Kate R

Meh

Revisado: 12-06-24

It has a cute plot and some entertaining parts, but it just kind of falls flat. The main character started to drive me crazy with some insanely bad reads of situations. She way overreacted at so much and I found myself rolling my eyes and wishing she’d just shut up. There were some really predictable and cliché situations that just didn’t feel fresh.

The narrator speaks excruciatingly slowly, so I needed to speed up the narration speed to make it sound more natural. There’s a brief character with an Australian accent that the narrator uses a British accent for. A few words mispronounced too which irks me - “throuple” is an example towards the end and she pronounces it “throople.”

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My favorite mystery series!

Revisado: 06-14-23

I’ve just listened through the Heathcliff Lennox series for the 5th time and can’t believe I never wrote a review for this book. I took a gamble on a random cozy mystery series and boy did I strike gold. The story is intriguing and believable and the narrator is absolutely PHENOMENAL! I truly can’t get enough of these books.

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My favorite mystery series!

Revisado: 06-14-23

I’ve just listened through the Heathcliff Lennox series for the 5th time and can’t believe I never wrote a review for this book. I took a gamble on a random cozy mystery series and boy did I strike gold. The story is intriguing and believable and the narrator is absolutely PHENOMENAL! I truly can’t get enough of these books.

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Predictable & poorly researched

Revisado: 06-04-23

I rolled my eyes so many times at this book. It’s such a tired trope. Prude girl gets her world rocked by someone way hotter and richer than her. Nothing sexual happens until quite literally halfway through the book. Even then, it’s so lukewarm. And the hockey part is laughable. Clearly it was 5 minutes of Googling to write this book.

At the end, they mention that Max scored 672 goals in his 10 year career. Is that a joke??? Even Ovechkin took 14 years to hit 672, and he’s the most goal-scoringest player in the modern era of hockey.

The other absolutely laugh out loud moment was when Georgia wore a t-shirt jersey and Max came out with this line: “I didn’t even know they made t-shirts with the Wolverines logo on the front and my name on the back.” You’re telling me that the most insane NHL player to ever exist has no idea they make t-shirt jerseys? Let alone with his name on the back? Give me a break.

The other laugh out loud part was him getting discharged from the hospital with no home care merely one week after waking up from a 3-week coma. Come on.

This was an aggravating listen. I only finished it because I couldn’t return it. My eyes hurt from rolling them so often. Skip this one.

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The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Revisado: 11-28-22

We’ll start with the two points that ultimately made me give this 4/5 and not 5/5:
1) The narrator’s accents were ridiculous and honestly a little offensive. Just read it man, don’t do a bad rendition of a Zimbabwean accent. His voice he assigned to women when they recounted their experiences kind of gave me the ick too.
2) As someone else mentioned, this seemed abridged. They ended the book with a cliffhanger about if Michael Swango would ever be caught. The book’s original publication date was in January 2000. Swango was formally indicted on murder charges in New York 6 months later. He ultimately plead guilty to 4 counts of murder and is serving life sentences at ADX Florence, a “supermax” prison in Colorado. In my opinion, it would behoove the author to write an epilogue and re-release with the updates. It would put a good bow on top.

As to the positives, it’s hard to capture it with words. The system failed so many people. I was simultaneously dumbstruck and enraged the whole time I listened. I truly couldn’t stop listening and finished it in one sitting. The author really managed to capture the fear of the patients and their families, but also the level of sadism of Michael Swango. I highly recommend this book, just with the caveats above. The rest was phenomenal.

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Humanizing History

Revisado: 10-19-22

I loved this book. It really makes so many parts of our shared history tangible and interesting. Humans are incredible in how innovative and yet also how destructive we are. I would definitely give this a listen if ancient human history interests you.

I only had one issue with the book. 10 minutes in, the author mentions a scholar at the University of Santa Barbara. A university which…..does not exist. I’m assuming it was an oversight and he meant to say University of California at Santa Barbara, but a bit shocking that none of the editors picked up on that!

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Lots of Promises, Almost Delivered

Revisado: 10-12-22

Despite the amazing work of Dr. Wendy Lower, the description of the book is not accurate. She never actually identifies the family. She gets very close, but no one can actually identify the family.

I also disagreed with the author that we are never able to become desensitized to images. I worked at the 911 museum for a time, and at the beginning, the imagery and content was overwhelming. However, the only way that we as employees could survive, was simply by taking a deep dive into the horror of it all, and then disassociating. in order to act as stewards of our history, we had to desensitize ourselves – not only to protect our own selves, but to present the history in a factual way. In a way I became desensitized to a lot of things, including my own emotions surrounding 9/11, and just personally. However, I think that’s a perfect example of what horrific history can do to us, and I think that’s an important part of the discussion.

That being said, there were some really interesting (is that the right word?) aspects of the Holocaust that I had never heard about before. I think it’s fascinating how Dr. Lower went about researching and the interviews she had with family members.

