en-US Tue, 02 Apr 2024 10:22:39 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review6396191954 Tue, 02 Apr 2024 10:22:39 -0700 /review/show/6396191954 Sean gave 5 stars to Singularity: or, How the LOGOS Resolves the Problems of Racism, Gender Obsession, Climate Change, Decadence, & Every Other Calamity You Encounter (Paperback) by Theophilus .
]]> Review2810318811 Tue, 02 Apr 2024 10:19:27 -0700 /review/show/2810318811 Sean gave 5 stars to Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality (Hardcover) by Nancy R. Pearcey
A thoughtful must-read perfect for the body/sexuality challenges our culture currently faces. ]]> Review3123922838 Tue, 02 Apr 2024 10:15:57 -0700 /review/show/3123922838 Sean gave 5 stars to The Tale of Despereaux (Paperback) by Kate DiCamillo
]]> ReadStatus7773995792 Tue, 02 Apr 2024 10:14:40 -0700 /review/show/2806881590 Sean started reading Sit, Walk, Stand by Watchman Nee
]]> Review2810318811 Tue, 02 Apr 2024 10:12:44 -0700 /review/show/2810318811 Sean gave 5 stars to Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality (Hardcover) by Nancy R. Pearcey
A thoughtful must-read perfect for the body/sexuality challenges our culture currently faces. ]]> Review5971556502 Sun, 12 Nov 2023 09:54:14 -0800 /review/show/5971556502 Sean gave 5 stars to Singularity: or, How the LOGOS Resolves the Problems of Racism, Gender Obsession, Climate Change, Decadence, & Every Other Calamity You Encounter (Kindle Edition) by Theophilus .
]]> Review5901988286 Wed, 11 Oct 2023 10:18:50 -0700 /review/show/5901988286 Sean gave 5 stars to Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life (Hardcover) by Jordan B. Peterson
]]> Review5901984689 Wed, 11 Oct 2023 10:16:46 -0700 /review/show/5901984689 Sean gave 5 stars to 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Hardcover) by Jordan B. Peterson
]]> Review5781253964 Sat, 26 Aug 2023 00:29:17 -0700 /review/show/5781253964 Sean gave 5 stars to No Hell Below Us: A Political Tour de Farce (Kindle Edition) by John Twain
]]> Review5732214095 Sun, 30 Jul 2023 21:32:49 -0700 /review/show/5732214095 Sean gave 5 stars to Blue Gowanus: An El Buscador Noir (Kindle Edition) by Michael Hartnett
For fans of The Blue Rat, you will love Blue Gowanus.

Our intrepid neo-noir hero from The Blue Rat is back, and he has a new playground—the Gowanus Canal in New York. Author Michael Hartnett's descriptions paint the Gowanus Canal as a little rough on the senses with its rundown businesses and fetid water. However, one of Hartnett’s many gifts as a writer is his ability to make the settings of this series as vivid as the characters. Through El Buscador’s eyes, the reader gets to appreciate and even enjoy spending time in the rundown Brooklyn waterway and its surroundings.

Protagonist El Buscador returns along with several of his cohorts from The Blue Rat, including former reporter Pratt, newspaper editor and love interest Mavis, and the wily Thackeray—as well as El Buscador’s nemesis, Timothy Terrance Tolland. Tolland is forever looking to recreate New York in his own image with buildings designed more to be monuments to his own self-perceived greatness than to the richness of the city and its inhabitants. His latest scheme is to use a pretense to shove through a project in the Gowanus Canal district. But not if El Buscador has anything to say about it.

Taken together, The Blue Rat and Blue Gowanus provide an interesting insight: If you want to understand what happens at the surface level of society—the part you see in the light of day—you must dig deep. In the case of the Blue Rat, El Buscador masters the forgotten roots of New York, many of which lie literally underground. In Blue Gowanus, clues lie in the waters of the canal and the business owners and residents on its shore that serve almost as New York’s subconscious mind. The city's pollution and forgotten trash seem to find their way into the canal, turning it into more of a receptacle for toxic waste than the vibrant shipping pathway it once was. As Hartnett writes, when the discarded items of big city living make their way into the canal, that “marks the end of the line because there is nowhere else for them to go if they’ve arrived at the dead end of Gowanus.�

For the cynical, like Tolland, the Gowanus distrcit is a place to further plunder whatever value it has left. For El Buscador, it is a place of imagination—enter one of the book’s new characters, a renegade sturgeon who braves the toxic waters like an ancient thought trying to break through into a modern mind; and another character who finds artistic inspiration in the canal, aptly named Pygmalion. For El Buscador, the canal that some see as irredeemable is a place of potential rebirth.

It's also important to note that Blue Gowanus has a humorous undertone throughout, which makes the machinations of Tolland, as well as El Buscador’s counter-machinations, a joy to read from beginning to end. So, grab your fedora, three fingers of brandy, and your copy of Blue Gowanus, and get ready for a great story with a twisting and turning plot, quirky characters galore, and a view of the Gowanus Canal that only Michael Hartnett can make sparkle with intrigue and fun. ]]>