darlingfox

The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

The White Queen tells the story of a woman of extraordinary beauty and ambition who, catching the eye of the newly crowned boy king, marries him in secret and ascends to royalty. While Elizabeth rises to the demands of her exalted position and fights for the success of her family, her two sons become central figures in a mystery that has confounded historians for centuries: the missing princes in the Tower of London whose fate is still unknown.


You'd think I'd run screaming at the sight of the words "a woman of extraordinary beauty", but I was in the mood for historical fiction and I thought that I could try this one since it was new in the library.

I gave up around page 50 since nothing interesting had happened by then. Life is too short to waste on yet another mediocre love-at-first-sight romance novel. There's nothing wrong with liking them or, indeed, in the romance novels themselves if they're well-written. This wasn't. Elizabeth wasn't a likable character and the first person narrative was very distracting instead of immersing.

Even worse for a novel which is supposed to be historical, there was no sense of time or place. I might have continued reading if the setting would have felt like 15th century England, but it didn't. The characters might as well have lived in the Lalafantasyland in the year of the Unicorn.


Note to self: avoid novels with "extraordinary beauties" in the future. It never ends well.

While browsing my tags I realized that I'd completely forgotten a book meme I started last year. ...Oops? Well, back on the metaphorical horse it is! This'll count as part of the body since bones are, in fact, part of the body.


Bones to Ashes by Kathy Reichs

crime/mystery

A forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan, her relationship with Det. Andrew Ryan on the rocks, welcomes the distraction of an unidentified New Brunswick skeleton from Québec's cold case unit. But when the bones are determined to be that of an adolescent girl, Brennan is convinced they belong to her childhood friend, Évangéline Landry, who disappeared at age 15. Now Brennan must come to terms with Évangéline's possible death, while trying to ignore her feelings for Ryan as they investigate a series of teenage abduction murders that could be tied to the mysterious bones.
- says Amazon. com


And because I'm feeling lazy, I'll just copy+paste my Goodreads review (you can connect to Goodreads with your Twitter! omg technology):

I do like the series as a whole and Tempe as a character, but this book was a disappointment.

It seems that when Reichs chooses an issue she wants to write about, she will write about even if there isn't enough plot for a whole novel. I think this might have been better as a short story: the main plot would've been tighter and the unrelevant side "plots" would've been absent.

Or maybe a stricter editor would've helped. For one, maybe Tempe's never ending questions would've been cut out. Readers can actually think, the author doesn't have to tell us what we should be asking. Also, when every chapter ends in a dramatic cliffhanger, it loses it's effectiveness in about three chapters.

Still, this was entertaining enough a read and I know I'll read the next Tempe book, too. I wasn't too bored, I finished this and at no point did I want to throw the book against a wall.

Another 'Top 100" list, this time AFI's list of 100 most romantic movies of the last 100 years (very heavily skewed to the 30s-60s era of Hollywood).

Bold the ones you've seen, italicize the ones you mean to see, underline the ones you couldn't make it through.

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Stolen from viridian_magpie.

Bolded - have read
Underlined - read a book from a series or stopped reading a single book at some point

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from this article

Context: The car's been seen in several cameras (police & city's) around Turku and the police ask people to call if they see it. XDDD