https://blog.vollink.com/tags/book-review+drama/ Recent content in book-review+drama on On My Mind... Hugo -- gohugo.io Wed, 21 Aug 2019 12:00:00 -0400 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/08/the-adventures-of-tom-sawyer/ Wed, 21 Aug 2019 12:00:00 -0400 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/08/the-adventures-of-tom-sawyer/ Book cover This is a book that I've known about for most of my life, and Tom Sawyer is a character that I've heard referenced through my entire life.  A fairly large area of Disney's Magic Kingdom is dedicated to this book; one of my favorite places to hang out for an hour.  Yet, nothing of the story was spoiled for me. First and foremost, the " https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/01/hotel-on-the-corner-of-bitter-and-sweet/ Wed, 09 Jan 2019 12:00:00 -0500 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/01/hotel-on-the-corner-of-bitter-and-sweet/ Book cover Seems an appropriate way to start off the first book review of 2019 with a book that came out in 2009.  On top of that, it's a book that I really, really enjoyed reading. This book follows the protagonist, Henry Lee both as a 13 year old in 1943, and an adult in 1986.  If you have been reading my reviews for a while, you'll note that I get picky when time starts jumping around, and I'm really happy to say that this book gets this simple detail absolutely right: Every chapter title includes the year. https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/12/there-there/ Wed, 12 Dec 2018 12:00:00 -0500 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/12/there-there/ Book cover I will start by noting that this book started slow for me.  It took me over two weeks to read the prologue up through the fourth chapter.  Once I passed that, I read the next 80% of the book in two days finishing on a third. Every character in this book is a Native American either from or converging on Oakland California.  There is a lot of exploration, especially among the young characters, of what it means to be Native in the city. https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/09/insurrecto/ Wed, 05 Sep 2018 12:00:00 -0400 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/09/insurrecto/ Book cover Even though I'm reviewing an Advance copy, this story is surprisingly nonlinear, and I doubt that will change, though - really - it could.  The book starts, like a 1970s movie, listing the cast of characters in the approximate order in which the characters appear.  It's a story about two people, writing screenplays that are not exactly about the same thing, but are derived from a shared starting point and past. https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/07/the-remains-of-the-day/ Wed, 11 Jul 2018 12:00:00 -0400 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/07/the-remains-of-the-day/ Book cover (paperback) This is the 1989 book that later became a movie (which I never saw).  This won the Booker Prize.  We follow a quintessential British Butler named Stevens sometime after World War 2 on a journey to look up an ex-employee.  The journey itself is beautifully and descriptively written. While the main thread is the journey, the bulk of the story is Stevens' recollection of his past. https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/06/ohio/ Wed, 27 Jun 2018 12:00:00 -0400 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/06/ohio/ Book Cover This follows four main characters who had gone to high school together back in the early 2000s, and on one night in 2013, all came back home to their hometown of New Canaan, Ohio. After the prelude, the first section of the book follows Bill Ashcraft, a drifter who is loaded up on drugs.  Appropriate to the character - for the parts where we are following his narrative - the story is jumping back and forth between his past and present with no direct warning in-between, full of non-sequiturs, and frankly - hard to follow.