The IRB's Celebrating 10 Years of Intelligent Reviews October 2007-October 2017 Fiction One giant leap for womankind ANDROCIDE INTEL 1 Series, Book 5 By Erec Stebbins 339 pp. Twice Pi Press Reviewed by Eric Petersen Techno thriller master Erec Stebbins is back with the fifth entry in his INTEL 1 series, (the previous entries are also reviewed on this site) taking it in an even darker and more compelling direction that reflects current events in the United States. At this point in the series, INTEL 1, once the FBI’s top counterterrorism unit, headed by former agent “Mad John” Savas and his wife, former agent Rebecca Cohen, has become a super secret “black ops” group, answerable only to President Elaine York, restored to power after a right-wing military coup had ousted her. The coup nearly plunged the United States into a full-scale second civil war, but thankfully, the insurrection was put down and the right defeated after INTEL 1 (and a mysterious computer hacker ca...
Fiction Dead characters walking THE BIG GREEN TENT By Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated by Polly Gannon 579 pp. Picador Reviewed by Marty Carlock It appears to me that American fiction writers work to please their readers, while Europeans write to please critics. How else to explain the purple praise lavished on The Big Green Tent , a tome by “one of Russia’s most famous writers,” “a must-read,” “Compelling, addictive reading,” “never boring,” and “As grand, solid and impressively all-encompassing as the title implies”? List me among the ignorati: I can agree only with the first and last of these plugs. For 400 of its almost 600 pages I had to beat myself up to keep reading. Ulitskaya whimsically pursues a kind of anti-narrative, telling a character’s story to its end, killing him or her off – then in the next chapter or so: What? Here’s Olga or Ilya again, young and lusty, living another piece of his/her life. This is a lazy way to write. It relieves the author of the tedium of makin...
The four Amir sisters – Fatima, Farah, Bubblee and Mae – are the only young Muslims in the quaint English village of Wyvernage. On the outside, despite not quite fitting in with their neighbours, the Amirs are happy. But on the inside, each sister is secretly struggling. Fatima is trying to find out who she really is – and after fifteen attempts, finally pass her driving test. Farah is happy being a wife but longs to be a mother. Bubblee is determined to be an artist in London, away from family tradition, and Mae is coping with burgeoning Youtube stardom. Yet when family tragedy strikes, it brings the Amir sisters closer together and forces them to learn more about life, love, faith and each other than they ever thought possible. The Secret Lives of the Amir Sisters is the debut novel by Nadiya Hussain. With an eye-catching colourful cover this book is sure to grab reader’s attention as it certainly caught my eye. The storyline follows the four Amir Sisters and each chapter ...
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