You might ask yourself if Christmas actually needs a biography – aren’t all its many secrets and stories already well known to us? It turns out, as you dive deep into the highly readable Christmas: A Biography by Judith Flanders, that they really, really aren’t. All those stories we know Continue Reading
Books
#Christmas book review: The Twelve Days of Dash & Lily by David Levithan and Rachel Cohn
Is Christmas a romantic time of year? That depends very much on who you ask but it is true, at least for the most part for Lily and Dash, two quite different young people who, after a red Moleskine book full of dares sends them running all New York and, Continue Reading
On 1st day of Christmas … I hung 15 new pop culture ornaments on my tree incl. Scooby-Doo!, Roger Rabbit, Onward, Laurel and Hardy + Captain Marvel, A Bug’s Life, Ghostbusters, Star Wars
If any year needs a filled to the tip of the needles Christmas tree, it is this one. (Let’s be honest, all years need festive decorating but 2020 really needs it.) I will admit to the fact that my Christmas in July tree never really came down – it’s a Continue Reading
Book review: The Trials of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #2) by M. R. Carey
Humanity has risen and fallen and rise again more times than the average historian can count. Ours is not a history built on success after endless success, unpunctuated by failure or loss; rather, we have lost almost as much as we have gained, and yet each times we have been Continue Reading
The top ten dares of Dash & Lily ranked for your festive viewing pleasure
SNAPSHOTWhich Dash & Lily dare is the most daring? Once Lily (Midori Francis) challenges Dash (Austin Abrams) to a simple dare via a red notebook, he retaliates with a dare of his own, sparking a series of escalating challenges. Which one was #1? Watch to find out! (synopsis via YouTube Continue Reading
#Christmas book review: Christmas Cakes & Mistletoe Nights by Carole Matthews
In the deepest, prettiest, warmest and cosiest, tinsel-decked parts of our collective festive soul, there is a part of us that is certain beyond a shadow of a Santa believing doubt that the perfect Christmas is possible and waiting out for us somewhere. In this most remarkable and perfect of Continue Reading
Book review: Adventures of a Young Naturalist by David Attenborough
When you come to know someone later in their life, it is all too easy to assume, and we often do, that they have always been exactly like the person you see before you. We do it with parents and grandparents, teachers and authority figures of all kinds, even new Continue Reading
Book review: The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker
A strange affliction affects a few people in an isolated college town in California before cases begin to mount and what started as a small outbreak soon becomes a major contagion, a virulent wave of disease that sweeps through the town, and thanks to the efforts of a few willful Continue Reading
Book review: Doors of Sleep by Tim Pratt
ARC courtesy Angry Robot Books – release date 12 January 2021 in UK and 4 May in Australia. The possible existence of a multiverse, an infinite string of worlds in which life is the same, but very much not too, in its expression, is, for many people, an entirely alluring Continue Reading
Book review: Over the Woodward Wall by A. Deborah Baker
Adventures are usually supposed to be fun, giddily exciting undertakings, thekind of thing that The Famous Five or The Lord of the Rings cohort set out on (though admittedly the latter group did have the weight of theworld on their shoulders, what with ending great evil and all that) and Continue Reading