Cats Do Eat Spagetti: Living with Our Rescue Cats
Book
When English artist Paul Wright and his wife moved to a new home beside Italy's Lake Como, their...
Martin Carr recommended track Stray Cat Strut by Stray Cats in Runaway Boys: A Retrospective '81-'92 by Stray Cats in Music (curated)
Stray Dog Simulator
Games and Entertainment
App
Pick your favorite breed and live the life of a Stray Dog! Survive in a massive city filled with...
Pawprint | animal rescue podcast for dog, cat, and other animal lovers
Podcast
Have you ever wondered what it takes to place a stray dog or cat in a permanent home? Meet the...
The Lost Cats and Lonely Hearts Club
Book
Step away from the cat videos on YouTube and put your reservation for the cat cafe on hold because...
Housebroken
TV Show Watch
"HouseBroken" is an animated series following a group of neighborhood pets and stray animals as they...
Housebroken
Sarah (7798 KP) rated Onward (2020) in Movies
Oct 5, 2020 (Updated Oct 5, 2020)
A Pixar film with a fantasy setting, what's not to like? It's a great take on elves, wizards and mythical creatures and also relevant to today's society with it's cultural references and technological advancements. And unicorns acting like stray cats? Genius. The plot itself is exactly the type of quest you'd expect in a fantasy, with your typical Disney/Pixar tropes (dead parent). However this story doesn't necessarily turn out the way you'd expect and I have to commend Pixar for not being predictable. Like Frozen before it, this plays out in a rather emotional and heartwarming yet fairly unexpected way. I'd be lying if I said I didn't get any "feels" watching this!
There's no real need to say that this film looks amazing. I think it'd be more surprising if a Pixar film didn't. It also has a great voice cast although my only real negative of this film is that I felt like the cast could've been given more to work with. It may have just been me not paying attention, but I struggled to even notice John Ratzenberger (which is like missing the late Stan Lee in a Marvel film).
Onward is an unusual Pixar film. For me it falls between the aforementioned categories. It's not "bad" enough to just be very good but it's not quite brilliant, although I did enjoy it very much and laughed a lot more than I was expecting.
Jason Williamson recommended In Heaven by The Meteors England in Music (curated)
Every Witch Way But Wicked
Book
Take twelve paranormal authors. Toss them together in one anthology. Add a dash of romance, a pinch...
Witches
Acanthea Grimscythe (300 KP) rated Let the Right One In in Books
May 16, 2018
Lindqvist has created for readers a completely deplorable cast of characters, ranging from Eli, the child, to her caretaker, Håkan Bengtsson. These characters aren’t hate-worthy in the same manner as Gone Girl‘s Amy Dunne, but rather in the way that they simply are. I won’t go too much into the details behind why I find the cast of this book to be unsavory, because I feel that just about anything I could say about the characters would, in one form or another, spoil the book; these characters and their flaws, which are bountiful, provide the book with so many unexpected twists and turns that just about anything that could be said might reveal something vital to the plot. Except for my favorite character, which, oddly enough, is Gösta. This may or may not have something to do with the fact that, like Gösta, I adore cats and it is extremely difficult for me to not want to take a stray in. (My boyfriend and I have too many, and I love them more than the entire world!)
The plot takes place over the course of about three weeks, beginning near the last week of October and ending on Friday, November 13. For a book of about five-hundred pages, that’s quite a few days to cover and often, that expanse of time, when it is written as detailed as Lindqvist has penned it, can seem like it simply drags on – that is not the case here. As I read, it felt more like a few days than several weeks, largely because the plot is fast paced and constantly moving. Because there isn’t a lot of exposition, there isn’t really much to slow the story down. Told from alternating perspectives, readers are given several different points of view of what’s going on, and from there it is relatively easy to come to your own conclusions regarding the story’s events as well as the behaviors of the various characters. Those I loathed, others might feel pity for, and vice versa.
Let the Right One In is a vampire novel, as I’ve alluded to earlier in this review; however, Lindqvist does not approach the idea of vampires in the same method that many books do presently. These are not romanticized vampires, but rather monsters. Horrible, bloodthirsty creatures that will rip out your throat, not sparkle – that’s what Lindqvist’s vampires are. This fact alone scores extra points with me, because I prefer vampires as the terrors they are meant to be, rather than the glorified, dark lovers that plague most contemporary literature.
My only gripe with this translation of Let the Right One In deals largely with its flow. While the story itself is excellent and the characters dynamic, the translation seemed to be a bit on the rough side. I do not speak Swedish. If I did, I wouldn’t have a use for the translated version of the story. That said, I know absolutely nothing of the language. Given that my major is in Creative Writing and that I have taken Linguistic courses, I do know that some languages have no tense – at least, not in the way that those of us that speak English view it. That said, there are many times in the translation that I was reading where the tense seemed to switch randomly, and I do not know if this was intentional or not. It was not an issue that I encountered while reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo though, so it’s a bit hard for me to be forgiving about it.
This book was definitely worth the read, and I’m hoping that I’ll get a chance to watch the original film adaptation in the future – my boyfriend might have it, actually. I should check!