I’m not a fan of Shark films. There’s nothing particularly wrong with them — they’re just not for me. I find them quite boring and predictable, the sort of qualities I much prefer to be in my beloved slasher flicks. I watched The Requin (which means “shark” in French) purely because of Alicia Silverstone, but she delivered what…
Review: ‘The Fallout’ is an Intimate Character Study of Life After Trauma
The opening of Megan Park’s feature-length directorial debut, The Fallout, which follows the aftermath of a school shooting, felt reminiscent of 2018’s Vox Lux, in that abrupt gunfire suddenly destroys what began as a normal day. Unlike Vox Lux, however, we don’t see anything, we just hear it. It’s an inciting incident that won’t sit well with everyone,…
Book Review: The Brightsiders
The Brightsiders has the worst opening lines to a book that I’ve ever read — so much so that I closed my kindle book. I was prepared for it to be YA, but wow. I picked this up again because I noticed it was included in my Audible membership, so I thought I’d see if I…
Book Review: Lessons in Chemistry
Lessons in Chemistry tells the story of Elizabeth Zott, a female chemist in the ’60s who finds herself single, pregnant, and fired from her lab job. She ends up hosting a cooking show while raising her young daughter in order to make ends meet. Throughout her life, she has remained headstrong against setbacks and sexism and, especially…
Book Review: Good As Dead
After a hit-and-run accident leaves Holly injured and her husband dead, a fixer for a high-powered guilty party offers Holly and her daughter a life of luxury in exchange for silence. Told from alternating points of view, Susan Walter’s Good As Dead explores how an unlikely group of people are bound to one another by a…
Book Review: How to Kill Your Family
How to Kill Your Family sounded like exactly my thing because I love being in the mind of a sociopath/psychopath. I love unreliable and unlikeable narrators, as well as plots centring on murder and revenge. The book started off strong as it introduced us to our central character, Grace, and to her circumstance, but it didn’t take…
Book Review: Stolen by Elizabeth Gilpin
Actress Elizabeth “Betty” Gilpin (GLOW, The Hunt) has written a memoir about her time in the troubled teen industry called ‘Stolen,’ which I only learnt about yesterday. This morning I purchased the audiobook and listened to the entire thing. At 15, Elizabeth was an honour student, a state ranked swimmer, and a rising soccer star, but…
Legally Blonde at 20
Legally Blonde was released in the US on July 13th, 2001, and in the UK on October 26th, 2001. Even after 20 years, Legally Blonde’s feminist legacy still perseveres in empowering women by dismantling the blonde stereotype through a strong female character. In 2017, Reese Witherspoon told the Wall Street Journal, “At least once a week I have…
Book Review: The Husbands
“It will get done. But the part that he leaves out is that he’ll have nothing to do with the doing.” Nora is a wife, mother, and lawyer who is fed up of her well-meaning but completely oblivious husband, Hayden, not helping her out more with childcare and housework. Nora’s lifechanges when the couple’s house hunting…
Book Review: The Divines
“With the emotional power of Normal People and the reflective haze of The Girls, a magnetic novel that moves between present-day Los Angeles and a British boarding school in the 1990s, exploring the destructive relationships between teenage girls.” I was really excited about this book, especially due to the above description, but it was nothing like that. Ellie Eaton…