I've taken quite a vacation from this blog, but I certainly haven't taken a break from reading, or the occassional book review. If you've missed me, you can find my review of a wonderful cozy mystery, Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station by Dorothy Gillman, posted at a new review venue, The New Haven Review of Books.
The New Haven Review of Books will be posting a new short (300ish words) review every Monday. Attentive readers will notice that my review is not nearly as long, rambling and self-indulgent as the reviews on this site, though it still manages to "out-word-count" the other four reviews. The NHRB has two basic rules for reviews: 1) that the review be positive (they are not interested in slamming books), and 2) the the book be overlooked by other, larger, review venues. Now, you cozy readers out there know that the Mrs. Pollifax series is very popular among mystery readers, so there's a bit of an exception to rule #2 - if the book is well-known within a genre, but remains unknown to general readers, (or perhaps, in the case of Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station, is over 20 years old) then it counts as overlooked.
The NHRB is looking for reviewers, so please get in touch (with them) if you have a brilliant and underappreciated book that you'd like to write about.
In other review news, I thought this article in the New York Times blog, about the 7 most overused words in book reviews, was pretty funny. I think I'm guiltly of using (or overusing) at least four....
