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Larissa Behrendt with her third novel After Story

After Story by Larissa Behrendt review – trauma and secrets unspool on literary tour of England

Travelling the seat of colonial violence, an Indigenous mother and daughter complicate and celebrate the canon in Behrendt’s thoughtful, wry novel

“For Indigenous people, culture equals life,” Terri Janke wrote this month . Culture is not a discrete thing, to be observed at the theatre or behind museum glass. It can’t be sealed off from place, history, or family – it is these things.

This principle is at the heart of academic and filmmaker Larissa Behrendt’s significant body of work, and of her third novel, also out this month.

After Story sees Jasmine, an idealistic Indigenous lawyer, take her (somewhat bemused) mother Della on a literary tour of England. Behrendt’s lens is ostensibly focused on “British” culture, but parallel histories emerge in the novel’s seamless cuts between past and present: stories forgotten, repressed or actively erased from Jasmine and Della’s past, and their country’s.

During their visit, as a media storm builds around the disappearance of a white girl from Hampstead Heath, memories of the abduction of Jasmine’s sister Brittany resurface with a fresh sting – a sonic boom of indictment in the disparate response to each case. Decades of family secrets start to unspool.

Della, meanwhile, is unburdened by the various pretensions of her fellow tourists about the “right” way to engage with their itinerary’s colonial canon – so she does so heart-first. “All these ways of punishing people who were poor,” she marvels on their Dickens-inspired tour of the foundling museum. “Sometimes, like I know, you can love them and want to keep them and they’re just taken from you.” Her mind, like the reader’s, goes immediately to the generations of children forcibly taken from their families – that massive, knowing fracture of culture from which Australia has not recovered. More and more, she also thinks of Brittany. Della’s grief is raw, sometimes too intimate to bear. It’s delicately handled by Behrendt, who resists the easy catharsis of sentimental or confessional modes to allow her character some privacy. What is revealed of Della’s pain is tactile and quiet, “spreading out like dark honey spilt over a tablecloth”.

Jasmine, fighting to free herself of “the suffocating facts” of this inheritance of loss, has clung to literature as a beacon of self-definition. These sustaining daydreams – of Austens and Woolfs; that her other sister, Leigh-Anne, might one day be “a Vanessa to my Virginia” – are also complicated sources of alienation and shame inviting her to dismiss her own life, “so small, parochial”. But prefigured in After Story’s dual mother-daughter narration is the capacity to hold opposing truths.

Behrendt is able to both celebrate the power of Shakespeare’s or Brontë’s art and mourn the vast cost of their colonial transplantation. She suggests that a Eurocentric “culture” divides everyone – including Europeans – from culture. Literature’s “ideas and ideals” both drive and damage us, an illusory yardstick with which to beat ourselves. Yet this is also a love letter to books as technologies of change, that help us “understand where bias and prejudice hide [and] create a new way of thinking”. If the question is what stories might help us decolonise, Behrendt finds the answer in all of them, from the Magna Carta, to Mrs Dalloway, to the fragments Della salvages from memories of her mother’s cousin Elaine and writes in the notebook on her hotel bedside table.

Mostly from offstage, Aunty Elaine anchors the novel, embodying the power Aboriginal women hold as knowers and keepers of tradition. Even as the trip renews Della and Jasmine’s connection to their own stories, they realise they’ve taken her knowledge for granted. “It was slipping from me and I didn’t have a museum to keep it in,” Della says. To survive, culture must be lived, Behrendt argues – it is both verb and noun. That this epiphany only unfolds in the seat of colonial violence is the book’s major tension – presumably intentionally. It risks repeating the same hierarchical fantasy that positions England as a “homecoming”, “silvery” trees as inferior to “lush emerald green”, “culture” as coming from somewhere else – indicative of the way colonialist structures ignore or sideline ancient legacies, or steal them wholesale. (“You’ve got to be pretty cheeky to take a whole temple,” Della notes with dark humour at the British Museum.)

But mother and daughter’s reclaiming of their role as storytellers can also be seen as an act of cultural repatriation, for which Behrendt is an urgent advocate . Connecting to culture, as in Tara June Winch’s The Yield , is a condition for healing, for transcending centuries of unspoken rules about “who was expected to succeed, who was expected to fail”. As Della links a cathedral’s “magisterial” feeling of the sacred to the bush, or notes the colour of English brick “reminding you you’re on someone else’s country”, she gestures to the potential of decoupling knowledge from institution – and a more respectful, curious way of encountering the culture of another.

Behrendt’s pleasure in the Anglophone world of the tour is sincere (at times skirting perilously close to guide-book or history lecture territory). But she skewers the contemporary Australian hypocrisy that can show reverence for the “old ghosts” of a Roman burial site (or Cornish graveyard ) while failing to establish a national keeping place for its own traditional owners, or letting sites “older than the pyramids and Stonehenge” be blown up . In honouring English history’s depth, Behrendt asks, sharply, why Indigenous Australia should be expected to just “move on”.

These smouldering questions are leavened by characters who are funny, complex and real. Behrendt allows their feuds and struggles to be painful without being corrosive, reminding us everyone needs time and grace to grieve in their own way. To make peace with the moments others fail, might be to allow yourself to fail, to be imperfect. Strand by strand, she gently lays bare the discomfort and hope of a mother and daughter – strands of a story they “can tie together, that can be bound into something tangible”.

After Story by Larissa Behrendt is out now through UQP

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Book Review: Larissa Behrendt dissects complex family relationships in her entrancing new book After Story

October 7, 2021
After Story
Larissa Behrendt
University of Queensland Press

Larissa Behrendt doesn’t pull any punches in this poignant but difficult examination of family relationships, racism, and the justice system. After Story is a captivating tale about a mother and daughter trying to reconnect after years of tragedy, trauma and secrets have created rifts between them.

Bookworm Jasmine is a lawyer and the first of her family to leave the small country town of Frog Hollow to make it in the big city, desperate to distance herself from the trouble-making reputation of her family. Six months after the funeral of her father, Jasmine invites her mother Della on a literary tour of England as a chance for the two to reconnect. Della, who has never left Frog Hollow and is in the midst of a feud with Jasmine’s sister Leigh-Anne, accepts despite not knowing anything about literature. The two have barely landed in London when the fractures in their relationship start to show, and the news of a young girl going missing on Hampstead Heath begins to open old wounds as Jasmine and Della are forced to deal once more with the loss of Jasmine’s older sister Brittany twenty-five years earlier.

Behrendt breaks down each day of the tour, alternating from Della’s point of view to Jasmine’s. Della’s lack of literary knowledge and experience travelling allows the readers to see England from a new perspective. She compares what she sees and hears to her experiences back home, and as time goes on, begins to question the wisdom of the British as she compares their knowledge and achievements to that of her Indigenous ancestors.

Meanwhile, in Jasmine’s chapters, the younger woman interrogates how the experiences of various authors influenced their work. She compares this to the effect of trauma and the abuse of one of her clients back home, but is still less able to reconcile the impact of past events on her mother. While on one hand she understands, on the other she wishes things were different and struggles to balance her feelings and therefore her expectations of Della.

Behrendt’s characterisation is immaculate. Della and Jasmine’s voices are distinct, their focuses and streams of thought consistent throughout the book even as they grow, making them both easy to understand and relate to. But Behrendt is also careful to balance their views and provides excellent commentary on how our intentions may be perceived differently by those around us. Frequently Della says things that are misinterpreted by her daughter and the rest of the group resulting in her often remaining silent rather than trying to explain herself or her point of view. Likewise, both characters make decisions that they feel are best for each other when in fact it is not at all what the other wants.

The story is held together by a supporting cast of strong, intelligent and insightful women, none of whom are actually present on the tour. Throughout their travels, Jasmine and Della frequently compare themselves to and fall back on the knowledge of their relatives Aunty Elaine, Aunt Kiki, Mum Nancy and Leigh-Anne. In addition, Behrendt makes good use of the other tour participants who range in age and world-views and who are seemingly at odds with one another the whole time. This constant clash of ideas and judgements feels true of real life, and the first-person narration is oddly comforting in the sense that both struggle to sort through the noise and find their own identity amongst it all.

There are too many wonderful things to say about this book. The use of the literary tour as the grounding device for Jasmine and Della’s respective journey’s is perfect for booklovers. The story is heartfelt, respectful and nuanced, and the characters are relatable. This might very well be my favourite book of 2021. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

FIVE STARS (OUT OF FIVE)

Larissa Behrendt’s After Story is out now, available through UQP . Grab yourself a copy from Booktopia HERE .

Jess Gately

Jess Gately is a freelance editor and writer with a particular love for speculative fiction and graphic novels.

bookish nooks

Nov 11, 2022

Book Review: After Story, by Larissa Behrendt

First Nations lawyer, Jasmine, takes her mum, Della, on a literary tour of England. Bound together only by the labels of family, Jasmine resents her mother and their shared connection but hopes that the trip will help them heal from the trauma of their shared past.

As each story of money, power and colonisation is presented within the walls and structures of Western literary history, mother and daughter learn to reconsider the powerful influence and ageless significance of their own First Nations culture.

I was initially drawn to this story by the literary references: two Australians travelling the English countryside to find the locales of the greatest writers on my shelf? I was hooked.

But I stayed for the message. Though I have no First Nations ancestry myself, I felt so much pride in my country's origins while I was reading this. It's not my story to tell; it's the story of the communities whose stories mark the land and create meaning.

Maddy holds After Story by Larissa Behrendt, with the Melbourne skyline in the background. Image: Madeleine Corbel, 2022.

A warped history

A major message Larissa Behrendt conveyed in After Story ( UQP ) was the warping of history, and how our knowledge is shaped by the telling of it. A Western translation of the events from the past entangles our own perceptions of culture and place, not to mention what we deem as important to learn about in the first place.

We tend to revel in our European buildings, old cathedrals, plaster walls and classical arches – and yet we don't seem to give a damn about the spiritual life of a tree that's hundreds of years older than these structures. We make it compulsory to learn the history of settlement without considering the impact of genocide on a population older than we can fathom. We worship the quills of Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen (as we should, don't get me wrong), but fail to afford the same literary and cultural space to stories that have been told by women in the Australian bush for thousands of years.

This reminded me of some of the arguments made in Bri Lee 's book, Who Gets To Be Smart . Though this is directed at educational funding and how we define intelligence, there is a lot of questioning and soul-searching about institutional gatekeeping. Who misses out on an education in Australia, and who should we be listening to? Which stories do we tell, and why?

This story made me question the way I have learned about literary history, and who decides how I learn that history. The Australian curriculum is changing, and we're learning to consider the way that Australia has been moulded by generations of racism and selfishness. But through the eyes of Jasmine and Della, I'm beginning to see how far we have yet to travel.

Throughout their tour of England, the characters come across people who aren't willing to listen. They spout their own lineage, writings, opinions and accolades for their own ends without listening to the wisdom of the people in their immediate circle.

We view knowledge as something that is earned through a piece of framed paper resting on an office wall. Again, don't get me wrong, I'm working pretty hard for that piece of paper myself, so I'm in no position to rant about the downsides of institutional learning. But what is often forgotten is that knowledge exists in all forms and wisdom can be found in experience.

Jasmine's mother, Della, is a source of wisdom and strength. Though she never forces her culture on others and seems engrossed in the information presented to her on the literary tour, she is undoubtedly complicated and knowledgeable herself. Her past experiences, frustrations and traumas combine with cultural pride and individualism to create a brilliant kaleidoscope. I was in awe of her.

The wisdom of family, the strength in shared culture, the beauty of travel and the power in learning through listening forms the backbone of this book.

In this Ted Talk, Tai Simpson discusses the wisdom woven inherently into Indigenous First Nation stories. Video : TED, 2021.

A path forward

The writing captivated me totally and the literary tour scenery had me wishing to explore the same places. I want to learn more about the culture of the earth beneath my feet. There's so much to discover and this book opened my eyes (and my ears) to the ways in which we're taught to think about history – and how those should change.

What’s the last story that made you think deeply?

As always, thanks for reading with me,

An infinite void

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After Story by Larissa Behrendt

University of Queensland Press, $32.99 pb, 306 pp

I n the latter half of this novel, one of its protagonists is viewing a collection of butterflies at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. This forms part of Jasmine’s holiday with her mother, Della, a tour of famous literary and other notable cultural sites in the United Kingdom. By this stage they have visited Stratford-upon-Avon, Brontë country in Haworth, and Jane Austen’s Bath and Southampton, and have been duly impressed or, in Della’s case, underwhelmed. But now Jasmine can only feel sadness: ‘We take the life of a living thing, hold it to display, because we feel entitled to the knowledge, entitled to the owning, the possessing.’

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Larissa Behrendt

Debra Adelaide

University of Queensland Press
Indigenous Writing
Australian Fiction

Debra Adelaide has published eighteen books, including novels, short fiction, and essays, the most recent of which is The Innocent Reader (2019). Until 2020 she was an associate professor in the creative writing program at the University of Technology Sydney.

After Story

by Larissa Behrendt

From the New Issue

Backstage with Anna Goldsworthy

One Another by Gail Jones

Mishearing by David Musgrave & AfterLife by Kathryn Lomer

Slipstream: On memory and migration by Catherine Cole

The Listmaker by Robin Klein & The Apostle Bird by Garry Disher

The View from Ararat by Brian Caswell & Go and Come Back by Joan Abelove

Candy by Luke Davies

City of Crows by Chris Womersley

After Story by Larissa Behrendt

When a mother and daughter take the overseas trip of a lifetime, they discover that the past is never quite behind them.

When Indigenous lawyer Jasmine decides to take her mother, Della, on a tour of England’s most revered literary sites, Jasmine hopes it will bring them closer together and help them reconcile the past.

