Reading Rambo

Emerald Fennell is maddening. She is the daughter of a successful jeweler, she studied English at Oxford, she stars in BBC's extremely popular show Call the Midwife , and to top it all off, she wrote this excellent book. She also looks like this, which is just rude You might recognize her from GIFs I've shoved at you of Call the Midwife 's couple Patsy and Delia. They're the greatest. Just look at them: But let's get away from three-dimensional, well-crafted 1960s lesbian couples on television and get into this three-dimensional, well-crafted 2013 book. Shiverton Hall follows a long line of predecessors in that it's set at an English boarding school. Inevitably comparisons will be drawn to Harry Potter , but that is silly and cut it right out. Shiverton Hall is much darker than Harry Potter ever pretended to be. (except for maybe the time that snake came out the old woman's mouth and she collapsed in a flesh pile) Shiverton Hall is about...

The ever-lovely Emily of As the Crowe Flies and Reads sent me the book The Boundless , because I coveted it due to its kickass cover art. The Boundless  is about a train of the same name, SEVEN MILES LONG, as it whisks across the Canadian wilderness with a young man named Will in tow. Will is great. We love Will. He is also in danger because there's a gold and diamond railroad spike (the final spike from the building of the railroad, that they obviously IMMEDIATELY removed after driving it in) in the heavily secured funeral car, and he is in the way of the dastardly people trying to steal it. The way they set up the funeral car means you immediately think 'oh. he's gonna end up having to break inside that car.' But rather than it being an annoying predictable sort of twist, you're psyched for when it's gonna happen. "Good luck to anyone who gets inside, is all I can say."   "But didn't you say the funeral car had no door?"   ...

If you were ever interested in children's literature, you most likely read Harriet the Spy . If you did not, it is a weird and great book about a girl named Harriet who lives in New York City under the watchful eye of her nanny, Ole Golly, and goes around spying on her neighbors and classmates and writing about it in her spy notebook. Some stuff happens. You should read it. AND THEN. Then you should read this follow-up that I never even knew about until my delightful friend Jenny casually mentioned it the other day. The Long Secret  is about Harriet and her friend Beth Ellen on vacation in a town near Montauk, New York, where both their families have summer homes. Like this dog, they are doing quite well for themselves. THE LONG SECRET  IS MAYBE BETTER THAN HARRIET THE SPY . But this is possibly because I'm reading it as an adult and more aware when Louise Fitzhugh is Doing Something Very Good in her book, as opposed to when I was a kid and thought the  Anim...