From the CBC story we learn the following, Rochelle Wallis is 19.
"The pair decided to get married last year when she visited him in his village of Pontrhydygroes, Wales. The couple met two years earlier in Canada and remained in touch."Now I'm just a guy who reads a lot of military history but I'm pretty sure that would make her 16 when they met. I wonder how old the husband is? Oh wait it's buried at the bottom.
"Adam Wallis, 28, recently got a job as an electrical technician in Wales, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported."Hmmm 25 year old meets up with 16 year old. You know for once I agree with the apparatchiks.
is a snarky sendup of "New Labor". The Prime Minister much to his horror has lost touch with British Society so he enlists one of his security guards to help him get back in touch with his people. The humor here is done with broad strokes. Townsend's disdain for what the Labor party has become is quite obvious and it's accurate from what I understand. I was chuckling throughout most of the book.
tries to give a general history of this culture in the British isles, France, Italy and the Middle East. Unfortunately the osprey format is too short to do this well. What we get instead is a dizzying list of names and places with very little information. If you're already an expert on this time you'll be able to follow this but that doesn't make much sense considering the audience the publications are aimed at.
is a fantasy novel that has a lot of buzz behind it but doesn't deliver. Quentin Coldwater melancholic and whiny spends most of the book complaining about whatever it is currently happening to him. This has been compared with Harry Potter and Narnia. There's no subtlety and this Grossman specifically mentions Hermione's teeth shrinking. Narnia references are slightly concealed since the characters are going to end up traveling there Grossman dozen want to get in legal trouble. The ideas themselves although derivative do put an interesting spin on things but the book as a whole fails in two respects. First as mentioned earlier unsympathetic characters that develop very little throughout the book. The second problem is the lack of an antagonist. The plot tends to wander sometimes reading more like an outline than anything else. There is a final showdown which at least does in retrospect explain some of the past events but of course I'm not going to go back and reread it just because I have those pieces now.
I'm late to the party on this oh well. Harry Dresden is the only wizard/private investigator in Chicago. There's been a horrific murder he must find the culprit, while trying to deal with skeptics and the White Council that oversees magical affairs. This is the first book in a long ongoing series. Storm Front is not great literature. World building is occasionally laughable seriously he's the only wizard in the world doing this sort of thing? Characterization particularly a female characters is borderline offensive. The plot is only move forward by happenstance. All that being said I can't help feeling a certain guilty pleasure in this. I'm willing to give the second novel a chance. Butcher does have the gift for telling a story so that it only falls apart when you come back and think about it later.
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