I've been holding off posting because I've felt so tired that I've been thinking that nothing good is gonna come out, but then I realized that I'd better do it anyway. Right?
A week or so ago I read Dirty Weekend by Helen Zahavi. Sounds promising, right? It's a short, fast-paced book about a British woman who wakes up one day, decides she's sick of being stalked, used, demeaned, etc. by men and says "enough." The only thing that will make things right is to spend the weekend getting medieval on any hapless rapists and abusers who decide she looks like a good target. She and Lisbeth Salander would make one scary-assed team. This book could have gone so wrong: if the prose wasn't tight enough, or the tone less ironic, even if Zahavi'd decided to beat you over the head with the moral...but no. This was quite a fun ride (if you enjoy humor so black it'd make the Grim Reaper smile, and if you're on a first-name basis with your inner feminist rage demon). So, I'd recommend it, but not for the gentler among us.
I also read my ARC of Carol O'Connell's The Chalk Girl, the tenth in the Mallory series. I liked it, but I fear O'Connell is relying a bit on repetition. That said, the best part of the book is, again, the relationships drawn between the characters. There's an adorable child character...and the usual human monsters. I'll be back with some prose from the book.
