What a great idea this is! Kiirstin at A Book a Week and Mandy at Edge of Seventeen just did a “buddy review” of Ice, the latest YA book by Sarah Beth Durst.
Each one first did their own review of the book itself, and then they interviewed each other about their opinions. I don’t know if I’ve seen that sort of thing before. Essentially, as they describe it, they’re doing a “book club” right online for us, and we are the beneficiaries of their discussion.
Being something of a mythology and folklore buff myself, I was very interested in what both Mandy and Kiirstin thought of the book. It sounds like Durst did a great job of pulling a fairy tale motif into the real world, though it also appears that the remoteness of fairy tale characters followed the motif as well, making some of the book’s characters rather hard to relate to.
Still, from the descriptions, this sounds like a book that people who enjoy myth and folklore might really be interested in. And I loved the book club format, and the dual-blog review and conversation! Really good idea.
Well done, Kiirstin and Mandy!
Phyl, I’m so glad you liked it! Thank you for your kind words. It was an experiment for us that I think worked pretty well (although Mandy has done something similar before with her Sweet Valley High read/re-read). We’re going to try to keep doing it although I keep forgetting to get our next book out of the library… whoops!
Something I realized while working on it is that I could be asking more questions in blog comments, which I think would generate more discussion than I sometimes see in comments. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with the way I comment now, necessarily, but the act of asking questions and seeing others’ answers adds an additional dimension of enjoyment to the whole reading process for me.