Twenty-five years earlier the disappearance of Jasmine’s older sister devastated their tight-knit community. This tragedy returns to haunt Jasmine and Della when another child mysteriously goes missing on Hampstead Heath. As Jasmine immerses herself in the world of her literary idols – including Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and Virginia Woolf – Della is inspired to rediscover the wisdom of her own culture and storytelling. But sometimes the stories that are not told can become too great to bear.

Ambitious and engrossing, After Story celebrates the extraordinary power of words and the quiet spaces between. We can be ready to listen, but are we ready to hear?

Winner, 2022 Voss Literary Prize

Shortlisted, 2022 The Age Book of the Year Award

Shortlisted, 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards – Indigenous Writers’ Prize

Shortlisted, 2021 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards – Fiction

Shortlisted, The ABA Booksellers’ Choice Awards 2022 – Nielsen Adult Fiction Book of the Year

Longlisted, 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award

Longlisted, 2022 Indie Book Awards – Fiction

Longlisted, 2022 Australian Book Industry Awards – General Fiction Book of the Year

Longlisted, 2023 Dublin Literary Award

‘ This book is a masterclass of when European literature meets the power of First Nations oral storytelling ... Larissa cements herself as one of our greatest storytellers. ’ Blackfulla Bookclub

‘ After Story is a powerful meditation on family, culture, storytelling and the lingering effects of trauma and grief. This is an extraordinary novel … After Story is sprawling, cerebral and compassionate. It feeds the brain, offers much-needed vicarious travel and leaves the reader with hope that fraught relationships can be mended. ’ Readings

‘ This beautifully fashioned novel stands testament to the proposition that good fiction can cut to the chase of complex social problems in ways that might leave an entire library of self-help non-fiction found wanting in its wake. ’ The Canberra Times

‘ Della and Jasmine are both battling through their own trauma - their personal loss as well as the stole land and lives which weigh on them - from different bases. In a novel where their stories converge so inevitably, and sweep so many other stories in their wake, Behrendt shows she is a writer of considerable, and increasing, power. ’ Meg Keneally, The Australian

‘ After Story delves into darkness to show that truth-telling can set us free ... it's a pleasure to read and a wonderful opportunity to rethink what we have to offer the world around us. ’ The Saturday Paper

‘ We might think we know what to expect from this whirlwind week of bookish sightseeing: family secrets, writerly anecdotes and a splash of tour-bus drama. These comfort-reading delights are certainly present in After Story but they're layered over something anguished, characterful and quietly consequential ... with its glimmering seam of humour, Behrendt's novel offers a much-needed reminder that novels don't have to be relentlessly somber to be serious. ’ The Sydney Morning Herald

‘ Behrendt is able to both celebrate the power of Shakespeare’s or Brontë’s art and mourn the vast cost of their colonial transplantation. She suggests that a Eurocentric “culture” divides everyone – including Europeans – from culture. Literature’s “ideas and ideals” both drive and damage us, an illusory yardstick with which to beat ourselves. ’ The Guardian

‘ While persisting intergenerational trauma is a thread that runs through the novel, After Story is also a marvellous evocation of travel that takes the form of literary pilgrimage. ’ ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

‘ Larissa's writing is rich and captivating ... After Story shows how the past, family ties and grief travel with Della and Jasmine to the other side of the world, and the power and importance of great stories in their lives. ’ Lydia Tasker, Sydney Writers' Festival

‘ A gem you can't put down. Reaching the last chapter, I got literary anxiety akin to binging a rare find on Netflix. Goodbye so soon? ’ Ascension Mag

‘ After Story is a captivating tale. ... Behrendt's characterisation is immaculate. There are too many wonderful things to say about this book ... The story is heartfelt, respectful and nuanced, and the characters are relatable. This might very well be my favourite book for 2021. I can't recommend it highly enough. ’ The AU Review

‘ A fantastic novel by Larissa Behrendt ... A really sophisticated piece of writing ... I really enjoyed After Story ... It's very very gripping, I couldn't put it down. ’ Annabel Crabb, Chat 10 Looks 3 Podcast

‘ Not one to be missed. ’ Urban List

‘ The author has also cleverly interwoven into the story layers, British history and literature, as well as giving an honest account of white Australia’s racist past and present ... a truly special book. ’ ReadPlus

‘ A richly researched tapestry of literature, history and science ... lyrical and gently dazzling. ’ Law Society Journal

‘ A gorgeous, clever novel of mother/daughter love and loss, ambitious in conception and masterful in execution. ’ Clare Wright for The Sydney Morning Herald

‘ A First Nations mother/daughter rite of passage, involving love, literature, and redemption that is simply a joy to read. ’ Ian McFarlane, The Canberra Times

‘ This mother and daughter travel tale is a gem that shines with truth and respect for story... The voice is very Aussie, frank, almost disingenuous, as if Della was having a D and M with her sister. She’s not afraid to speak her mind and neither should those who work in the industry. ’ CBD News

‘ In turns heart-breaking, thought-provoking, enlightening and beautifully written, it’s an absolute must-read. ’ MamaMia

Q&A with Australian Book Review

Larissa Behrendt on ABC Radio National The Book Show

Interview with Backstory on 3RRR Melbourne

At Home with the Garret Podcast

Q&A with The Wheeler Centre

Q&A with Her Canberra

Larissa Behrendt for Good Weekend's Dicey Topics

Interview with Julian Morrow for Sunday Extra: The Year that Made Me

The Book Pod with Corrie Perkin

On SBS Voices The New Writers Room podcast

Jackie Huggins & Chelsea Watego

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Kate Grenville

‘ A moving story of going far away to find home again – a beautiful, hopeful book. ’

Rachel Griffiths

‘ A literary tour that speaks to the imagination, connecting the canon of English literature to the lives of a mother and daughter whose own stories have been untold, Larissa weaves an exquisite tapestry that talks to our common humanity that lives within the stories we collect, treasure and share. ’

‘ After Story is a work of great originality. It is a tale of discovery and understanding, envisioned through the shared experiences of Della and Jasmine on a journey to the "old country", a place that is not theirs. Through Della and Jasmine we come to understand the depths of familial love, with poignancy, humour and true storytelling. ’

‘ An extraordinary novel ... sprawling, cerebral and compassionate. ’

Shankari Chandran

‘ After Story has everything I want in a book: a lawyer who loves literature; the norms, falsehoods and shame created by our colonised histories (including the literature of the coloniser); and the messy, messy love that ties families together. It's painful, warm and utterly beautiful. ’

Clare Wright

‘ A gorgeous, clever novel of mother/daughter love and loss, ambitious in conception and masterful in execution. ’

Helen Garner

‘ I loved it. ’

‘ Tell everyone you know how great After Story is. ’

Hayley Scrivenor

‘ There are insightful meditations on justice, race, shame and love, and it's a touching story about mothers and daughters that features a literary tour of England. You simply can't go wrong. ’

Nicole Abadee

‘ Absolutely beautiful. ’

Larissa Behrendt presents After Story for NSW Public Libraries

Larissa Behrendt discusses After Story with ABC News Breakfast

Larissa Behrendt

Larissa is the author of three novels: Home , which won the 2002 David Unaipon Award and the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book; Legacy , which won the 2010 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing; and After Story , shortlisted for the Indigenous Writers' Prize at the 2022 NSW Premier's Literary Award, General Fiction Book of the Year at the 2022 ABIAs and Nielsen Adult Fiction Book of the Year at the 2022 ABA Booksellers' Choice Awards, and longlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award. She has published numerous books on Indigenous legal issues; her most recent non-fiction book is Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling. She was awarded the 2009 NAIDOC Person of the Year award and 2011 NSW Australian of the Year. Larissa wrote and directed the feature films, After the Apology and Innocence Betrayed and has written and produced several short films. In 2018 she won the Australian Directors’ Guild Award for Best Direction in a Documentary Feature and in 2020 the AACTA for Best Direction in Nonfiction Television. She is the host of Speaking Out on ABC radio and is Distinguished Professor at the Jumbunna Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.

More by Larissa Behrendt

Finding Eliza: Power and colonial storytelling

Pack of eight First Nations Classics

After Story by Larissa Behrendt longlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award

UQP Writers at Sorrento Writers Festival

Related titles.

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After Story by Larissa Behrendt

A love of literature and a belief in the transformative power of storytelling shine through in After Story, the thoughtful third novel by Eualeyai/Kamillaroi author, academic and filmmaker Larissa Behrendt.

It follows Indigenous lawyer Jasmine as she plans a 10-day tour of England’s literary sites to visit places associated with some of her favourite authors from childhood, including Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. When her travelling companion, a university friend, drops out of the trip, she invites her mother, Della, to join her.

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17 Book Review Examples to Help You Write the Perfect Review

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Blog – Posted on Friday, Mar 29

17 book review examples to help you write the perfect review.

It’s an exciting time to be a book reviewer. Once confined to print newspapers and journals, reviews now dot many corridors of the Internet — forever helping others discover their next great read. That said, every book reviewer will face a familiar panic: how can you do justice to a great book in just a thousand words?

As you know, the best way to learn how to do something is by immersing yourself in it. Luckily, the Internet (i.e. Goodreads and other review sites , in particular) has made book reviews more accessible than ever — which means that there are a lot of book reviews examples out there for you to view!

In this post, we compiled 17 prototypical book review examples in multiple genres to help you figure out how to write the perfect review . If you want to jump straight to the examples, you can skip the next section. Otherwise, let’s first check out what makes up a good review.

Are you interested in becoming a book reviewer? We recommend you check out Reedsy Discovery , where you can earn money for writing reviews — and are guaranteed people will read your reviews! To register as a book reviewer, sign up here.

Pro-tip : But wait! How are you sure if you should become a book reviewer in the first place? If you're on the fence, or curious about your match with a book reviewing career, take our quick quiz:

Should you become a book reviewer?

Find out the answer. Takes 30 seconds!

What must a book review contain?

Like all works of art, no two book reviews will be identical. But fear not: there are a few guidelines for any aspiring book reviewer to follow. Most book reviews, for instance, are less than 1,500 words long, with the sweet spot hitting somewhere around the 1,000-word mark. (However, this may vary depending on the platform on which you’re writing, as we’ll see later.)

In addition, all reviews share some universal elements, as shown in our book review templates . These include:

A review will offer a concise plot summary of the book.
A book review will offer an evaluation of the work.
A book review will offer a recommendation for the audience.

If these are the basic ingredients that make up a book review, it’s the tone and style with which the book reviewer writes that brings the extra panache. This will differ from platform to platform, of course. A book review on Goodreads, for instance, will be much more informal and personal than a book review on Kirkus Reviews, as it is catering to a different audience. However, at the end of the day, the goal of all book reviews is to give the audience the tools to determine whether or not they’d like to read the book themselves.

Keeping that in mind, let’s proceed to some book review examples to put all of this in action.

How much of a book nerd are you, really?

Find out here, once and for all. Takes 30 seconds!

Book review examples for fiction books

Since story is king in the world of fiction, it probably won’t come as any surprise to learn that a book review for a novel will concentrate on how well the story was told .

That said, book reviews in all genres follow the same basic formula that we discussed earlier. In these examples, you’ll be able to see how book reviewers on different platforms expertly intertwine the plot summary and their personal opinions of the book to produce a clear, informative, and concise review.

Note: Some of the book review examples run very long. If a book review is truncated in this post, we’ve indicated by including a […] at the end, but you can always read the entire review if you click on the link provided.

Examples of literary fiction book reviews

Kirkus Reviews reviews Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man :

An extremely powerful story of a young Southern Negro, from his late high school days through three years of college to his life in Harlem.

His early training prepared him for a life of humility before white men, but through injustices- large and small, he came to realize that he was an "invisible man". People saw in him only a reflection of their preconceived ideas of what he was, denied his individuality, and ultimately did not see him at all. This theme, which has implications far beyond the obvious racial parallel, is skillfully handled. The incidents of the story are wholly absorbing. The boy's dismissal from college because of an innocent mistake, his shocked reaction to the anonymity of the North and to Harlem, his nightmare experiences on a one-day job in a paint factory and in the hospital, his lightning success as the Harlem leader of a communistic organization known as the Brotherhood, his involvement in black versus white and black versus black clashes and his disillusion and understanding of his invisibility- all climax naturally in scenes of violence and riot, followed by a retreat which is both literal and figurative. Parts of this experience may have been told before, but never with such freshness, intensity and power.

This is Ellison's first novel, but he has complete control of his story and his style. Watch it.

Lyndsey reviews George Orwell’s 1984 on Goodreads:

YOU. ARE. THE. DEAD. Oh my God. I got the chills so many times toward the end of this book. It completely blew my mind. It managed to surpass my high expectations AND be nothing at all like I expected. Or in Newspeak "Double Plus Good." Let me preface this with an apology. If I sound stunningly inarticulate at times in this review, I can't help it. My mind is completely fried.

This book is like the dystopian Lord of the Rings, with its richly developed culture and economics, not to mention a fully developed language called Newspeak, or rather more of the anti-language, whose purpose is to limit speech and understanding instead of to enhance and expand it. The world-building is so fully fleshed out and spine-tinglingly terrifying that it's almost as if George travelled to such a place, escaped from it, and then just wrote it all down.

