Book Review // Guest Post

Once again it is Thursday and I am wrapping up my Summer Guest Series. I will have one more guest post after this lovely one by Erika of Bearika Rose and that will be it! I have enjoyed sharing these posts each week and have had a blast meeting some awesome new bloggers! I hope you enjoy this book review! (I mean it's comparable to a shot..how could it get any better?) I think I will be heading out to pick this book up next!

Your beach day is in the calendar; your sunscreen on the shelf and that new bikini is hanging pretty in your closet. The only thing that’s missing is that summer novel to keep your mind occupied while the sun is working its magic.

And boy do I have the book for you...

Shotglass* Review:

Vampires in the Lemon Grove, by Karen Russell, has to be one of my favorite 2014 summer reads. Not only is it a quick one, but it’s also by a critically acclaimed author (so I feel smart while reading it). Of course my mum recommended it to me – she’s always giving me the books I should read (and I read about half of them).

The book is a set of unrelated short stories. They are set all over the world in practically modern times, but every one has a touch of magic in it. Some stories are better than others – my favorite is the second one. And they can be quite creepy as well; giving you shivers while you’re in the hot sun (or in my case curled up in bed after midnight). Russell has the ability to mold her prose around the narrator of each story. The vocabulary shifts, and the sentence length and structure vary depending if the narrator is a five hundred year old vampire or an eleven-year-old boy or a young Chinese woman.

And because the stories are no longer than 20 pages, they make for perfect mini-reads on the beach in between trashy romance novels. Making your brain work a little harder to piece together meaning and metaphor and beauty. Russell’s imagery is spot-on, so when you look up expecting to see the sand and waves, you’ll see a single room with a locked door, or a lemon grove.

If a story doesn’t take your fancy, then skip it! And let me know over on my blog if you’ve read the book, and what your favorite story is. I’m betting it’s number two as well.

*a shotglass review, is a short, quick to the point review of something that gets the message across in as few lines as possible (much like a shot in terms of alcohol).