[Book] The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

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 "...

21 Aug 2019 · 3 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Book] Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

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....

9 Jan 2019 · 3 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Book] There There by Tommy Orange

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....

12 Dec 2018 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Book] Insurrecto by Gina Apostol

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....

5 Sep 2018 · 3 min · Gary Allen Vollink