I read Fahrenheit 451 over ten years ago in my early teens. At the time, I remember really wanting to read 1984, although I never managed to get my hands on it. I'm almost glad I didn't. Though I would not have admitted it at the time, it would have gone over my head. Or at the very least, I wouldn't have been able to appreciate it fully. […]

The New York Times reviews Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry :

Three-quarters of the way through Lisa Halliday’s debut novel, “Asymmetry,” a British foreign correspondent named Alistair is spending Christmas on a compound outside of Baghdad. His fellow revelers include cameramen, defense contractors, United Nations employees and aid workers. Someone’s mother has FedExed a HoneyBaked ham from Maine; people are smoking by the swimming pool. It is 2003, just days after Saddam Hussein’s capture, and though the mood is optimistic, Alistair is worrying aloud about the ethics of his chosen profession, wondering if reporting on violence doesn’t indirectly abet violence and questioning why he’d rather be in a combat zone than reading a picture book to his son. But every time he returns to London, he begins to “spin out.” He can’t go home. “You observe what people do with their freedom — what they don’t do — and it’s impossible not to judge them for it,” he says.

The line, embedded unceremoniously in the middle of a page-long paragraph, doubles, like so many others in “Asymmetry,” as literary criticism. Halliday’s novel is so strange and startlingly smart that its mere existence seems like commentary on the state of fiction. One finishes “Asymmetry” for the first or second (or like this reader, third) time and is left wondering what other writers are not doing with their freedom — and, like Alistair, judging them for it.

Despite its title, “Asymmetry” comprises two seemingly unrelated sections of equal length, appended by a slim and quietly shocking coda. Halliday’s prose is clean and lean, almost reportorial in the style of W. G. Sebald, and like the murmurings of a shy person at a cocktail party, often comic only in single clauses. It’s a first novel that reads like the work of an author who has published many books over many years. […]

Emily W. Thompson reviews Michael Doane's The Crossing on Reedsy Discovery :

In Doane’s debut novel, a young man embarks on a journey of self-discovery with surprising results.

An unnamed protagonist (The Narrator) is dealing with heartbreak. His love, determined to see the world, sets out for Portland, Oregon. But he’s a small-town boy who hasn’t traveled much. So, the Narrator mourns her loss and hides from life, throwing himself into rehabbing an old motorcycle. Until one day, he takes a leap; he packs his bike and a few belongings and heads out to find the Girl.

Following in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac and William Least Heat-Moon, Doane offers a coming of age story about a man finding himself on the backroads of America. Doane’s a gifted writer with fluid prose and insightful observations, using The Narrator’s personal interactions to illuminate the diversity of the United States.

The Narrator initially sticks to the highways, trying to make it to the West Coast as quickly as possible. But a hitchhiker named Duke convinces him to get off the beaten path and enjoy the ride. “There’s not a place that’s like any other,” [39] Dukes contends, and The Narrator realizes he’s right. Suddenly, the trip is about the journey, not just the destination. The Narrator ditches his truck and traverses the deserts and mountains on his bike. He destroys his phone, cutting off ties with his past and living only in the moment.

As he crosses the country, The Narrator connects with several unique personalities whose experiences and views deeply impact his own. Duke, the complicated cowboy and drifter, who opens The Narrator’s eyes to a larger world. Zooey, the waitress in Colorado who opens his heart and reminds him that love can be found in this big world. And Rosie, The Narrator’s sweet landlady in Portland, who helps piece him back together both physically and emotionally.

This supporting cast of characters is excellent. Duke, in particular, is wonderfully nuanced and complicated. He’s a throwback to another time, a man without a cell phone who reads Sartre and sleeps under the stars. Yet he’s also a grifter with a “love ‘em and leave ‘em” attitude that harms those around him. It’s fascinating to watch The Narrator wrestle with Duke’s behavior, trying to determine which to model and which to discard.

Doane creates a relatable protagonist in The Narrator, whose personal growth doesn’t erase his faults. His willingness to hit the road with few resources is admirable, and he’s prescient enough to recognize the jealousy of those who cannot or will not take the leap. His encounters with new foods, places, and people broaden his horizons. Yet his immaturity and selfishness persist. He tells Rosie she’s been a good mother to him but chooses to ignore the continuing concern from his own parents as he effectively disappears from his old life.

Despite his flaws, it’s a pleasure to accompany The Narrator on his physical and emotional journey. The unexpected ending is a fitting denouement to an epic and memorable road trip.

The Book Smugglers review Anissa Gray’s The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls :

I am still dipping my toes into the literally fiction pool, finding what works for me and what doesn’t. Books like The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray are definitely my cup of tea.

Althea and Proctor Cochran had been pillars of their economically disadvantaged community for years – with their local restaurant/small market and their charity drives. Until they are found guilty of fraud for stealing and keeping most of the money they raised and sent to jail. Now disgraced, their entire family is suffering the consequences, specially their twin teenage daughters Baby Vi and Kim. To complicate matters even more: Kim was actually the one to call the police on her parents after yet another fight with her mother. […]

Examples of children’s and YA fiction book reviews

The Book Hookup reviews Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give :

♥ Quick Thoughts and Rating: 5 stars! I can’t imagine how challenging it would be to tackle the voice of a movement like Black Lives Matter, but I do know that Thomas did it with a finesse only a talented author like herself possibly could. With an unapologetically realistic delivery packed with emotion, The Hate U Give is a crucially important portrayal of the difficulties minorities face in our country every single day. I have no doubt that this book will be met with resistance by some (possibly many) and slapped with a “controversial” label, but if you’ve ever wondered what it was like to walk in a POC’s shoes, then I feel like this is an unflinchingly honest place to start.

In Angie Thomas’s debut novel, Starr Carter bursts on to the YA scene with both heart-wrecking and heartwarming sincerity. This author is definitely one to watch.

♥ Review: The hype around this book has been unquestionable and, admittedly, that made me both eager to get my hands on it and terrified to read it. I mean, what if I was to be the one person that didn’t love it as much as others? (That seems silly now because of how truly mesmerizing THUG was in the most heartbreakingly realistic way.) However, with the relevancy of its summary in regards to the unjust predicaments POC currently face in the US, I knew this one was a must-read, so I was ready to set my fears aside and dive in. That said, I had an altogether more personal, ulterior motive for wanting to read this book. […]

The New York Times reviews Melissa Albert’s The Hazel Wood :

Alice Crewe (a last name she’s chosen for herself) is a fairy tale legacy: the granddaughter of Althea Proserpine, author of a collection of dark-as-night fairy tales called “Tales From the Hinterland.” The book has a cult following, and though Alice has never met her grandmother, she’s learned a little about her through internet research. She hasn’t read the stories, because her mother, Ella Proserpine, forbids it.

Alice and Ella have moved from place to place in an attempt to avoid the “bad luck” that seems to follow them. Weird things have happened. As a child, Alice was kidnapped by a man who took her on a road trip to find her grandmother; he was stopped by the police before they did so. When at 17 she sees that man again, unchanged despite the years, Alice panics. Then Ella goes missing, and Alice turns to Ellery Finch, a schoolmate who’s an Althea Proserpine superfan, for help in tracking down her mother. Not only has Finch read every fairy tale in the collection, but handily, he remembers them, sharing them with Alice as they journey to the mysterious Hazel Wood, the estate of her now-dead grandmother, where they hope to find Ella.

“The Hazel Wood” starts out strange and gets stranger, in the best way possible. (The fairy stories Finch relays, which Albert includes as their own chapters, are as creepy and evocative as you’d hope.) Albert seamlessly combines contemporary realism with fantasy, blurring the edges in a way that highlights that place where stories and real life convene, where magic contains truth and the world as it appears is false, where just about anything can happen, particularly in the pages of a very good book. It’s a captivating debut. […]

James reviews Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight, Moon on Goodreads:

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown is one of the books that followers of my blog voted as a must-read for our Children's Book August 2018 Readathon. Come check it out and join the next few weeks!

This picture book was such a delight. I hadn't remembered reading it when I was a child, but it might have been read to me... either way, it was like a whole new experience! It's always so difficult to convince a child to fall asleep at night. I don't have kids, but I do have a 5-month-old puppy who whines for 5 minutes every night when he goes in his cage/crate (hopefully he'll be fully housebroken soon so he can roam around when he wants). I can only imagine! I babysat a lot as a teenager and I have tons of younger cousins, nieces, and nephews, so I've been through it before, too. This was a believable experience, and it really helps show kids how to relax and just let go when it's time to sleep.

The bunny's are adorable. The rhymes are exquisite. I found it pretty fun, but possibly a little dated given many of those things aren't normal routines anymore. But the lessons to take from it are still powerful. Loved it! I want to sample some more books by this fine author and her illustrators.

Publishers Weekly reviews Elizabeth Lilly’s Geraldine :

This funny, thoroughly accomplished debut opens with two words: “I’m moving.” They’re spoken by the title character while she swoons across her family’s ottoman, and because Geraldine is a giraffe, her full-on melancholy mode is quite a spectacle. But while Geraldine may be a drama queen (even her mother says so), it won’t take readers long to warm up to her. The move takes Geraldine from Giraffe City, where everyone is like her, to a new school, where everyone else is human. Suddenly, the former extrovert becomes “That Giraffe Girl,” and all she wants to do is hide, which is pretty much impossible. “Even my voice tries to hide,” she says, in the book’s most poignant moment. “It’s gotten quiet and whispery.” Then she meets Cassie, who, though human, is also an outlier (“I’m that girl who wears glasses and likes MATH and always organizes her food”), and things begin to look up.

Lilly’s watercolor-and-ink drawings are as vividly comic and emotionally astute as her writing; just when readers think there are no more ways for Geraldine to contort her long neck, this highly promising talent comes up with something new.

Examples of genre fiction book reviews

Karlyn P reviews Nora Roberts’ Dark Witch , a paranormal romance novel , on Goodreads:

4 stars. Great world-building, weak romance, but still worth the read.

I hesitate to describe this book as a 'romance' novel simply because the book spent little time actually exploring the romance between Iona and Boyle. Sure, there IS a romance in this novel. Sprinkled throughout the book are a few scenes where Iona and Boyle meet, chat, wink at each, flirt some more, sleep together, have a misunderstanding, make up, and then profess their undying love. Very formulaic stuff, and all woven around the more important parts of this book.

The meat of this book is far more focused on the story of the Dark witch and her magically-gifted descendants living in Ireland. Despite being weak on the romance, I really enjoyed it. I think the book is probably better for it, because the romance itself was pretty lackluster stuff.

I absolutely plan to stick with this series as I enjoyed the world building, loved the Ireland setting, and was intrigued by all of the secondary characters. However, If you read Nora Roberts strictly for the romance scenes, this one might disappoint. But if you enjoy a solid background story with some dark magic and prophesies, you might enjoy it as much as I did.

I listened to this one on audio, and felt the narration was excellent.

Emily May reviews R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy Wars , an epic fantasy novel , on Goodreads:

“But I warn you, little warrior. The price of power is pain.”

Holy hell, what did I just read??

➽ A fantasy military school

➽ A rich world based on modern Chinese history

➽ Shamans and gods

➽ Detailed characterization leading to unforgettable characters

➽ Adorable, opium-smoking mentors

That's a basic list, but this book is all of that and SO MUCH MORE. I know 100% that The Poppy War will be one of my best reads of 2018.

Isn't it just so great when you find one of those books that completely drags you in, makes you fall in love with the characters, and demands that you sit on the edge of your seat for every horrific, nail-biting moment of it? This is one of those books for me. And I must issue a serious content warning: this book explores some very dark themes. Proceed with caution (or not at all) if you are particularly sensitive to scenes of war, drug use and addiction, genocide, racism, sexism, ableism, self-harm, torture, and rape (off-page but extremely horrific).

Because, despite the fairly innocuous first 200 pages, the title speaks the truth: this is a book about war. All of its horrors and atrocities. It is not sugar-coated, and it is often graphic. The "poppy" aspect refers to opium, which is a big part of this book. It is a fantasy, but the book draws inspiration from the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Rape of Nanking.

Crime Fiction Lover reviews Jessica Barry’s Freefall , a crime novel:

In some crime novels, the wrongdoing hits you between the eyes from page one. With others it’s a more subtle process, and that’s OK too. So where does Freefall fit into the sliding scale?

In truth, it’s not clear. This is a novel with a thrilling concept at its core. A woman survives plane crash, then runs for her life. However, it is the subtleties at play that will draw you in like a spider beckoning to an unwitting fly.

Like the heroine in Sharon Bolton’s Dead Woman Walking, Allison is lucky to be alive. She was the only passenger in a private plane, belonging to her fiancé, Ben, who was piloting the expensive aircraft, when it came down in woodlands in the Colorado Rockies. Ally is also the only survivor, but rather than sitting back and waiting for rescue, she is soon pulling together items that may help her survive a little longer – first aid kit, energy bars, warm clothes, trainers – before fleeing the scene. If you’re hearing the faint sound of alarm bells ringing, get used to it. There’s much, much more to learn about Ally before this tale is over.

Kirkus Reviews reviews Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One , a science-fiction novel :

Video-game players embrace the quest of a lifetime in a virtual world; screenwriter Cline’s first novel is old wine in new bottles.

The real world, in 2045, is the usual dystopian horror story. So who can blame Wade, our narrator, if he spends most of his time in a virtual world? The 18-year-old, orphaned at 11, has no friends in his vertical trailer park in Oklahoma City, while the OASIS has captivating bells and whistles, and it’s free. Its creator, the legendary billionaire James Halliday, left a curious will. He had devised an elaborate online game, a hunt for a hidden Easter egg. The finder would inherit his estate. Old-fashioned riddles lead to three keys and three gates. Wade, or rather his avatar Parzival, is the first gunter (egg-hunter) to win the Copper Key, first of three.

