The Water Knife, a sci-fi thriller written by Paolo Bacigalupi, presents a dystopian world that is disturbing in its verisimilitude. The novel, however, is ultimately dragged down by shallow main characters, having to resort to shock value to hold our attention. The story is built around three main points of view: there’s the journalist Lucy, who needs to find out …
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is both an effective detective story and a powerful cry about the situation of women in modern society. Stieg Larsson creates, in the first volume of the Millenium trilogy, a fascinating cast of characters and an engaging plot, but really excels when putting at the foundation of the story the problem of how women …
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This review contains spoilers. A crime thriller written by Stephen King, The Outsider has a great start, pushing its characters to their limits while making them face questions regarding the limits of reason and, paradoxically, the terrible consequences of acting based on emotions alone. Its second half, however, brings the pacing to a halt, with the introduction of an uninteresting …
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Giordano Bruno (friar, philosopher, and the protagonist of Heresy) was persecuted by the Inquisition at the end of the sixteenth century for preaching the infinity of the universe and its heliocentric model, preceding even the famous Galileo. It is said that his last speech, when he was finally captured by the Inquisition in 1600 and sentenced to death for heresy, …
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If it is said a reader lives a thousand lives before they die, how about an author? Telling the life story of Julian Carax, a mysterious writer, and that of Daniel Sempere, the eleven-year-old boy who picks, from the labyrinthine shelves of a forgotten library, exactly the last book written by Carax, The Shadow of the Wind is a novel …
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