Yolandi and Elfrieda are sisters raised in an isolated, stifling, patriarchal community of Russian Mennonite immigrants in rural Canada. Their parents buy Elf a forbidden piano to give her an outlet, and she pours everything into her music, leaving home at 17 to study in Oslo, eventually becoming a world-renowned concert pianist. But her life is weighed down by the crippling pain of depression, and she ends up in the hospital after yet another suicide attempt. In All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, everyone […]
Maybe it’s a holy freaking huge awesome deal
I am not a quick reader, but I blazed through Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda in one sitting. I haven’t seen the movie yet and didn’t know much about the book before I saw it while browsing bookstores on a recent trip, but I’m really glad I read it. The story begins as teenage Simon is blackmailed by a fellow student who inadvertently read Simon’s email exchange with another boy Simon knows only as Blue. They’re both closeted and want to keep […]
Ice and blood and family secrets
Growing up in a small town in the Deep Midwest, I dreamed of traveling to all of the exotic places I heard and read about, even though it seemed out of reach. My family was poor and never took any real vacations, not even a road trip to the Black Hills or Yellowstone, and until my freshman year of college, I’d really only been to four states including my own. I didn’t see the ocean until I was 18, didn’t fly until I was 22, […]
You can’t go home again
I still remember watching E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in the theater as a kid. The nearest movie theater was an hour’s drive from our little town in the Deep Midwest, so we didn’t get to go more than a few times a year. I’d been begging my parents to take us to see E.T. for weeks when they finally surprised me for my 8th birthday. I was enchanted from the start, so wrapped up in the story by the time Eliot said goodbye to E.T. that […]
The things we take for granted
I first learned about Octavia Butler a few years ago when searching online for innovative novels and Kindred showed up on just about every list I came across. When I went to the bookstore, I had become so enthusiastic about her that I decided to buy not only this book but also Fledgling, and then I read the latter first after a coin toss. That was probably a mistake, because I disliked it so much that I put off reading Kindred indefinitely. I’d finally put […]
“For a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me.”
I had the same English teacher from 8th grade on through the rest of high school, save for one semester, and she was the best teacher I had. In our senior year, she assigned “leisure” reading, letting us choose from a pool of books to read on our own every few months, without class discussion, with only a very basic quiz to show we’d actually done the reading. She wanted us to develop a love of reading for reading’s sake, wanted to expose us to […]
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