Halliday was obsessed with the pop culture of the 1980s, primarily the arcade games, so the novel is as much retro as futurist. Parzival’s great strength is that he has absorbed all Halliday’s obsessions; he knows by heart three essential movies, crossing the line from geek to freak. His most formidable competitors are the Sixers, contract gunters working for the evil conglomerate IOI, whose goal is to acquire the OASIS. Cline’s narrative is straightforward but loaded with exposition. It takes a while to reach a scene that crackles with excitement: the meeting between Parzival (now world famous as the lead contender) and Sorrento, the head of IOI. The latter tries to recruit Parzival; when he fails, he issues and executes a death threat. Wade’s trailer is demolished, his relatives killed; luckily Wade was not at home. Too bad this is the dramatic high point. Parzival threads his way between more ’80s games and movies to gain the other keys; it’s clever but not exciting. Even a romance with another avatar and the ultimate “epic throwdown” fail to stir the blood.

Too much puzzle-solving, not enough suspense.

Book review examples for non-fiction books

Nonfiction books are generally written to inform readers about a certain topic. As such, the focus of a nonfiction book review will be on the clarity and effectiveness of this communication . In carrying this out, a book review may analyze the author’s source materials and assess the thesis in order to determine whether or not the book meets expectations.

Again, we’ve included abbreviated versions of long reviews here, so feel free to click on the link to read the entire piece!

The Washington Post reviews David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon :

The arc of David Grann’s career reminds one of a software whiz-kid or a latest-thing talk-show host — certainly not an investigative reporter, even if he is one of the best in the business. The newly released movie of his first book, “The Lost City of Z,” is generating all kinds of Oscar talk, and now comes the release of his second book, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” the film rights to which have already been sold for $5 million in what one industry journal called the “biggest and wildest book rights auction in memory.”

Grann deserves the attention. He’s canny about the stories he chases, he’s willing to go anywhere to chase them, and he’s a maestro in his ability to parcel out information at just the right clip: a hint here, a shading of meaning there, a smartly paced buildup of multiple possibilities followed by an inevitable reversal of readerly expectations or, in some cases, by a thrilling and dislocating pull of the entire narrative rug.

All of these strengths are on display in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Around the turn of the 20th century, oil was discovered underneath Osage lands in the Oklahoma Territory, lands that were soon to become part of the state of Oklahoma. Through foresight and legal maneuvering, the Osage found a way to permanently attach that oil to themselves and shield it from the prying hands of white interlopers; this mechanism was known as “headrights,” which forbade the outright sale of oil rights and granted each full member of the tribe — and, supposedly, no one else — a share in the proceeds from any lease arrangement. For a while, the fail-safes did their job, and the Osage got rich — diamond-ring and chauffeured-car and imported-French-fashion rich — following which quite a large group of white men started to work like devils to separate the Osage from their money. And soon enough, and predictably enough, this work involved murder. Here in Jazz Age America’s most isolated of locales, dozens or even hundreds of Osage in possession of great fortunes — and of the potential for even greater fortunes in the future — were dispatched by poison, by gunshot and by dynamite. […]

Stacked Books reviews Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers :

I’ve heard a lot of great things about Malcolm Gladwell’s writing. Friends and co-workers tell me that his subjects are interesting and his writing style is easy to follow without talking down to the reader. I wasn’t disappointed with Outliers. In it, Gladwell tackles the subject of success – how people obtain it and what contributes to extraordinary success as opposed to everyday success.

The thesis – that our success depends much more on circumstances out of our control than any effort we put forth – isn’t exactly revolutionary. Most of us know it to be true. However, I don’t think I’m lying when I say that most of us also believe that we if we just try that much harder and develop our talent that much further, it will be enough to become wildly successful, despite bad or just mediocre beginnings. Not so, says Gladwell.

Most of the evidence Gladwell gives us is anecdotal, which is my favorite kind to read. I can’t really speak to how scientifically valid it is, but it sure makes for engrossing listening. For example, did you know that successful hockey players are almost all born in January, February, or March? Kids born during these months are older than the others kids when they start playing in the youth leagues, which means they’re already better at the game (because they’re bigger). Thus, they get more play time, which means their skill increases at a faster rate, and it compounds as time goes by. Within a few years, they’re much, much better than the kids born just a few months later in the year. Basically, these kids’ birthdates are a huge factor in their success as adults – and it’s nothing they can do anything about. If anyone could make hockey interesting to a Texan who only grudgingly admits the sport even exists, it’s Gladwell. […]

Quill and Quire reviews Rick Prashaw’s Soar, Adam, Soar :

Ten years ago, I read a book called Almost Perfect. The young-adult novel by Brian Katcher won some awards and was held up as a powerful, nuanced portrayal of a young trans person. But the reality did not live up to the book’s billing. Instead, it turned out to be a one-dimensional and highly fetishized portrait of a trans person’s life, one that was nevertheless repeatedly dubbed “realistic” and “affecting” by non-transgender readers possessing only a vague, mass-market understanding of trans experiences.

In the intervening decade, trans narratives have emerged further into the literary spotlight, but those authored by trans people ourselves – and by trans men in particular – have seemed to fall under the shadow of cisgender sensationalized imaginings. Two current Canadian releases – Soar, Adam, Soar and This One Looks Like a Boy – provide a pointed object lesson into why trans-authored work about transgender experiences remains critical.

To be fair, Soar, Adam, Soar isn’t just a story about a trans man. It’s also a story about epilepsy, the medical establishment, and coming of age as seen through a grieving father’s eyes. Adam, Prashaw’s trans son, died unexpectedly at age 22. Woven through the elder Prashaw’s narrative are excerpts from Adam’s social media posts, giving us glimpses into the young man’s interior life as he traverses his late teens and early 20s. […]

Book Geeks reviews Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love :

WRITING STYLE: 3.5/5

SUBJECT: 4/5

CANDIDNESS: 4.5/5

RELEVANCE: 3.5/5

ENTERTAINMENT QUOTIENT: 3.5/5

“Eat Pray Love” is so popular that it is almost impossible to not read it. Having felt ashamed many times on my not having read this book, I quietly ordered the book (before I saw the movie) from amazon.in and sat down to read it. I don’t remember what I expected it to be – maybe more like a chick lit thing but it turned out quite different. The book is a real story and is a short journal from the time when its writer went travelling to three different countries in pursuit of three different things – Italy (Pleasure), India (Spirituality), Bali (Balance) and this is what corresponds to the book’s name – EAT (in Italy), PRAY (in India) and LOVE (in Bali, Indonesia). These are also the three Is – ITALY, INDIA, INDONESIA.

Though she had everything a middle-aged American woman can aspire for – MONEY, CAREER, FRIENDS, HUSBAND; Elizabeth was not happy in her life, she wasn’t happy in her marriage. Having suffered a terrible divorce and terrible breakup soon after, Elizabeth was shattered. She didn’t know where to go and what to do – all she knew was that she wanted to run away. So she set out on a weird adventure – she will go to three countries in a year and see if she can find out what she was looking for in life. This book is about that life changing journey that she takes for one whole year. […]

Emily May reviews Michelle Obama’s Becoming on Goodreads:

Look, I'm not a happy crier. I might cry at songs about leaving and missing someone; I might cry at books where things don't work out; I might cry at movies where someone dies. I've just never really understood why people get all choked up over happy, inspirational things. But Michelle Obama's kindness and empathy changed that. This book had me in tears for all the right reasons.

This is not really a book about politics, though political experiences obviously do come into it. It's a shame that some will dismiss this book because of a difference in political opinion, when it is really about a woman's life. About growing up poor and black on the South Side of Chicago; about getting married and struggling to maintain that marriage; about motherhood; about being thrown into an amazing and terrifying position.

I hate words like "inspirational" because they've become so overdone and cheesy, but I just have to say it-- Michelle Obama is an inspiration. I had the privilege of seeing her speak at The Forum in Inglewood, and she is one of the warmest, funniest, smartest, down-to-earth people I have ever seen in this world.

And yes, I know we present what we want the world to see, but I truly do think it's genuine. I think she is someone who really cares about people - especially kids - and wants to give them better lives and opportunities.

She's obviously intelligent, but she also doesn't gussy up her words. She talks straight, with an openness and honesty rarely seen. She's been one of the most powerful women in the world, she's been a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, she's had her own successful career, and yet she has remained throughout that same girl - Michelle Robinson - from a working class family in Chicago.

I don't think there's anyone who wouldn't benefit from reading this book.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better idea of how to write a book review. You might be wondering how to put all of this knowledge into action now! Many book reviewers start out by setting up a book blog. If you don’t have time to research the intricacies of HTML, check out Reedsy Discovery — where you can read indie books for free and review them without going through the hassle of creating a blog. To register as a book reviewer , go here .

And if you’d like to see even more book review examples, simply go to this directory of book review blogs and click on any one of them to see a wealth of good book reviews. Beyond that, it's up to you to pick up a book and pen — and start reviewing!

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After Kavanaugh: Christine Blasey Ford tells the rest of her story

In her memoir, ‘one way back,’ blasey ford details the chaos that ensued after she accused brett kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her.

Reading Christine Blasey Ford’s new memoir, I kept thinking of a tweet I read back in the spring of 2018, two months before President Donald Trump nominated Brett M. Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. “Can you name all 59 women who came forward against Cosby?” a user named Feminist Next Door posted. “Cool so we agree that women don’t make rape accusations to become famous.”

Ford, of course, did become famous after accusing Kavanaugh of attempting to sexually assault her while both were in high school (Kavanaugh has always denied this happened). She came to Washington, delivered a memorable testimony — “ indelible in the hippocampus ” — and then descended into the kind of fame that, as she describes in the book, “ One Way Back ,” nobody would ever wish upon themselves. Death threats forced her family into a hotel room for months. Bodyguards accompanied her children to school. A decades-old fear of enclosed spaces (a fear that first started, she says, after Kavanaugh’s alleged attack) was now paired with a fear of open spaces as strangers wrote to her: “We know where you live. We know where you work. We know where you eat. … Your life is over.”

Before coming forward, Ford describes a charmed existence. She had long ago traded the stuffy Beltway of her teenage years for laid-back California. She was a weekday psychology professor and a weekend surfer. When she saw Kavanaugh’s name on Trump’s shortlist, she prayed for the nomination to go to anyone else so that she could go back to packing up snacks and wet suits for her family at their beach house. Why did she risk all of this to go public? In Ford’s telling, she never imagined that her story would become so polarizing or so huge, and once it did, it was too late to change her mind. It felt like a surfing metaphor: Paddling out, she writes, “is the hardest part. And you never, ever paddle back in once you’re out there. You catch the wave. You wipe out if you have to.”

Readers looking to “One Way Back” for a magic bullet to prove Kavanaugh’s guilt or innocence are out of luck. Ford doesn’t remember anything more than she’s already publicly recalled; there are no new witnesses or unearthed diary entries. What she gives instead is a thoughtful exploration of what it feels like to become a main character in a major American reckoning — a woman tossed out to sea and learning that the water is shark-infested, or at the very least blooming with red tide.

At times, she comes across as either deeply optimistic or unfortunately naive. Prehearing, Ford’s legal team suggested that she sit through a “murder board” — a mock interrogation designed to stress-test her story. She decided that her truth should be protection enough, not comprehending that she was declining a fairly standard form of preparation.

She was told she could bring a handful of guests to act as a supportive presence while she testified, and she chose friends and colleagues over relatives — she and her husband decided he should stay home with their sons so that they didn’t have to miss school; she worried that the long hearing would be physically uncomfortable for her elderly parents. But when she saw Kavanaugh flanked by his wife and daughters at his own testimony, she realized she’d misunderstood a fundamental rule in the game of optics.

“I didn’t know my integrity was on the stand as much as Brett’s,” she writes. Kavanaugh looked like a wholesome family man. She looked like a renegade. She woke up to a headline in The Washington Post that read: “Christine Blasey Ford’s family has been nearly silent amid outpouring of support.”

Of course, it turned out that things were more complicated with her family than even she had realized. After Kavanaugh was confirmed, Ford’s legal team approached her with a delicate question: Is it possible that her dad sent a letter to Kavanaugh’s father — they belonged to the same golf club — saying that he was glad Kavanaugh had been confirmed? Ford couldn’t believe this was true, and when she asked her dad, he assured her no letter was written. It’s not until a later conversation that he backtracked: He didn’t write a letter, but he did send an email. “Just gentleman to gentleman,” he explained awkwardly. “I should have just said, ‘I’m glad this is over.’ That’s what I meant.”

Oddly, Ford did know what he meant, and in the context of her father’s Washington, it makes sense: He was an old-school Republican for whom manners and decorum supersede everything — a trade-school graduate who was proud to propel his family into a country club lifestyle and who wanted to make sure they would still be welcomed in that lifestyle even after all this tricky business with his daughter. But her father’s actions were utterly devastating in the new political climate, in which every word could be weaponized and every text or email was a gotcha. The pair’s relationship hasn’t fully recovered by the end of the book, and it’s hard to imagine it ever will.

Returning to California after the confirmation hearings, Ford was catapulted into a new reality. On the one hand, she was invited to dinner at the homes of Oprah Winfrey and Laurene Powell Jobs. On the other hand, these dinners were the only times she felt safe leaving her house, figuring that Oprah must have even more security than she did. On the one hand, backstage invitations at a Metallica concert. On the other, an anxiety so deep and pervasive that she spent days on end wrapped in a gray Ugg-brand blanket. From time to time, she writes, people still asked her whether she thought she ruined Kavanaugh’s life, and she reacted with incredulity: “Despite the fact that Brett ultimately got the job. Despite the fact that he sits on the Supreme Court while I still receive death threats.”

There are inspirational moments, too: for every death threat, a dozen well-wishers; for every moment of self-doubt, another moment of reminding herself that she’s coming from a place of privilege — supportive family, steady income — and that putting herself through the wringer might make it easier on the next victim, the next time.

