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Dubliners

James Joyce and Terence Brown

7.5 (4 Ratings) Rate It

Book

James Joyce's Dubliners is an enthralling collection of modernist short stories which create a vivid...

Charlie Cobra Reviews (1840 KP) rated Pure in TV

Jul 7, 2020

Pure

2017 | Drama

8.0

(1 Ratings)

TV Show Rating

Conflict of Conscience & Crisis of Faith

Pure is a crime/drama series created by Michael Amo and directed by Ken Girotti. It is produced by Two East Production and Cineflix and airs on the WGN network. The show stars Ryan Robbins, A.J. Buckley, Peter Outerbridge, and Rosie Perez.

Noah Funk (Ryan Robbins) is a newly-elected Mennonite pastor, who is tired of drug traffickers in his community and is determined to get rid of them. He finds that things are not that simple when after planting drugs in the home of the ring leader, he is forced to become the head of the Mennonite drug trafficking operations, endangering his community, his family and himself.

This show has constantly surprised me with its ups and downs and twists. I'm usually not into these kind of shows but it just really has me hooked especially with this new season. I feel so much for the main character Noah because he is a good person and almost all the people in their community are good people too. And how his actions come to plague him and weigh on him are dreadful. He does everything to protect his family and still they get dragged into things. His wife Ana Funk is also quite a great character and his brother Abel, a recovering drug addict comes into play greatly too. The dialogue isn't always the greatest and sometimes the acting isn't so good from supporting characters but there isn't a show quite like this. I like seeing the character fall from grace and struggle with his conscience and doing the right thing when he's the only one trying to fight the corruption in his community. It really is a great show, I give it an 8 out of 10.

Kudos

ClareR (5864 KP) rated Lightseekers in Books

Feb 23, 2021

Lightseekers

Femi Kayode | 2021 | Crime, Fiction & Poetry, Mystery, Thriller

8.0

(1 Ratings)

Book Rating

Lightseekers is a fantastic thriller set in Nigeria. I love books set in other countries (i.e. set outside the UK), in the hope that I’ll learn something about the people and the culture - and I think that was exactly the case for both me and the main character, Philip Taiwo in this book. He has lived in the US for long enough to forget how things are done in his home country of Nigeria, and for long enough to be considered an outsider. Luckily for Philip, he has a competent helper in Chika - a man employed as his driver who is clearly much more than just that. There’s a lot of mystery surrounding Chika’s capabilities, and he certainly has a way with people that Philip needs to talk to. Sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes not so much.
This isn’t a straightforward, easy investigation. There’s corruption at every turn, and the mob mentality and fear of being caught on the wrong side of that, radiates off the page. It was pretty difficult at times to work out who was on the side of ‘good’ and who wasn’t - the lines were so blurred. It was pretty obvious that social media in this case contributed negatively to what had happened, and how easily its users were manipulated - I’ve been seeing this a lot in books recently, and as a user of Social Media, I can see where these authors are coming from!
I really enjoyed reading this on The Pigeonhole, and I think Femi Kayode is going to be an author to look out for if this book is anything to go by. Thanks Pigeonhole for serialising this, and Femi for joining in the chat in the margins!

Kudos

Ross (3284 KP) rated Blindspot - Season 4 in TV

Jun 28, 2019

Gone are the puzzles. Now just a brain-deadening copy of 24

Blindspot started with such a strong premise - a woman found with no memory and covered in tattoos and each tattoo turning out to be a puzzle which leads the FBI to solve a crime or stop a terrorist attack. As with so many TV shows, however, the original premise of strong, isolated episodes was gradually eroded in favour of an over-arching larger plot.
Here we have that same issue, while the season 3 villain has been ousted, lo and behold a new one has cropped up to take his place. This relegates the show to be something of a low quality reboot of 24 as the team struggle with conspiracy, terrorism, underworld shenanigans and corruption to try and stop the eventual attack.
However, the producers seem to have set the number of episodes in advance and then struggled to fill the 22 episode series with quality output. So instead we get a number of rejected 24 scripts hashed out with implausible solving of tattoo puzzles that generally add nothing to the overall series. So many times, the team seem to have been staring at a puzzle for months, only to suddenly realise that if they convert the numbers to letters, turn those into chemical symbols, add up their periodic table entries and divide that by the square root of the number of bananas produced per annum in the Caribbean and lo and behold it gives the password to a Hotmail account of an international terrorist who literally just landed in the country. Almost every episode has one of these mind-farts where so much is just shat out the screen in lazy exposition. The writers should have abandoned the tattoo nonsense a long time ago as tired and exhausted.