Kathryn's Inbox

A little while back, I read and reviewed Game Changer the first novel in Rachel Reid's massively popular and bestselling Heated Rivalry series. Recently developed into a television series for HBO Max, the novels in the series tells the stories of male ice hockey players who experience same sex attraction and their romantic lives. While the majority of the novels and bulk of the television series focuses on a secret relationship between two players from rival teams, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov,  Game Changer is the story of hockey player Scott Hunter who encounters university graduate Kip Grady who is underemployed and working at a smoothie bar. What starts as a pregame ritual of drinking smoothies for Scott soon develops into secret romance between the pair, eventually culminating in Scott being the first hockey player in his league to be an openly gay man. And thus setting up the rest of the series as other romances in the hockey world begin to blossom. It's a great pre...

Okay. I confess. I could not resist that cover and all of the nostalgic vibes it brought back. Of being a kid and ordering a cheap paperback from a Scholastic catalogue about other kids doing things that were simultaneously ordinary and ever-so-slightly extraordinary. Plus the title mentions frogs and I like frogs. There's a Frog In My Sleeping Bag is a stand-alone story that forms part of a loosely linked series of books about the kids in a third grade class who all have adventures that somehow feature animals. It tells the story of Janna, a lively girl who struggles with the fact that her Spanish mother has raised both her and her younger brother to be fluent in both English and Spanish. But, enough of that. Janna is looking forward to the school camp ... where she finds herself in a whole lot of trouble and as the victim of a number of pranks. Including the aforementioned frog in her sleeping bag.  This was a lot of fun. The book was published well, some time ago, but the theme...

British comedian Rik Mayall, best known for The Young Ones and Drop Dead Fred offers readers a delightful satire on the typical celebrity memoirs in Bigger Than Hitler Better Than Christ. He presents himself to the reader as a delusional twit, certain that he is the biggest celebrity in the world, and offers a heavily embellished account of his career. The whole thing is a lot of fun, though the joke soon becomes tired. Mayall never for a single moment breaks character which is, in some ways, hilarious but the book does tend to drag after a while. I think this probably would have been more interesting had he written a heavily embellished introduction and an embellished afterword with all of the serious bits in between, but I do respect that that was never his comic style and he was never going to be the sort of comedian to release a serious memoir. Regardless it is an entertaining reminder of a talented comedian who died when he was still too young. Recommended.