Did it? Will it? “One Way Back” is a blisteringly personal memoir of a singular experience. But it was most piercing to me as a memoir of the past half-decade, when long-buried wounds were tried in the court of public opinion as much as in the court of law, and when sexual assault allegations were treated as though they were about scoring political points more than settling psychic trauma.

If you believed Ford in 2018, “One Way Back” will give you a deeper appreciation for the woman behind the headlines. If you didn’t — well, I don’t know if the book will change your mind. But it might wiggle your mind a little bit. Because it’s impossible to picture why someone would lie to achieve the kind of fame that has been bestowed upon Ford. It’s hard enough to picture why someone would put themself through that nightmare to tell the truth.

One Way Back

By Christine Blasey Ford

St. Martin’s. 320 pp. $29

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Book Review Wednesday: The After Series by Anna Todd

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I completely agree with you. But it was my first marriage. Every fight, jealous, broken hearts, hands, furniture.. was my first marriage....Sad to read what I went through but I couldn't put it down

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Now a UNCW teacher, a Navy vet captures life coming home from Iraq War

"The After" is a book written by Michael Ramos, a veteran who is now teaches in the creative writing department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

It's been a century since Ernest Hemingway's character Nick Adams headed off solo into the North Woods to ease his PTSD from World War I.

And, according to Michael Ramos, civilians still don't get it. He writes about his own homecoming in "The After," a new volume from the University of North Carolina Press.

Ramos served nearly 10 years in the U.S. Navy as a Religious Program Specialist (RP), what used to be called a chaplain's assistant. Most of that time, he was detached to the Marine Corps; the Marines get their chaplains and Corpsmen (medics) from the Navy.

That might seem a wimpy, rear-echelon posting, compared with, say, a Navy SEAL or an Army Ranger, but in Iraq, where Ramos spent tours, it was near the front. Chaplains aren't allowed to carry weapons, so Ramos served as his chaplain's armed bodyguard. He dodged bullets and fired back.

He now teaches in the creative writing department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he's assistant director of its Publications Laboratory and art director for its journal Ecotone.

"The After" is divided -- a bit messily, with flashbacks and flash-forwards -- between Ramos' time in service and his return home.

Compared with the Vietnam era, things are easier. Few civilians are spitting on veterans and calling them baby-killers. (Ramos does have an encounter with some Vietnam-era aged hippies, whose convictions are as rock-solid as a hard-shelled Baptist's.)

Yet, while Ramos and his buddies have to hear thanks for their service, over and over, they have to swallow a lot of stupidity. Like the person who asked, "What was it like to kill somebody?" or "You don't look disabled."

Ramos won't denounce the military and its performance, post 9/11, but he can't swallow the Lee Greenwood, Stars-and-Stripes, "kill them Ay-rabs" outlook either.

Like the veterans of World War II and Korea, Ramos' generation of veterans won't talk much about the war, except with each other. As one lance corporal put it in a well-intended therapy session, he doesn't want to share those memories, those horrors or demons, with family or friends.

Ramos heard a bunch of those stories, though, as an RP -- especially in the middle of the night when another Marine was remembering combat and dead bodies, couldn't sleep and had to talk to someone about it.

Asked by a young student if "American Sniper" was accurate, Ramos offers a generalized critique of all war movies: They don't catch the smells of blood, feces and burnt flesh. They don't catch the gallows humor of the grunts, peppered with dead-baby jokes. And they can't catch the camaraderie.

Marines and sailors didn't serve for God or America, Ramos writes; they fought for the guy on their left and the guy on their right, and their sergeants and the guys in adjoining units -- trying to save them from dying.

(This, by the way, echoes the findings of S.L.A. Marshall, the military historian and World War I veteran, who argued in "Men Against Fire" that frontline infantry loyalties were not to any ideology but to the comrades in their unit.)

Ramos often refers to fellow servicemen as his brothers. (Or sisters; he wound up marrying a veteran who also suffers from bad memories.)

The book concludes, more or less, as Ramos' teenaged son completes Marine boot camp.

"The After" is written in short, sharp bursts of text, with some essays just a couple of pages long. At the same time, trying to follow the tangled logic of a stressed, lost veteran, he will dash off sentences that are more than a page long.

Borrowing a leaf from Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," he traces a Marine's life through its series of boxes: from the box in which recruits ship their civilian clothes home to the "box" that brings home the corpses. Another chapter or two follows his combat boots.

"The After" won't heal the rift between America and the tiny minority who actually fight its wars. But it goes a fair way toward explaining the vet's point of view.

Book review

The After: A Veteran's Notes on Coming Home

By Michael Ramos

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, $20 paperback

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Author Interviews

A former nun explains why she ran away from her 'cloistered' life.

Terry Gross

Catherine Coldstream spent 12 years in a Carmelite monastery. Her new memoir is Cloistered . Keiko Ikeuchi /MacMillan hide caption

Catherine Coldstream spent 12 years in a Carmelite monastery. Her new memoir is Cloistered .

Catherine Coldstream didn't grow up planning to become a nun. Coldstream was from London, and had lived in Paris where she studied composition and performed experimental music.

But after her father died when she was 24, she remembers feeling "utterly thrown and completely bereft." She began searching for something different.

"I'd had a sense of transcendence very strongly when my father died," she says. "That led me on to want to get closer to the source of transcendence. And I thought religion maybe had the key."

Entering a cloistered Carmelite monastery in a rural area in the north of England meant starting a new life. Days began at 5:15 a.m., and revolved around silent prayer, group prayer, hymns, work and obedience. Coldstream says she took comfort in the routine.

"You knew exactly where you had to go when, and you were silent most of the time and very focused on what you were doing," Coldstream explains. "There were all these kinds of external structures, like ... the timetable and the bell that meant you could sort of focus on your inner life and not be always, needing to talk or make decisions."

After Years Of Abuse By Priests, #NunsToo Are Speaking Out

But eventually Coldstream began to chafe against the obedience, and the feeling that her artistic background, her intellectualism and her questioning nature were being rejected. She ran away from the monastery, then returned, then, two years later, went through official channels to leave for good. She eventually went on to study theology at Oxford.

"There's part of me that misses the intensity of monastic life and the purity of intention," Coldstream says. "But I feel it's not a complete human life, in a way. ... [Now] it's a more rounded life and it's a more fulfilled life in many ways."

Coldstream writes about her experiences in the Carmelite order in the memoir, Cloistered: My Years as a Nun.

Interview highlights

On daily life as a nun

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[You] jumped out of your bed. You weren't allowed to lie there. You just had to get straight up on your knees. You washed in a bucket of cold water. You went straight down to what we called the choir, which was a monastic chapel, and you were praying 25 minutes later. And this went on throughout the day. There were bells. There were times of prayer that alternated with times of work, but it was all very strictly regulated.

On the monastery building and grounds

Cloistered , by Catherine Coldstream MacMillan hide caption

Cloistered , by Catherine Coldstream

If you think of something [like] Downton Abbey, but it was a smaller version of that, but completely bare inside, in a very sort of stark, austere way that was actually really kind of spiritually inspiring. There's a lovely echo and lovely light and a sense of space. ... We didn't have central heating. It was really far north of England. Very drafty in winter. The windows rattled and the cold air would come in. But there was something really beautiful about it. It was very, very isolated. And it was in beautiful countryside, farmlands everywhere. Lakes and trees and meadows and hills in the distance. So you had a sense of being protected, actually, from the modern world. You felt like you'd gone back in time to somewhere that was magical in its beauty.

On wearing the habit

Putting on the actual physical stuff of the habit doesn't change you, but it does make you feel part of the community in a more complete way. It also makes you feel very heavy and dragged down, because there are layers and layers of stuff. The main habit was made of this brown surge, which is a rough, thick wool. And we had basically two layers of that. ... And then ... under that we had a tunic, which was a thick, cotton thing. And then we had four layers of linen on our heads.

So you felt encumbered by a lot of the cloth at first. And all these pins, which you could easily stab yourself with, and people did — you're always, by mistake, sort of scratching and sticking the pin in the wrong bit. You felt weighed down, but ... you quite quickly get used to it. [The habit is] a symbol of having been set aside, "consecrated" was the word we use.

On the psychological cruelty she experienced

There was a sort of a withholding of human warmth and affection. There was also lots of deliberate little humiliations that certain people might, in authority, administer to younger sisters in order to "keep them humble" or break the spirit. This was a very traditional thing in monasticism, that you would be made to feel small, that you'd be made to feel unloved or rejected. And it was all part of character formation. It sounds stark just saying it in the cold light of day, but it was like that, and you felt terribly lonely and generally crushed by some of these sort of things.

On running away from the monastery

I think I ran away to forestall [a] breaking point. I'd seen others breaking and I thought: Why are so many people in my age group [the younger nuns] ... having breakdowns? And a few people had to go to hospital, and had to leave because they were having mental breakdowns and things. And I thought, Gosh, the pressure is so great. Maybe I'm going to have a breakdown. ... And maybe that's why I had to leave. I was worried that I'd be broken if I stayed.

On the difficult and enjoyable things about readjusting to the outside world

The hardest thing was the noise. I was very used to a completely silent world. So I found noise very difficult. And I found talking to people very difficult, actually. I disliked any sort of intrusive human contact. I liked to be left alone, and I was used to it. I found everything very messy and dirty and just too much going on, so that was really difficult. ...

Invisibilia

Nun of us are friends.

But there were things, of course, I hugely enjoyed. I mean, I loved ... the physical freedom of just being able to just go — go wherever you wanted to. I remember the first time I went to the sea and just sort of running along the beach, hair flapping in the wind, jumping into the waves. The physical freedom was wonderful. I enjoyed going for a drink as well. ... I really enjoyed going for an Indian meal. That was amazing. ... My body was aching for relief and rest and I hadn't had any form of pleasure. ... So those pleasures were great, and I really enjoyed it. But I did feel slightly overwhelmed by a noisy, busy, messy world with so much going on.

On how studying theology changed her faith

Get thee to this nunnery: Fun, fast, freewheeling 'Mrs. Davis' is habit-forming

I'd got used to accepting some very, very traditional points of view on Catholicism, and that was all turned upside down. There was a time after I'd been studying theology for about a year, that I was really scared that it was going to ruin my soul, and I was going to lose my faith completely. And I did struggle with my faith for a while. I found the more you know about the Christian history and the way the scriptures were put together and things, the more questions you've got, and the harder it is to believe in it all.

Sam Briger and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

About the Book

After We Collided

By anna todd.

Though 'After We Collided' would not be categorized under books with an exceptionally incredible story, the novel is still a good piece of literature to read.

Written by Joshua Ehiosun

C2 certified writer.

‘After We Collided’ is a book that is better refined than its prequel, ‘After.’ With better storytelling, better character definition, and better dialogues, the novel is much smoother to read . One thing a reader would notice from the story is that the characters seem to be a little too mature for their age; this makes one forget that Tessa is an 18-year-old.

I would describe the story of ‘After We Collided’ as not too good and not too terrible. What makes the story of ‘After We Collided’ seem relevant is that there is the anticipation for wanting to know what happened after Hardin broke Tessa’s heart in the prequel ‘After.’ ‘After We Collided’ provokes a feeling of pain because the book focused more on Tessa and Hardin’s pain. Though their love life was vastly explored, Anna Todd’s focus seemed to be more on the hardship which Tessa faced from Hardin’s betrayal and the pain that Hardin felt from hating his father.

One thing ‘After We Collided’ did better than its predecessor ‘After’ was its better description of characters. In Anna Todd’s first book , ‘After,’ characters seemed to be forced to bend to the rules of supporting the main characters alone. However, in ‘After We Collided,’ the characters seemed more interactive with the main characters. Also, ‘After We Collided’ saw the introduction of better characters. The versatility of characters in ‘After We Collided’ over ‘After’ makes the book better than its prequel. The better definition of characters like Trevor, Trish, Zed, Landon, Vance, and Kimberly, made the novel a better book than its prequel.

Something every reader of ‘After We Collide’ will find interesting is how better dialogues got in the story. From the first novel in the series, dialoguing seemed to be forced and unnatural. However, ‘After We Collided’ made dialogues smoother and much more natural. With better character definition and Anna Todd releasing the constraint of allowing Tessa alone to be the main narrator, the novel’s dialogue became more indulging.

Writing Style and Conclusion

The writing style for ‘After We Collided,’ which was the first-person point of view narration, stayed the same as ‘After.’ However, there was a huge difference in the narration as it was not only from Tessa’s point of view alone but was from both her and Hardin’s point of view; this idea made the story better to understand in terms of how Tessa and Hardin felt about each other.

The conclusion of the story ‘ After We Collided ,’ though the novel ends with a cliffhanger where Tessa recognizes a homeless man on the street as her father, the ending still feels forced and not natural. The novel’s ending makes a reader feel forced to read the sequel.

After We Collided Review: Love after Pain

After We Collided by Anna Todd Digital Art

Book Title: After We Collided

Book Description: 'After We Collided,' the second in the 'After' series, delves into Tessa's emotional turmoil and romance with Hardin, blending love, pain, and passion.

Book Author: Suzanne Collins

Book Edition: First Edition

Book Format: Paperback

Publisher - Organization: Simon & Schuster

Date published: December 5, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-4767-7300-4

Number Of Pages: 352

Writing Style
Lasting Effect on Reader

After We Collided Review

‘After We Collided’ is the second book in the ‘After’ series. The novel tells the story of Tessa and Hardin after Tessa’s heart had been shattered by the one boy she loved. Dive into a tale of pain, romance, love, and hate.

