crazy but successful exercise in trying to inhabit the minds of people whose experience is far outside your own ken. I wonder if Emma Donoghue wrote this purely from reading reports of abductions, or if she interviewed women who have lived […]

The Big Four by Agatha Christie

[rating=1] I hesitate to use the word “awful” in association with the Queen of Crime, but ‘The Big Four’ is a bad egg. Penned (some say ghost-written) during Dame Agatha’s worst year: In 1926, her mother died and her husband told her he was in love with another woman and wanted a divorce. No wonder […]