Bayou Bytes Blog

Courtesy of goodreads.com Oh, the classics. We read them because they were perhaps revolutionary for the time period, thus we are enlightened by the antiquity yet still taught by the applicable lessons in them. Or we read them because our mean high school teachers forced us to. One of those commonly required authors is William Shakespeare; he wrote seemingly endless amounts of fodder for future English classes. Yet, one man saw greatness in a particular Shakespeare play. He saw the potential for humor, gore, smack talk, smut, and an endless amount of sarcasm in  King Lear ... he saw his eleventh literary creation, Fool . Fool is the story of Pocket, King Lear's court jester. Pocket is a witty, highly intelligent, manipulating, kind, crude, sweet man, who is subtly the voice of reason in Lear's crumbling kingdom and family. Fool follows the original King Lear story line... and that's about it. The characters are much more richly detailed, their interactions mo...

Courtesy of Goodreads.com "Today is Christmas Eve. Today is my birthday. Today I am fifteen. Today I buried my parents in the backyard. Neither of them were beloved." Right off the bat, you know that The Death of Bees  (2012) is going to be rough.  This is a book about horribly neglectful and abusive parents; the pitfalls of the government's policies on child welfare; misplaced and malicious judgement made about people; growing up in general; and the tenacity that children and teenagers have to survive their situations no matter how dire.  The book is gritty and in your face; the author does not shy away from the violence and neglect that pervades homes and families.  Author Lisa O'Donnell's debut novel, The Death of Bees  does not hesitate to shock; it is the shock factor of the novel that jolts the reader to the realization that this story is one that could very well happen. O'Donnell uses short, abrupt descriptions to create t...

Courtesy of http://sffbookreview.files.wordpress.com /2012/09/flavia-puppet.jpg Flavia de Luce does not go looking for trouble; it just happens to find her.  She does not mean to  make the police look bad; she just cannot help that she knows more about chemistry and science than they do.  So, armed with her immense knowledge of self-taught chemistry and her dogged persistence, Flavia does what any 11 year old girl would do: she solves the crime. A creation of Canadian author Alan Bradley, Flavia and her family were first introduced in 2009's The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie , a delightful, twisted mystery involving boarding schools, dead birds, and stamps. Bradley continued with Flavia's genius chemistry-centered answers to crime in The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag (2010), A Red Herring Without Mustard (2011), I Am Half-Sick of Shadows (2011), Speaking from Among the Bones (2013), and most recently, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches (2014). ...