Overall a good listen; but frustrating that the summary promises an answer and we are left with none. Though at the end of the day, that seems to be one of the many themes of this terrible tragedy.

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A bit of a rollercoaster… Some good, some bad

Revisado: 10-03-22

As context, I have a master’s degree in Medieval & Renaissance Studies, so I was definitely interested in this book when it came up as a suggestion for me.

I think the problem of the book is that it takes 6 hours to get to the point that should have been made right at the beginning: plagiarism, collaboration, and borrowing from other works was RIFE in the Renaissance. In fact, the whole Renaissance was spawned by reviving classical (Greek, Roman) works. It then takes 2 hours after that for him to admit that his ideas are, in fact, not new, and it’s reasonably agreed upon that Shakespeare did use North as a source (though McCarthy argues that literally everything Shakespeare wrote came from North, while most scholars are more in the camps of “some” influence).

Essentially, I don’t find this book to be particularly groundbreaking in the way I think others might. I think he makes strong points regarding the works of Thomas North and that there really might be something to it. Shakespeare almost certainly drew from other sources. However, there’s a thin line that’s walked better in some places than others about dismissing Shakespeare’s influence on the works. In some places in the book, it feels like McCarthy doesn’t give credit where credit is due. But that’s just my opinion.

I think the usage of EEBO and plagiarism software is a great idea. I did take issue with McCarthy - not trained in Elizabethan language - “translating” North’s work to put it into the software. The tricky bit is that English wasn’t standardized at that point, and adapting modern English spelling to run it through plagiarism software does 2 things: it may change the meaning of some words if not completed by someone properly trained in the ins and outs of 16th century English (which would potentially fix any bias), and it also adds a barrier between determining true plagiarism. For example, we know that current English translations of the Bible can be extremely different from the original Greek. I think it would be fascinating to create a plagiarism software that accounts for different spellings of words and running it through that - it would seem that would be a much more accurate investigation.

All of that being said, I will also say that academia has a tendency to outright bully people with different thoughts. I would genuinely like to hear the rebuttal of a Shakespearean scholar rather than just the countless examples of them rebuffing McCarthy. Is McCarthy’s method unproven? Mostly. Is it something that can be tested in a way to make it proven? Absolutely. If I were in academia, I would think it would behoove me to have this be a project to undertake. It could potentially open up a lot of avenues.

At the end, McCarthy seems to make the outlandish claim that a half a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays published after his death were actually the original North plays that Shakespeare had laying around and his buddies mistook them for ones he wrote. Putting that in with 25 minutes to go really made me feel like I had wasted my time. McCarthy keeps insisting that this isn’t a conspiracy, but something tells me he’s holding back some of the even crazier ideas he has….

All in all, I think this is a good start - but again, needs some revision. Thomas North was not Shakespeare, though the two men certainly knew of each other and Shakespeare likely drew material from North’s works.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Disappointed, but you can give it a shot

Revisado: 09-15-22

It took me over three hours to actually understand what was going on in this book. It seems to jump around in time a little bit, particularly in the beginning. My biggest frustration was the use of flowery language. It felt like the author was trying to reach a word count, and was using way too many adjectives to get her point across. I don’t need four different ways to describe how apples being preserved for winter. A good copy editor could have shaved 2 hours off the book and the effect would have been better. It also bothered me that there weren’t really any chapters, and that the second half of the book wasn’t split up at all over the course of 4 hours.

Additionally, it took me a long time to figure out who was who within the novel, so I have spelled it out for anyone who doesn’t feel like reading through thousands of reviews and putting the pieces together:
Agnes is Anne Hathaway
The Latin tutor is William Shakespeare
Hamnet/Hamlet is Anne & William’s son
Susanna & Judith are Anne & William’s daughters
Bartholomew and Joan are Agnes’s father and step-mother
John & Mary are William’s father and mother

There is a lot of emotion surrounding the death of a child. It’s hard to get through because the author did do a great job making it feel raw and impossible to explain as it is in really life.

On the plus side, I really enjoyed the very end when Anges goes and sees Hamlet in London and realizes the connection and how it is Shakespeare’s way of grieving the loss of their child. Historically, we don’t know the connection between his son and the name of one of his most famous works. But I really enjoyed this author’s take on it.

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Thank you, Jenette.

Revisado: 08-21-22

Wow. This book is so refreshing in the world of celebrity memoirs. It was so real. She bares herself to us and I thank her so much for that. Her writing is incredibly raw. She writes about experiences that as young women we deal with, but never speak about. I normally am not a fan of present tense writing, but her use of it in her book makes everything so much better - like you’re with her while all these things are happening. I also love her voice - I always have. You can tell her heart and soul went into this. So thank you, Jenette. Thank you for your realness in a world of shallowness. And thank you for trusting us with your traumas. ❤️

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