Good characters
Forced ending
Book too long
Story not too captivating

About Joshua Ehiosun

Joshua is an undying lover of literary works. With a keen sense of humor and passion for coining vague ideas into state-of-the-art worded content, he ensures he puts everything he's got into making his work stand out. With his expertise in writing, Joshua works to scrutinize pieces of literature.

Cite This Page

Ehiosun, Joshua " After We Collided Review ⭐ " Book Analysis , https://bookanalysis.com/anna-todd/after-we-collided/review/ . Accessed 23 March 2024.

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How Candida Royalle Set Out to Reinvent Porn

By Margaret Talbot

A collage of women around a large red X.

In 1979, a group called Women Against Pornography opened an office in what was then, in the organizers’ view, the belly of the beast: Times Square. WAP members, predominantly white feminists, who believed that porn had the power to reinforce, and even breed, misogyny, led others who shared their views on eye-opening tours of the neighborhood’s peep parlors, X-rated movie theatres, and live sex shows, hoping to turn out shocked shock troops for what was then a growing branch of the women’s movement. There were some ironies, not to say cruelties, to this mission. The great nineteen-eighties debates known as “the feminist sex wars” and a lot of writing by queer critics and memoirists would help reveal them. In “ Times Square Red, Times Square Blue ,” from 1999, the Black gay novelist Samuel R. Delany wrote elegiacally about how the seamy old Forty-second Street had fostered cross-class contact and welcomed sexual encounters that could have happened only in darkened theatres and similar spaces; he lamented its sanitized successor. Even in 1979, the Times was noting that the WAP office had taken over a location that was formerly “a soul food restaurant and gathering place for transvestites and prostitutes.”

On the other side of the country, I was finishing high school that year, in Los Angeles County’s suburban San Fernando Valley, a place that I had no idea was then becoming, and would remain for several decades, the center of porn production. What I did know was that the world was lightly stitched with other people’s desires and with public settings to satisfy them in. There was the friendly neighborhood drag bar, the Queen Mary, down the street from the Sav-on drugstore where my friends and I got our school supplies. There were the no-tell motels with the blinking neon signs on Ventura Boulevard. On the way to the L.A. airport, on Century Boulevard, there was a sign for nude bowling. Spotting it from the car, my mom would say, in mock confusion, “Now, who do you suppose is nude in there—is it the bowlers?” Driving through Hollywood, you’d often see marquees advertising “Live Nude Girls.” She’d say, “Much better than the alternative.”

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The feminists of WAP did not anticipate—who could have?—how irrelevant places like Times Square would become to their crusade, how thoroughly the porn industry was soon to be transformed by new kinds of capital and technology. The anti-porn arguments of the Catharine MacKinnon–Andrea Dworkin camp would ultimately be swamped not by the passionate counter-arguments of so-called pro-sex feminists, emphasizing female agency and unruly desire, or even by more mainstream liberals stressing free expression and the First Amendment, but by the sheer deluge of porn soon to be released through the home-video market and, later, the Internet. The first videocassette recorder widely purchased for home use, Sony’s Betamax, came on the market in 1975, followed the next year by a competing format from the company JVC. In 1980, there were roughly two million VCRs in American households; by the end of the decade, there were more than sixty-two million. X-rated videotapes helped fuel the steep demand for the new gadgets, and vice versa. Hardcore headed home and curled up in the den.

And there was just so much of it—hundreds of thousands of X-rated videotapes were available for home consumption in the eighties. The kind of porno-chic feature films that in the seventies had been shown in now shuttered adult theatres—“Deep Throat,” “Behind the Green Door,” “The Devil in Miss Jones”—gave way to videos that patched together sex scenes with perfunctory dialogue and barely-there plotlines. It wasn’t the narrative arcs that most viewers were after.

The shift toward sheer volume would be accelerated by the arrival of free Internet porn, and particularly by the advent of the global behemoth Pornhub, which relies heavily on pirated clips and on content uploaded by users. In 2010, a somewhat mysterious German software guy named Fabian Thylmann bought Pornhub and a number of other purveyors of online sex stuff, and turned them into a mighty conglomerate that eventually acquired the bland, Silicon Valley name MindGeek. (Since August of last year, MindGeek has gone under the even more opaque name Aylo.) In 2020, Erika Lust, an adult-film director and producer, told the Financial Times , “They came into the market with a business model based on piracy and completely destroyed the industry, putting many production studios and performers out of business.”

Not many lives reflect these successive eras of modern porn and our attitudes toward them more revealingly than that of Candice Vadala, better known as Candida Royalle, an adult-movie actress turned feminist-porn pioneer. Few have tried with as much ardent, self-serious determination to remake the industry from the inside. With her production company, Femme, Royalle set out to produce hot, explicit films that rejected what she called, at various times, “plastic formulaic pounding dripping in your face porno” or “big-boobed babes having meaningless, passionless sex with some perfectly buffed ‘stunt-cocks.’ ” The results were mixed, but intriguingly so.

In an assiduously researched, elegantly written new biography, “ Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution ” (Norton), the historian Jane Kamensky makes a strong case for her subject’s story as both unique and, in a curious way, representative. Royalle, she writes, “was a product of the sexual revolution, her persona made possible, if not inevitable, by the era’s upheavals in demography, law, technology, and ideology. Her life could not have unfolded as it did in any place but the United States, or in any time but the one in which she lived.” Kamensky was until recently the director of the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library, an unparalleled research collection on the history of women in America, and it was in this capacity, not as a fan of, say, “Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls” (1978), that she got interested in Royalle. Reading the film star’s obituary in the Times sparked a thought. The Schlesinger had the papers of Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and WAP . What if Royalle, a very different kind of figure in the sex wars, had maintained anything like these comprehensive records of her own life and career?

As it turned out, she had. At the core of Royalle’s personal archive were the diaries she had kept almost continuously from the age of twelve. (There were also photos, videos, clippings, costumes, and correspondence.) Kamensky is fascinating on what she calls “the Great American Diary Project,” an endeavor encouraged by teen magazines, therapists, moms, ministers, and books—“ Harriet the Spy ,” “ Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret ,” and that depth charge of adolescent-girl diaries, Anne Frank’s. (After reading Frank, young Candice pledged “to write interesting things from now on.”) Women who grew up in the nineteen-sixties and seventies might find it easy to picture their first diary even now—likely a pocket-size embossed book with a tiny, inadequate lock and key, into which you poured your secrets and aspirations, which were often, in an era that didn’t exactly prize female ambition, one and the same.

“From the first page, she addressed the book as a person, a you , to whom she said good night at the end of each entry,” Kamensky writes, of Royalle’s dear diary. At fifteen, she told it, “I’d never throw you out! You’ve sort of become a part of me.” Over the decades, the diary would serve as both a goad to and a document of the kind of endless, restless self-searching that was the template of many people’s lives in her generation. Hers would encompass a dalliance with transactional-analysis therapy, of “I’m OK—You’re OK” fame; years of more conventional therapy; and a late-life search for the mother who’d abandoned her. Royalle’s thirst for self-knowledge couldn’t be quenched. “Still trying to unlock the key to myself,” she wrote in 2013. “Myself. Myself, myself, myself, myself.”

As a young girl growing up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, Candice (Candy) Vadala had some joyful things to confide—she wanted to be a “coed,” a mother, and a “famous dancer”—and some very, very sad ones. Her father, Louis Vadala, was a jazz drummer who styled himself as a free-ranging hepcat. He met his first wife, Peggy, in St. Louis, when he was touring with a musical combo. Peggy was a “brash and glamorous” eighteen-year-old with a young son and an ex-husband in the state reformatory. Louis and Peggy were married, and before long were living on Long Island with two little girls, first Cinthea, and then Candice, born in 1950. Louis’s Italian American family, who were Catholic (Peggy was not), gave his new bride the cold shoulder. And it wasn’t only Louis’s relatives. Family lore had it that Peggy had given birth to Candice at home to save money on hospital bills, and that her hepcat husband parked himself in the living room while she screamed through labor in the bedroom. When Candice was eighteen months old, her mother went home to Missouri for good. Louis was granted custody of the girls—unusually for that era—and, though visitation rights were stipulated for Peggy, she never saw either of her daughters again. Louis married a woman named Helen, who worked as a cigarette girl and longed to be a lounge singer; the family settled into a modest apartment building in striving Riverdale. He needed help raising his children, but Helen wept a lot and drank and got rough with them when she did. Worse still, when Cinthea hit puberty, Louis developed a sexual obsession with her. He started standing outside the girls’ shared bedroom at night, gazing at Cinthea as she slept, while touching himself. He scrawled an obscene suggestion in Cinthea’s diary, which he erased but left legible.

The family’s interpretation of this behavior, Kamensky argues, would have been subject to a reigning pop-psychoanalytical atmosphere not well equipped to help any of them. That atmosphere downplayed or denied the likelihood of sexual or physical abuse in the home, and cast blame for family troubles on “frigid” wives and sometimes even on “alluring” daughters. Candice, showing her familiarity with contemporary psychological lingo, wrote in her diary that Louis was “terribly neurotic” but that Cinthea, too, was “obviously neurotic.” Candice felt excluded from the central household drama, which seemed to her to revolve around Cinthea, but noted succinctly that “this family can make you sick.”

Not surprisingly, Candice wanted out, and she got out. After high school, she took a job at Bergdorf Goodman, studied illustration at Parsons School of Design for a bit, and determinedly, frustratedly, pursued her first orgasm, with an affectionate boyfriend and with various hookups. Like many young women, she felt that famous click of recognition when she first attended a consciousness-raising meeting. She joined a women’s-liberation collective in the Bronx, and wrote enthusiastically in her diary, “The main purpose is to raise your consciousness as a woman & become aware of your capabilities—what you can do as a woman—without the aid of men!”

In January, 1972, she decamped to San Francisco. Cue the Buffalo Springfield song “For What It’s Worth” (“There’s somethin’ happening here / But what it is ain’t exactly clear”) and the stock footage of fringy free spirits cavorting in the park. Clichés aside, San Francisco really was a center of alternative life styles and permissive sexuality, from the topless night clubs of North Beach to the burgeoning gay scene in the Castro. Candice moved to the Haight, naturally, into a three-story Victorian group house on Belvedere Street whose shifting cast of gay and countercultural tenants dubbed themselves the Belveweird Freakos. (Of all the signs of a lost, never-to-be-regained, era here, the fact that this raffish bunch could afford to rent a three-story Victorian house in San Francisco might be the single most poignant.)

She fell in with underground-theatre people and performance artists, including members of the rowdy, kick-lining drag troupe known as the Cockettes. She began performing in D.I.Y. plays and campy revues that poked fun, in song and dance, at gender inequality and boring sales jobs and capitalist greed. She was beautiful, she had a good voice, and she had a rebellious, political streak. Maybe at this point she might have swung toward the kind of art career that Karen Finley or Holly Hughes would craft in the nineteen-nineties, provoking the N.E.A. and the Christian right while entrancing downtown audiences, or found her way into the neo-burlesque hipster scene that took off in New York and L.A. in those same years. But alternative theatre didn’t pay much. She was using a lot of drugs. Her heart was getting broken repeatedly by a boyfriend who was ethereally lovely but manipulative, and addicted to heroin. To make ends meet, she started doing porn—adopting Candida Royalle as her professional name—and found that it paid better than any of her previous work. First came nude modelling, then loops (grainy, low-budget depictions of sex acts made to run in peep shows), then full-length movies.

She remained fond of some of the dirty movies she did in San Francisco and L.A. in the seventies. She liked the aforementioned “Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls”—“for its sincere silliness.” She had fun working with friends on a giddy, raunchy parody of the soap-opera parody “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” called “Hard Soap, Hard Soap.” Kamensky says that Royalle brought to the production “big screen presence and a lot of style, courtesy of her own ’50s fashions,” and always delivered her lines “with conviction.”

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But some of the work was dismal for her to make and, later, to watch. One movie contains a scene in which two men rape her in a laundromat. Kamensky describes another of her films, in which Royalle’s character is a housewife, whose “brutal husband” pushes her—through, oh dear, psychoanalysis—“to shed her ‘hang-ups,’ chiefly about anal sex.” The work on that one was gruelling. Royalle recalled spacing out on the hideous décor, and “counting the minutes while sucking hard so I can get my money and run.” More than once, she’d swear off adult-movie acting, telling her diary, “Pornography is not my thing. Amen. It’s been good for a few hundred.” And, in declaring another hiatus, “So much for the world of pornography. It was a brief flirtation with a male dominated industry.”

In the mid-seventies, the same years that Royalle was acting in movies such as “Carnal Haven” and “Easy Alice,” a rising contingent of feminists was busy shaping the theory that, as the writer and activist Robin Morgan put it, “Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice.” (Kamensky points out that this line would be quoted, approvingly, on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives by the California congressman Bob Dornan—one of those moments which alerted sex-positive feminists to the overlap between right-wing repression and the new anti-porn movement.) Susan Brownmiller, in her influential 1975 book, “ Against Our Will ,” wrote that “pornography is the undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda”—and compared it to antisemitic caricatures during the Holocaust.

The new movement detected no silliness—sincere, insincere, whatever—in any porn, and nothing defensible. It was this argument that all porn is misogyny—queer or straight, homemade or big-budget, rough or tender, elaborate B.D.S.M. orgy or unaccessorized vanilla coupling—that put Royalle off. That and the idea that all women who acted in adult films had been railroaded into it. Royalle hadn’t always loved her choices, but she’d been the one to make them. She wrote a letter to Ms . (which declined to publish it) demanding to know why the publication seemed to “want nothing to do with a woman who’s been directly associated with the adult film industry unless she has a horror story to tell.”

