The Crooked Pen

Tag: book blogging

  • Words are Wind: A Depressing Update for “The Winds of Winter” by George R. R. Martin

    It has been two years since I wrote about The Winds of Winter and its slow progression towards release. I heard some time ago that 2020 was a productive year for Martin, inspiring words considering how long this novel has been in the works. The last installment, A Dance with Dragons, was published in 2011 […]

  • Thoughts on The “You” series by Caroline Kepnes (Spoiler-Free Review)

    I will be completely honest. After the dumpster fire that was season 2 of You, I had not planned on engaging with anything in the You universe ever again. However, after about 3-months into a reading slump, I decided to give this series a chance in the hopes that it would be at least moderately […]

  • Thoughts on “Combustion” by Jyvur Entropy

    Summary: Rachel lives in constant fear that she will burst into flames. She can feel the heat building in her gut. She keeps buckets of water under the bed. She keeps them to fend off the flames that her body may create. Autocombustophobia. That’s what they say she has. No one will believe Rachel when […]

  • Thoughts on “The Woman in Cabin 10” by Ruth Ware

    Amazon Summary:  Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, has just been given the assignment of a lifetime: a week on a luxury cruise with only a handful of cabins. The sky is clear, the waters calm, and the veneered, select guests jovial as the exclusive cruise ship, the Aurora, begins her […]

  • Infidelity Isn’t Sexy: A Rant About a Tired Romance Trope

    I want the record to stand that I don’t consider myself the moral arbiter of fiction. While I will critique until I am blue in the face, I’m not one of those people that gate-keeps topics or disallows people to use certain tropes, provided there can be an honest and intellectual conversation about them. That […]

  • Babes in Tropeland: Not ANOTHER Alcoholic Dad, Please

    For decades the easiest way to get across to the audience the protagonist was a poor-unfortunate soul was to make them an orphan; someone with no northern star to guide them through this perilous hell-scape we call existence. It was a method to make the main character sympathetic from the get-go, but it was also […]

  • Thoughts on “Malorie” by Josh Malerman

    SPOILERS FOR “BIRD BOX” and “MALORIE” READER DISCRETION ADVISED Amazon Summary: Twelve years after Malorie and her children rowed up the river to safety, a blindfold is still the only thing that stands between sanity and madness. One glimpse of the creatures that stalk the world will drive a person to unspeakable violence. There remains […]

  • “Beach Read” by Emily Henry (Spoiler-Free Review)

    Summary: A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters. Beach Read is not a book I would normally read. I typically favor thrillers, historical fictions, or some manner of creepy existential […]

  • Thoughts on “The Shadows” by Alex North

    Summary from Amazon: You knew a teenager like Charlie Crabtree. A dark imagination, a sinister smile–always on the outside of the group. Some part of you suspected he might be capable of doing something awful. Twenty-five years ago, Crabtree did just that, committing a murder so shocking that it’s attracted that strange kind of infamy that […]

  • Thoughts on “Invisible Girl” by Lisa Jewell

    WARNING: The following contains spoilers for the novel. Reader discretion is advised. Amazon summary: Young Saffyre Maddox spent three years under the care of renowned child psychologist Roan Fours. When Dr. Fours decides their sessions should end, Saffyre feels abandoned. She begins looking for ways to connect with him, from waiting outside his office to […]

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