I was intrigued by the movie, We Need to Talk About Kevin. It had an interesting premise: a mother has to cope in the aftermath of her son’s shooting rampage at his school. Ezra Miller creeped me out as the young psychopath and you could feel the unrelenting war between him as his mother, Eva (Tilda Swilton). I made a mental note to read the novel one of these days when I had some free time (ha!!!). This past weekend I decided to purchase the Kindle version. The Kindle app on my smart phone has made me more of a voracious reader than ever. Gone are the days of waiting for a book to come in the mail from Amazon. Gone are the days of racing out excitedly to the Barnes and Noble and spending more than I expected to.  I love my books. I love them. Now with Kindle, I can gorge myself on them again and again. The novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin is a collection of letters from Eva to her husband and Kevin’s father, Franklin. We learn through the letters that Kevin has just murdered a number of his classmates and a teacher. In the beginning of the novel, it is clear that Eva and Franklin have separated and Eva alone has to deal with the fallout of Kevin’s actions. Eva not only has to deal with the media scrutiny and the wrath of the parents who have lost their children because of her son. Eva examines her life in an attempt to understand her son and her responsibility for who he is. We learn that Eva was the successful travel guide publisher who travelled the world before she was married and gave birth to Kevin at 37.  We learn that Kevin was born a difficult child...

I was reading this great essay in the New York Times this weekend. Written by writer and teacher, Dean Bakopoulos, it asserts the notion that reading is like falling in love: I realized that what I’m really instructing them in is reading as a process of seduction. Consider how one falls in love: by fixating on certain attributes of the beloved. The way he looks in his brown cords. The way she flips her hair from her face. The flecks in her eyes, the twitch in his smile. We do not yet know the whole person, but we are lured by primal responses to a few details. Well, this week I fell in love. I’m in love with The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer, specifically the first book in the four book series, Cinder. Cinder is set many hundreds of years into the future. Earth has been through two more world wars and nations have been reorganized. Linh Cinder lives in the Eastern Commonwealth, which the reader can only conclude (from the way the character’s family name comes before their first names and the fact that the characters dress in fancy kimonos) is now comprised of most the former nations of Asia.  Like the classic fairy tale, Cinder lives with her stepmother, Adri, and two stepsisters, Pearl and Peony.  Cinder is an outcast not only because she is an orphan whom is seen as a burden by Pearl and Adri, but because she is a cyborg. Cinder has a robotic arm and leg. She also has a retinal interface that alerts her to when people are lying to her and that informs her of when her adrenaline is running dangerously high. Cyborgs are fairly commonplace in the Eastern Commonwealth, but they are second class citizens. When the government needs test...

Dead Weight is the second installment in the Lizzy Gardner detective series by T.R Ragan. In this installment a dying mother contacts Lizzy. Her daughter went missing over twenty years ago and was last seen accepting a ride from an unknown man after her car broke down on the side of the road. She wants to know her daughter’s fate before she dies. Lizzy has also been contacted by a woman whose sister went missing and whose disappearance may be linked to a famous weight loss guru, Anthony Melbourne.  On top of that her newest intern/self defense student/fellow Spiderman victim, Hayley Hansen, keeps disappearing for long periods of time. Unbeknownst to Lizzy, Hayley has been exacting revenge on the all the men who sexually assaulted her in exchange for providing her drug addict mother with her fix. She hasn’t killed anyone yet, but she is working up to it. Can Lizzy find out what happened to Carol Fullerton before her mother succumbs to cancer? Can Lizzy locate Diane Kramer or at least connect Anthony Melbourne to her disappearance? Dead Weight is a great follow-up to Abducted. With her usual deft skill, Ragan brings the reader into the novel with clean crisp prose that doesn’t get in the way of the narrative. There are a few twists and turns in this novel that don’t feel forced, but grow organically out of the storyline. It’s a great read. If you liked this post, please do us the further boon of Liking the Fierce and Nerdy page on FaceBook. Also, we’re giving great stream on Twitter, so do give us...

It’s official! I love the Kindle App on my phone. I thought that I was a voracious reader before, but now I have millions of books literally at my fingertips. Also, contributing to my frequent book orgies, is the fact that many of the titles are reasonably priced (I can justify any impulse buy between .99 and 5.99) so I have been reading a lot more lately. I have also discovered a lot of great new authors this way. One of my recent finds has been T.R. Ragan, author of the Lizzy Gardner Series. The first book, Abducted, introduces Private Detective, Lizzy Gardner. Lizzy is the only surviving victim of Spiderman (not the beloved costumed superhero) but a serial killer who abducted and murdered a number of teenage girls in the Sacramento area. Lizzy escaped him but Spiderman was never captured. The murders stopped for over a decade, but now they have started again. Lizzy has never fully recovered from her abduction and neither did her family. Her parents divorced soon after her return and her father no longer speaks to her. Her sister, Cathy, harbors deeply held and barely concealed resentment towards Lizzy, but her teenage daughter, Brittany, is very close to her aunt. I have read a lot of fiction about serial killers such as Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Red Dragon. Those books have all scared the living crap out of me and probably left me with some deep psychological scars. Abduction was definitely suspenseful and it had some frightening moments, but it wasn’t overly graphic or cringe inducing. I really connected to the character of Lizzy. She has emotional damage from the abduction, but she is not a victim. She works hard to not let Spiderman and his actions define her. It’s a great read and fortunately it has a sequel, Dead...

For Book Week. I am reading a book by National Book Award finalist, Laini Taylor, and Daughter of Smoke and Bone has renewed my hope and faith in fiction. It’s the story of Karou, an art student in Prague. Karou has just discovered that her first boyfriend, Kaz, cheated on her with a mutual acquaintance.  She has broken up with him, but he isn’t taking no for an answer. He shows up to her art class as, surprise, the nude model she has to sketch. However, Karou was given a beaded necklace of wishes by her guardian, Brimstone. These beads represent the smallest available wishes, and with them Karou can make minor wishes. Some of her previous wishes have included the blue hair that flows straight from her scalp and the bushy eyebrows that she wished on a romantic rival — and in this case, Karou is so incensed that she uses her wishes to make her ex itch in some embarrassing places. She straddles two worlds: the world of mortals and the world of wishes and chimera. This book thrills me and I haven’t even read a quarter of it yet. Taylor spins an incredible otherworld full of women who are part snake and messengers who are part crow and part bat. This is the world of the chimera, creatures that appear to be the composites of several different types of animals. Brimstone sells wishes and he raised Karou. “[His] arms and massive torso were the only human parts of him, though the tough flesh that covered them was more hide than skin. His square pectorals were riven with ancient scar tissue, one nipple entirely obliterated by it, and his shoulders and back were etched in more scars: a network of puckered white cross-hatchings. Below the waist he became else-thing. His...