Synopsis:
After spending time incarcerated in a secret prison after a terrorist attack, a computer-savvy teen decides to fight back in the name of the Constitution.
Review:
I am so not cool enough for Little Brother. I’ve never hacked, coded, partitioned or flashmobbed. I don’t understand crypto and I’ve never touched an Xbox. I did [...]

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Synopsis:
An episodic look at the life of a California girl living in New York.
Review:
I do not like to give negative reviews on this blog so I will just say that I finally gave up on Rules for Saying Goodbye with only 70 pages to go. I did not like that it was a memoir [...]

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Synopsis:
An aging rock star buys an old suit that brings with it a vengeful spirit with a personal vendetta.
Review:
Let’s just get it out of the way. Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son. His debut novel, Heart-Shaped Box, is a work of horror. And not only is it damn good, it’s good enough [...]

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Synopsis:
Bereft and aimless, an ex-meth head signs up to test a new drug promising to cure anxiety of all kinds.
Review:
I picked up Sunless because it promised a Chuck Pahlaniuk-esque satirical romp through all the woes of our modern age, dressed up in off-kilter post-apocalyptic trappings and with an addictive prose style.
Instead, I suffered through a [...]

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I realize this is not a blog about dance. In fact, dance and reading couldn’t be more disparate activities. You definitely can’t do them at the same time.
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Synopsis:
A young man with severe amnesia comes to realize that he is being stalked by a conceptual shark (which is much, much scarier than you might think).
Review:
What surprised me most about The Raw Shark Texts was how fast it moved. For all its high-minded metaphysical aims and experimental underpinnings, the book has the pacing [...]

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Synopsis:
The continuing adventures of the Irregulars, a band of disgraced ex-girl scouts protecting the Shadow City underneath the streets of Manhattan.
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My review of Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand is up on Blogcritics.org. Here’s the opening paragraph:
How Cass Neary, the protagonist of Elizabeth Hand’s latest novel Generation Loss has stayed alive this long is anyone’s guess. Super young, super talented and super stoned at the birth of punk below 14th Street in the 1970s, Cass [...]

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Synopsis:
A super-stressed high school senior bombs on the SAT, blowing her chances for Harvard–until she gets a text message from someone calling himself “The Taker” and promising to get her within 150 points of perfect.
Review:
High concept premise that fails in the execution for a lack of emotional honesty insight. Perhaps fans of the Gossip [...]

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Synopsis:
An autobiographical collection of irreverant essays about finding Jesus in the most unlikely places, starting with super-pagan Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Review:
I kept hearing about this book from various people whose opinion I respected, but I was a little skeptical. I am weary of efforts to make Christianity “cool” or “relevant” or “postmodern” or [...]

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