Underground in Berlin is an unusual memoir of a Jewish woman in WWII Germany. Marie Jalowicz Simon avoided the concentration camps by going into hiding in Berlin. With the help of both Jews and Germans, Communists and even Nazis she managed to find shelter and meager food from 1941, when she became “illegal”, until the end of the war. Given that many memoirs by Jews from this period deal with the Resistance and/or survival of the camps, Jalowicz Simon’s memoir is quite remarkable — a […]
Beware the Sea Anemone
Pretty Baby is a dark, suspenseful drama featuring a do-gooder, her career-obsessed spouse and a runaway teen with a baby. Kubica keeps the reader guessing not only about her characters’ motives, but also about the crime that seems to have been committed, and whether or not any of our three narrators are telling the whole truth. The novel starts from Heidi’s point of view. It’s a rainy, dreary early spring day in Chicago and Heidi is on her way to work where she runs a […]
The Truth Will Set You Free
The only thing at once more precious and more fragile than a true story is a free life. A Pulitzer finalist and long-listed for the Man Booker Prizer, The Moor’s Account is a work of fiction based on real historical events and people. Through the eyes of our narrator Mustafa, aka Estebanico, a Muslim from Morocco, the reader experiences the life of a successful merchant in Portuguese controlled North Africa, enslavement, and an ill-fated Spanish quest for gold in La Florida. Lalami’s inspiration came from […]
Has everyone been reading Nalo Hopkinson without me?
Sometimes, when one is introduced to a gifted writer who has been crafting fine works for going on two decades, one feels both excited to have found such a trove and yet irritated to have not known about her sooner. This is how I feel after reading Nalo Hopkinson’s first novel Brown Girl in the Ring, published in 1998. The novel won several awards and was nominated for a Philip K. Dick Award. It is an absolutely fascinating combination of dystopian future, Caribbean folk tale, […]
Friends and Enemies
And so we come to the end of Elena Ferrante’s epic story of the lifelong friendship of two Neapolitan women. In The Story of the Lost Child, Ferrante continues to write on themes of feminism, politics, family, and community dynamics through her memorable characters. Book Four sees Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo into middle age and beyond, with their complicated relationships to creativity, men, their children and each other. This book also brings the reader back around to the mystery introduced in Book One: what […]
A New York Love Story
Saint Mazie is the fictional story of a young woman in New York City. Told through Mazie’s diary excerpts and interviews with those who knew her or knew of her, the story begins in 1907, when 10-year-old Mazie received the diary as a present, and runs until 1939, when the entries end. From the first pages, we learn that Mazie was a woman of some note in the Bowery, a queen to some, a saint to others, and yet she questioned whether or not she […]
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