But when it came to criticizing the actual, existing adult-film industry—sure, she could do it with the best of them, and with a lot more inside knowledge than most. “The world of pornography, from the simulated quickies to the higher budget feature films,” she wrote, “is not at all concerned with what people have learned from women’s or men’s liberation, and in fact still bases its success on all the old traditional oppressive male attitudes toward sex.” The answer, she believed, wasn’t banning porn; it was better porn.

In 1984, she and a business partner started the production company Femme, to turn out films that would appeal to the growing market of women and couples watching erotic videos at home. “I don’t think that women want to see waves crashing, fade to black,” she told the audience of “The Phil Donahue Show,” looking stylish and professional, and sounding authoritative. “They want to see the nitty-gritty, too, and something hot and spicy. But they want more sensuality, more foreplay.” By then, Royalle had moved back to New York and married a young Swedish man, Per Sjöstedt, with Scandi-porn bona fides. His father, who ran a big Scandinavian erotic-film company, helped bankroll his daughter-in-law’s new venture.

Royalle had a particular vision for the films that she thought both women and men open to watching porn together would enjoy. The horniness onscreen had to look, or even be , mutual. (She liked to recruit actors who were actually together, or hot for each other, in real life.) There would be more foreplay and more of what she called “afterglow”; couples (these were generally hetero twosomes) were shown hugging and kissing, and sweating together après sex.

She was intent on “letting men see what many women actually want in bed,” as she put it. There would be no money shots of men ejaculating hither and yon; she didn’t happen to care for those. Nor would she feature women having sex with each other just to titillate male viewers: “It has to be intrinsic to the story, or they have to be lovers in real life.” She’d treat the performers with respect and appreciation on the set; in response to the AIDS epidemic, she introduced safe-sex protocols. (In a vignette from the Femme movie “A Taste of Ambrosia,” from 1987, a woman applies her partner’s condom “so slowly and meticulously,” Kamensky notes, “that the scene could be used in a sex ed workshop.”) On the other hand, Femme films still included genital closeups (“meat shots,” in the industry parlance), the requisite six sex scenes that Kamensky says mainstream porn movies featured, and blow jobs aplenty.

The first two films the company released, both in 1984, “Femme” and “Urban Heat,” offered a series of scenes with a distinctly New York-in-the-eighties sense of place—sex in stairwells and freight elevators; New Wave-y looking guys in leather jackets; people in mullets and headbands dancing at a crowded club; smudgy New York skylines; couples getting up to stuff on their tarpaper rooftops or in their un-air-conditioned apartments, with the timely intervention of some ice cubes.

More ambitious was her nearly two-hour narrative feature “Three Daughters” (1986), which she shot in a warmly lit and tastefully appointed house in suburban New Jersey. As Kamensky points out, Royalle’s script might be said to have remade her own family. There’s a Waspy but loving matriarch, played by Gloria Leonard (a friend from Royalle’s support group of porn actresses, called Club 90), a father whose sexual attentions are focussed squarely on his wife, and a cultured home life, with nice table settings. Touchingly, Royalle has outfitted each of the three daughters with a fulfilling career path: the oldest has a job at the U.S. Embassy in London, the middle is a gifted concert pianist with a rock-and-roll side, and the youngest is about to go to Springfield University, for its “great pre-med program.” All three get to have plenty of satisfying sex in the course of the movie: with, respectively, a loving fiancé, a handsome, buttoned-up (but not really!) young piano teacher, and a female bestie, succeeded, in time, by a male reporter.

Though the movies didn’t always get a lot of love from reviewers for the adult-entertainment trades (“steamy, not seamy” was one disappointed verdict), thousands of fans wrote letters to Royalle, thanking her for the movies, asking for sex tips, or suggesting scenarios. A correspondent who described herself as a “black female currently in a relationship with a white male” requested scenes of interracial couples. A rabbi from New Haven wanted copies of Femme videos for her Jewish women’s group. Royalle became something of a celebrity spokesperson for the idea that feminist porn was not an oxymoron, co-founding an organization called Feminists for Free Expression and debating MacKinnon on the “Donahue” show. She was a prized guest speaker at conventions of sex therapists, and, with the rise of cultural studies, in the late eighties, on college campuses. Linda Williams, the author of what was perhaps the first major academic study of porn’s filmic conventions, “ Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ ” (1989), was an admirer.

By the time Royalle died, at sixty-four, of ovarian cancer, she had her own house, a pretty, shingled cottage on the North Fork of Long Island. She gardened, doted on her cats, visited with friends, and received plaudits from a younger generation of alt pornographers. (She and Sjöstedt had long since divorced.) She was disappointed by the new generation of mainstream porn: “The adult-porn industry is becoming a trash heap of over-the-top extremities of the most violating acts foist[ed] upon a girl,” she had written in her diary in 2003. She feared that the “young men being brought up on this latest crop of feelingless mechanical crap are learning some terrible things about sex and women.”

Kamensky leaves us with the sense that Royalle’s victories were soon eclipsed. It’s true that the only unalloyed winner in the sex wars was capitalism, and, specifically, Pornhub, which the sociologist Kelsy Burke, in her authoritative recent history, “ The Pornography Wars ,” refers to as “the Amazon of porn.” A.I. sexbots are presumably next. Still, it’s a little jolting to hear Kamensky suggest that Royalle would have done better to stick with that women’s-liberation group in New York than to head out to dissolute San Francisco: “Her most substantive contribution to women’s liberation arguably came in her early twenties, during her stint with the Women’s Liberation Collective of the Bronx Coalition, which offered life-saving pap smears to poor women in public housing and fought to end the war in Vietnam. It is a tragedy both of Candice’s life and of second-wave feminism more broadly that the collective’s aversion to lipstick and lace drove her west, toward a more hedonic and less material vision of revolution.”

Is it, though? It’s hard to imagine venturesome, exhibitionistic Royalle settling down to a life of quietly devoted grassroots organizing. And why should she have? Other people feel a calling for that kind of activism and would surely be better at it. Besides, Femme and all the talking Royalle did about it expanded the business of hedonism in positive ways. Feminist and queer and other alt porn exists, after all, and some of its makers acknowledge Royalle as its godmother. There’s more of it now, because there’s more of every kind of porn, and alongside all the Internet-enabled consolidation of the industry, there has also been a kind of democratization, which includes the world of OnlyFans and the like. As the feminist scholar Heather Berg makes clear in “ Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism ” (2021), a study based on interviews with contemporary performers in the trade, these platforms are, in the usual way, a mixed bag: some people reap bigger rewards while others struggle with more gig-work drudgery and burdensome brand maintenance. But it also means that porn is no longer solely in the hands of producers with financing; now anyone can make and distribute it. Among the results, she says, has been a lot more queer and feminist content. That would have pleased Royalle. No, she didn’t rebuild the industry in her image. But she—along with writers and performers such as Susie Bright, Nina Hartley, and Annie Sprinkle—did help make sure that feminist porn was no longer regarded as a punch line or a paradox.

In her search for self-understanding, Royalle seems to have arrived at sure knowledge of one thing: what she wanted sexually. For a while, in the history of porn, this knowledge turned out to be something she could share with a fairly wide audience. She could push back, successfully, against what the writer Maggie Nelson calls our “culture’s dirty work of rendering female desire imperceptible, irrelevant, or impugning.” During one of the talk shows that Royalle appeared on to promote Femme, a young blond woman in the studio audience stood up and said, “Where do you go to find these movies? I’ve never heard of these movies, but I sure would love to see one!” Then an older Black woman wearing glasses—she might have been a church lady—stood up, too. On national TV, she told everybody where she got Royalle’s films: at a mall in Kalamazoo. The audience laughed and whooped. Royalle looked delighted. ♦

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Without Senators in Sight, Christine Blasey Ford Retells Her Story

Her lucid memoir, “One Way Back,” describes life before, during and after she testified that Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in high school.

A color photograph of Christine Blasey Ford shows a middle-aged woman with shoulder-length blonde hair, wearing a blue blouse and sitting on a sofa, the arm of which is covered by a multicolored knitted quilt.

By Alexandra Jacobs

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ONE WAY BACK: A Memoir, by Christine Blasey Ford

“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter.”

It sounded like a piece of refrigerator poetry suddenly ringing out in the wood-paneled Hart Senate Office Building: Christine Blasey Ford’s distinctive phrase describing her memory of being assaulted at 15 by Brett Kavanaugh, two years older, while his friend watched. (Kavanaugh, seeking confirmation to the Supreme Court, less poetically but “ categorically and unequivocally ” denied he had done any such thing, brandishing old calendars as an alibi.)

Published more than five years after her 2018 congressional testimony, Blasey Ford’s new memoir, “One Way Back,” is an important entry into the public record — a lucid if belated retort to Senator Chuck Grassley’s 414-page, maddening memo on the investigation — but a prosaic one. A Big Book like this has become the final step in the dizzying if wearily familiar passage through the American media wringer: once called a “ spin cycle ,” now more like a clown car going through the wash tunnel.

Blasey Ford is a research psychologist, professor and devotee of surfing, who leans heavily on the sport as a metaphor for her ordeal. “You made me paddle out,” she tells her lawyers at one point, when they are advising her not to testify after weeks of preparation. “And you never, ever paddle back in once you’re out there. You catch the wave. You wipe out if you have to.”

She explains the difference between a beach break (“a quick, rough ride”) and a point break (“slow, unfurling”), and offers deep thoughts on kelp, the marine organism that can be both nuisance and nurturer to humans in the swells. (“The same thing that can move you back can also move you forward. I’d just have to hope for high tide.”) Coloring the underside of her hair blue to mark summer vacations from her teaching job, Blasey Ford even unwittingly presaged mermaidcore .

“One Way Back” — that is, to some sort of shore — is a story of swimming away from the Eastern power establishment and then being sucked inexorably anew into its undertow. Living in country-clubbish suburban Washington, D.C., but lacking college degrees, Blasey Ford’s parents vowed to give their three children premium educations.

Christine, the youngest, attended the all-girls Holton-Arms in Bethesda, in social circles concentric with Kavanaugh, a student at the all-boys Georgetown Prep. She enjoyed reading “The Great Gatsby” as commentary on her circumstances, but even more “Mutiny on the Bounty,” which vividly rendered escape from a clear social hierarchy.

It was, she writes, “the height of an early ’80s John Hughes era that glamorized a hypersexualized, debauched high school party scene as depicted in movies like ‘The Breakfast Club’ and ‘Sixteen Candles,’” and it was in such a boys-will-be-boys milieu that she tells of being attacked, with no apparent avenue for recourse.

The assailant’s suffocating hand over her mouth, attempting to mute her screams, is one terrible detail that lingers; along with the bathing suit under her clothes that impeded their forcible removal. “Perhaps it’s kind of like my armor,” she writes of continuing to layer like this in her adult summers.

Blasey Ford never wavers from her certainty that it was the young Kavanaugh looming over her in that room, but she doesn’t seem hellbent on bringing him down. As she mulled going public, “If he’d come to me, really leveled with me, and said, ‘I don’t remember this happening, but it might have, and I’m so sorry,’ it might have been a significant, therapeutic moment for survivors in general,” she writes. “I might have wobbled a bit. I might have thought, ‘You know, he was a jackass in high school, but now he’s not.’”

Reading this narrative crowded with “teams” — high-powered lawyers, politicians, public-relations people and, yes, journalists, including a couple from this news organization — one indeed longs for and is denied such a quiet, human, adult scene of confrontation and forgiveness. (One also longs for more about Mark Judge, the buddy of Kavanaugh’s who Blasey Ford said was in the room that fateful night; he remained elusive in the proceedings despite talk of a subpoena, publishing “The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi” in 2022.)

Instead, we got a noisy, sped-up sequel to the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas saga , with a similar conclusion: a man on the Supreme Court changing the law of the land, a woman from his past consigned to historical footnote.

Blasey Ford suffered from her testimony, forced to sequester in hotel rooms with her family, guarded by expensive security. After it’s over, there’s prolonged PTSD: hunkering down under a fuzzy gray blanket, unable for a while to return to her regular professional life. (“Twenty-five years does a lot,” Hill tells her, about getting back to normal.)

“It felt like a sentencing,” Blasey Ford writes of her moment in the floodlights. “I suppose this book is my way of breaking free,” she muses — yet the publicity for it will, of course, invite more abuse.

There are some perks from being in the public eye. Blasey Ford is served bisque by Laurene Powell Jobs, sleeps over at Oprah Winfrey’s house, goes backstage at a Metallica concert. Her sons get the actual shirt off Steph Curry’s back at a Golden State Warriors game.

Vicious and violent hate mail is outweighed by letters from supporters and fellow survivors, and Blasey Ford expects to donate them, piling up on her dining room table, to an archive or museum. She used to dive at the pool; now she has a figurative platform, to use when she chooses. There are grants in her name at prestigious institutions.

Blasey Ford is incredibly forgiving of her old-school Republican father, who seems to value propriety — including, ouch, cordially emailing Kavanaugh’s dad after the confirmation — over defending his daughter’s experience. She slips in, double ouch, that her older brothers haven’t been much in touch since this all happened.

Though her signature phrase was mined for a McSweeney’s anthology of #MeToo writings , Blasey Ford is not a poet, after all, but a scientist, and the mess of fact and fiction about her case rankled on a cellular level. “I could see it, the riptide where the truth and narrative were mixing, creating a building current,” she writes, persisting with the ocean conceit. “Overnight, the small but noticeable divide between truth and news turned into a gulf.”

To her credit, you never really feel you’re drowning, reading “One Way Back.” But boy do you long for a nice hot shower afterward.

ONE WAY BACK : A Memoir | By Christine Blasey Ford | St. Martin’s | 298 pp. | $29

Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010. More about Alexandra Jacobs

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Will there be a 6th a court of thorns & roses book updates & everything we know.

