Vera - Series 3 - Review

My review of the first season of Vera.
My review of the second season of Vera.

Vera - Series 2 - Review

 My review of the first season of Vera.

Vera - Series 1 - Review

Vera starts out slow. She's a hard sell is Vera Stanhope - tough, insecure, fearfully intelligent, and afraid of placing confidence in others. Joe Ashworth, the dishy sergeant to end all dishy sergeants (sorry, Hathaway), is, however, a patient man. He's prepared to wait, to chip away at her walls, to take her moods and temper. I think they're my favorite detective duo of all time.

What I offer here are the impressions I jotted down after each episode - minireviews, if you like, and more of a rough diary than anything, but here they are. You can watch the first three seasons free here.

Top Books of 2015

Neil Gaiman's simply one of the best storytellers in the market right now. Mixing the whimsical and macabre, he uses an uncomplicated story to convey a powerful, understated effect. My dad described his writing thus: "It's like you're walking down an ordinary street and then you take a left turn and there's Faerie." The Graveyard Book is close to my favorite of his novels (Coraline might be the winner), and in it he sets us into a small world with a supernatural twist. Bod is an ordinary boy, raised by ordinary parents, who just happen to be ghosts. 

I read My Antonia once before in what was probably Middle School, but I obviously didn't get it. This was the time it finally clicked: the atmosphere, the untamed prairie, the romantic realism of it all. Also, that epilogue was about the most winsome portrait of a huge family that I've ever read.

Endeavour Season 3 - Coda - Episode Review

 My review of last week's episode: Prey

After last week's hijinks, Coda returns to more familiar territory. In many ways, this has been a wildly different series of Endeavour - so much so that it's been difficult to establish a status quo. Coda suffers from this, but in all the chaos, there are moments of pathos.

Mamaw Reviews The Return of the King

I first started chatting about hobbits with my grandmother a few months ago. After she read The Hobbit, we ended up watching the films. Here's the story:

Endeavour Season 3 - Prey - Episode Review

 My review of last week's episode: Arcadia

The first Inspector Morse episode aired in 1987. Over the last twenty-nine years, we've seen death in many shapes and forms, from run-of-the-mill stranglings to murder as performance art in a recent Lewis. But don't expect anything like that in Prey: this episode, Morse goes on Safari.

Endeavour Season 3 - Arcadia - Episode Review

My review of last week's episode: Ride

I don't suppose we could have plausibly continued the Morse-as-tourist-in-great-literature trend into the rest of the series, but I'm a little sad that this week doesn't find Morse as the mild-mannered Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited (I had my hopes: after all, this episode is called Arcadia) or snobbish Pip in Great Expectations, or any number of other literary middle-class hangers-on observing the enchanting world of the upper classes.

Of course, I kid. Morse in The Great Gatsby was a neat gimmick episode, but not a sustainable conceit. Even so, Morse as a character has always found himself an interloper in the world of others, and never more so than in Arcadia, an overstuffed episode which rather clumsily tries to get back into its usual groove.