Title: Sense and Sensibility
Author: Joanna Trollope
Source: from publisher for TLC book tour
Rating: ★★★★★
Review Summary: This book was an incredibly similar experience to reading the original and it feel fresh again because of the change in setting.
There are two kinds of re-tellings. There are those which use the original as an inspiration and which become awesome by using the original material in creative new ways. Cinder is one of my favorite examples of that kind of re-telling. This is not that kind of re-telling. This is the other kind, where the source material is preserved almost entirely with just a setting change and this is by far the best example of that kind of re-telling that I’ve ever read. Continue reading
I’ve noticed that I’m more likely to think the movie is better than the book if I’ve seen the movie first, and The Count of Monte Cristo is no exception. Obviously compared to the book (especially a book as long as The Count of Monte Cristo!) the usual liberties were taken to streamline the plot. Entire subplots and characters disappeared and in some cases, I do think this was to the movies detriment. The movie also added even more swashbuckling and sword-fighting than were in the book, which was probably unnecessary. Continue reading 
Title: The Handmaid’s Tale
Title: The Count of Monte Cristo
Title: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Title: Sense and Sensibility
Title: Jane Eyre
This last month was my first time participating in the Reading Buddies discussion run by Erin Reads and I’m already looking forward to next month’s read! The adult fiction books which seem to be popular in the discussions she leads are definitely outside my usual reading bubble and at least with this first book, I really enjoyed that. The March read was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. When I first started carrying this book around to read I was worried someone would ask me what it was about because I wasn’t really sure how to sum it up nicely. Then I looked up the genre for my genre-based reading challenges and discovered the wonderful German word, “Bildungsroman”, meaning a coming-of-age novel (or directly translated “formation novel”). It makes me happy that there’s a word that so precisely describes what this book is about. Continue reading 