A Court of Thorns & Roses is one of the most popular “romantasy” series, but is Sarah J. Maas planning to publish a sixth book set in this world?

Sarah J. Maas has already confirmed that she's writing a sixth book in her Court of Thorns & Roses series.
There's no word on a release date for ACOTAR 6 , but Maas' publication history suggests it could arrive in 2025 or 2026.
The next A Court of Thorns & Roses novel could focus on characters like Elain, Azriel, Lucien, and Mor.

A Court of Thorns & Roses is one of the most beloved " romantasy " stories out there, and fans of the Sarah J. Maas series may be wondering if there will be a sixth book set in this world . Maas published A Court of Thorns & Roses back in 2015, and she's since written two direct sequels, a novella called A Court of Frost and Starlight , and a spinoff novel about the original trilogy's supporting characters. Major players from ACOTAR have also appeared in Maas' Crescent City series , so they could show up again in Crescent City 4 .

However, this doesn't address whether there will be a sixth Court of Thorns & Roses book, something readers may be wondering about on the heels of A Court of Silver Flames. While the 2021 novel could serve as a conclusion to Cassian and Nesta's story, there's little doubt that Maas can still expand on ACOTAR 's other supporting characters and its fantasy world at large . This may leave readers speculating about whether she'll continue the series. Fortunately, the author has already offered a definitive answer to that question.

What Order To Read Sarah J. Maas' Books In

A court of thorns & roses book 6 is happening, author sarah j. maas has confirmed it.

ACOTAR fans will be pleased to learn that the sixth book in that series is first on Maas' to-do list.

Those worried about A Court of Silver Flames being the final book in Maas' ACOTAR series can put those fears to rest. The author already confirmed that A Court of Thorns & Roses 6 is happening during an interview with TODAY.com . It will be one of the four books Bloomsbury announced after securing a deal with Maas in 2023. And although Maas told TODAY.com that there's a " taxiing position " when it comes to the order she's writing and releasing these novels, ACOTAR fans will be pleased to learn that the sixth book in that series is first on Maas' to-do list .

Maas told the outlet that she'll be writing the sixth Court of Thorns & Roses book after House of Flame & Shadow , which hit shelves in January 2024. With her third Crescent City novel out of the way, Maas can get back to the Night Court and the Inner Circle. She hasn't revealed much else about her return to ACOTAR, but readers can use previous books to speculate about what she'll do next. The books already published in this series are as follows:

What Will The 6th ACOTAR Book's Story Be?

What a court of silver flames set up.

Maas told TODAY.com that she knows what direction she's taking the sixth ACOTAR book in, and she even teased a seventh. " I know much more about what’s happening in this one ," she explained. " And then the next book in that series, I have the ideas and general, vague thoughts. " Sadly, she didn't elaborate on what story her next novel will tell — or even reveal which characters it might follow. However, readers can guess what the sixth Court of Thorns & Roses book will cover based on what A Court of Silver Flames set up , as well as which characters haven't been in the spotlight yet.

As far as characters go, it's been repeatedly speculated that the sixth ACOTAR novel will follow Elain and Azriel , Elain and Lucien, or all three. Elain and Lucien are mates, though Elain wants nothing to do with him — and that could be a fascinating bond to explore, especially since Maas hasn't delved into that situation before. Azriel clearly has a crush on Elain, so that could complicate matters. The next book could see them getting together regardless of Elain's mating bond, or it could see Azriel finding his own mate.

Readers can guess what the sixth Court of Thorns & Roses book will cover based on what A Court of Silver Flames set up, as well as which characters haven't been in the spotlight yet.

A Court of Silver Flames also sets up a few threads that could continue in A Court of Thorns & Roses 6 , and one of them involves Mor, who could also be the book's primary POV. There's a moment in ACOSF when Mor interacts with a mysterious presence in the woods near her estate. This could prove important in later ACOTAR books, as it's never adequately explained in this one. The next installment could also further explore the Mortal Queens and the Band of Exiles if Maas chooses to go in that direction.

When Could The 6th A Court Of Thorns & Roses Book Release?

What else maas is working on.

There's no word on when the next Court of Thorns & Roses book will be released, but Maas confirmed it's the next thing she's working on. With Maas averaging about a book a year — though she has had two-year gaps between releases — it could hit shelves in 2025. This is probably the earliest readers will see it, but it's possible ACOTAR 6 won't arrive until 2026 . Fans of the series will need to wait for more updates from the author to determine when she'll drop the book. Maas will work on a secret project she's " very excited about " afterward, as well as Crescent City 4. However, ACOTAR is first.

Maas is also supposed to be adapting A Court of Thorns & Roses for Hulu alongside Ron Moore, but recent updates on the project have been confusing and disheartening. While Hulu's ACOTAR show hasn't been scrapped, it seems to be sitting in development hell. As such, it shouldn't hold up Maas' writing unless Hulu starts to prioritize ACOTAR more .

10 Books To Read If You Love A Court Of Thorns & Roses

How many more a court of thorns & roses books will there be, will book 6 be the last one.

It's unclear how many Court of Thorns & Roses books Maas will write in total, but readers can expect at least two more. The sixth installment in the series is already confirmed and slated to be her next release. And her comments to TODAY . com suggest she's planning a seventh novel, even if it hasn't been announced as of this writing. Whether the story will continue beyond that remains to be seen, but Maas does appear to be building to a crossover between her major fantasy series. A Court of Thorns & Roses will be a part of that, so its storylines could continue in other projects as well.

Source: TODAY.com , Bloomsbury

Despite outcry, Huntington Beach council votes to seek bids for privatization of library management

Huntington Beach Public Library supporters hold signs and applaud during Tuesday night's City Council meeting.

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The Huntington Beach City Council voted 4-3 on Tuesday night to move forward with seeking bids for the privatization of library management.

Council members listened to three hours of public comments from 108 residents largely against the idea, and more than 600 emails submitted were almost all against privatization.

For the record:

12:54 p.m. March 21, 2024 This article was updated with the correct identification of Barbara Richardson in a photo caption.

Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark, Mayor Pro Tem Pat Burns and council members Tony Strickland and Casey McKeon voted to start the bid process, while council members Dan Kalmick, Natalie Moser and Rhonda Bolton voted against.

Several people in the crowd yelled out “Shame!” after the vote, leading Strickland to demand their removal.

“I’m not going to put up with that s**t anymore,” Strickland said as he walked off the dais.

The meeting went into a five-minute recess, the second of the night, as police officers spoke to audience members. No one was ultimately removed.

Barbara Shapiro, left, speaks during Tuesday night's Huntington Beach City Council meeting.

Members of the conservative council majority stressed that seeking requests for proposals, or RFPs for the management work, was simply exploring options that could possibly save the city some money.

“I like our libraries,” Mayor Pro Tem Pat Burns said. “I don’t want to see them diminished or degraded in any way. But if we can get the same service and do it more economically … I think it’s our duty as leaders in the community, as council members, to look at those kind of savings. I think we’d be negligent in our job if we didn’t.”

The city was approached late last year by Maryland-based Library Systems & Services about operation of its public libraries, claiming it could save the city about $1 million per year, city staff said. The company employs former Huntington Beach City Councilman Mike Posey as a regional sales executive.

The city would retain ownership of the library system and its materials.

Huntington Beach Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark, center, listens to a speaker talk about the Huntington Beach Public Library.

But some public speakers, including library employees themselves, questioned if workers would stay in the Huntington Beach Public Library system if such a move were to occur, citing possible lower wages and cut-off pensions. Laura Jenkins is the senior youth services librarian for the Huntington Beach Public Library, who started out as a weekly storyteller.

“I don’t know what the terms of an outsourcing contract might be, but I do know that outsourced libraries are widely known for being a revolving door of workers,” Jenkins told the City Council. “Gone will be the days of the family librarian who grows with families as their children age. That, to me, is the biggest tragedy that will come with possible outsourcing.”

Kari Johnson, a Huntington Beach library services assistant, was tearful as she put the Mayor’s Excellence Award, presented to her last November, on the podium while speaking.

“I am here again tonight in these same chambers needing to defend that same job,” Johnson said. “Do not hand us over to outsourcing … look at our faces. We are sincere, hard-working, educated people … We have been pushed and prodded this year, and now this item is too much.”

None of Orange County’s libraries are currently privately operated, though Library Systems & Services does have operations in Southern California. Simi Valley contracted with the company in 2013, four years before Escondido did the same .

Bolton noted that current donations from nonprofit Friends of the Huntington Beach Public Library would not go to a private entity, so the savings from privatizing operations could actually be closer to $650,000 than $1 million.

Huntington Beach high school students wait to speak at Tuesday night's City Council meeting.

“That’s one-sided,” Strickland said. “You don’t know if there’s other people who would step up and fill that gap.”

Bolton responded incredulously, “Someone is going to donate to a private company?”

Moser noted that the city attorney’s office went from 11 to 15 full-time employees in a year, as that budget went up almost $1 million.

“For me, I think that we should invest in our libraries,” she said. “I don’t think this is the place where we should be cutting.”

But the RFP process will begin.

“We can always negotiate into the contract quality control metrics and other deal points to address any concerns we may have,” McKeon said. “I totally understand concerns that have been raised, I just think it’s premature to pass judgment until all the facts are known.”

Barbara Richardson, right, speaks against library privatization during Tuesday night's meeting.

Earlier Tuesday, the council received a letter from State Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond opposing the agenda item. Nonprofits PEN America and EveryLibrary also released a joint statement in opposition.

“Community libraries help us extend our efforts to support students and their families,” Thurmond wrote. “Don’t hinder them by making a short-sighted decision to privatize the library.”

Council approves guidelines for children’s library book review board

Ordinance No. 4318 was also approved by the same 4-3 vote on Tuesday night, with Van Der Mark, Burns, Strickland and McKeon in favor and Kalmick, Moser and Bolton against.

The ordinance includes guidelines for a parent/guardian community review board of up to 21 members that will screen children’s books for sexual content and/or sexual references before they enter the library.

The review board was first approved last fall , but this is the first time details have been released. It will meet at least twice a year, with meetings open to the public as a Brown Act board.

Don McGee speaks passionately about the Huntington Beach Public Library during Tuesday night's City Council meeting.

Board members will be provided a list of children’s books that are being considered by director of community and library services Ashley Wysocki at least 45 days before any board meeting, and any board member can nominate a book from the list for review. Board members can also request any book currently in circulation be subject to the same review.

“How will they decide if a book is pulled or not pulled?” Kalmick asked. “Literally, judging a book by its cover?”

City Atty. Michael Gates responded that committee members can use their own reasoning, including reviews or community input.

“I think we’ve just added a huge layer of bureaucracy and government,” Kalmick said. “I feel like I’m the Libertarian on this council trying to limit government’s intervention into our daily lives, and I can’t support this ordinance. I think it’s too confusing and way too squishy … I don’t know why this council would give up its authority on what goes in our public library to a board of unelected folks.”

Huntington Beach City Council members listen to a speaker during Tuesday night's meeting.

Van Der Mark responded that she is simply trying to bring parents and the community into the equation of what is allowed in libraries.

“You make it seem like in order to be worthy of having an opinion on a children’s book, you need to have a degree,” she said.

Kalmick responded that there’s a difference between someone with an opinion and someone with a library science degree.

“When I say that amateurs are on this board … it’s not to denigrate someone’s opinion,” he said. “It’s to quantify someone’s expertise ... Parenting is very difficult, but being a parent I don’t believe qualifies me to decide what books are in our children’s library.”

Huntington Beach residents stand and applaud as a speaker addresses the Huntington Beach City Council on Tuesday night.

Moser said she believed the definition of “children” as people under 18 was too broad, as are the standards of sexual content or references.

“You are potentially removing so many different books from the library, that are about things like people’s bodies,” she said. “Maybe not removing them from the library, but moving them to a restricted section, or perhaps disallowing them from entering the library at all.”

Notably, all decisions by the board will be final.

H.B. exits League of California Cities for 2024

In the last item of the night, the City Council again voted 4-3, in this case to leave the League of California Cities for this year, with the same members voting for and against the move.

McKeon, who introduced the item, said the organization advocates for the state’s agenda instead of individual cities, citing its support of Proposition 1 as an example.

“In my opinion, that’s unforgivable,” McKeon said. “We cannot continue sending tax dollars to an organization that hurt us this badly. We can no longer be part of an organization that’s supposed to be advocating for us and did the exact opposite in such a high-profile way.”

Huntington Beach residents applaud as a speaker addresses the City Council on Tuesday night.

As of Wednesday morning, Proposition 1 — Gov. Gavin Newsom’s mental health ballot measure opposed by most conservatives — maintained a lead of less than 22,000 votes statewide out of more than 7 million cast.

Huntington Beach’s withdrawal comes after neighboring Newport Beach also voted to withdraw last week . The city will seek reimbursement for 2024 dues that have already been paid.

Moser, a division board member of the League of California Cities, said in dissent that the league has provided plenty of benefit and advocacy for Huntington Beach.

“It’s not OK to throw the baby out with the bath water,” she said. “You might disagree with the way that they approached Prop. 1, that’s fine, but that doesn’t mean that everything leaves. There’s also training [by Cal Cities] that’s provided, not just to council members, but to staff, and I don’t know who else is going to be providing that type of training.”

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Matt Szabo is a sports reporter for the Daily Pilot. A Southern California native and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo graduate, he has been covering sports for L.A. Times Community News since 2006, most extensively water polo and tennis. (714) 966-4614

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After Story by Larissa Behrendt review – trauma and secrets unspool on literary tour of England

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