One of my good friends from graduate school, Alev, is from Turkey, and I remember asking her about Turkish authors I should read, and she immediately mentioned Elif Shafak. I’ve had several of her books on my to-read pile over the last few years, but this was the first one I actually read and I’m sorry that I waited so long. Honour is a complex multigenerational novel that begins in London in the 1990’s as Esma Toprak mentally prepares herself for the release of her brother, […]
A Bit Like the Last Six Minutes of Six Feet Under
I finished Chloe Benjamin’s second novel, The Immortalists, over two months ago but for various reasons (involving the end of an academic semester and a trip to China) haven’t sat down to complete my review. However, last night a chance discussion at my book club reminded me that I wanted to get my thoughts/impressions of this book on paper now rather than later. The Immortalists is our selection for later this fall, and one of our members had just gotten a copy of the novel from […]
There is literally no place in American history that’ll be awesome for me.
REVIEW OF BOTH KINDRED (Octavia E. Butler) & DREAD NATION (Justina Ireland) It was just by chance that I happened to read Dread Nation and Kindred at the same time, but it was hard not to draw parallels between the two books. Issues of gender, power, and the complexities of race as well as strong female narrators bind the two across the vast distance of their publication dates. Both books have interesting layers, and comparing and contrasting them would make a great literary analysis essay, but […]
Jack Reacher Gets Schooled
Lee Child has a formula and most of the time, it’s just the summer (or winter break) read I’m looking for*. However, one of the things I liked about this 2016 Jack Reacher novel was that it wasn’t the usual “Reacher strolls into a small town in middle America and gets into a nest of trouble.” Instead, Child goes back to the 1990’s when Reacher was in the army and constructs a story that involves terrorists of both the Islamic and Nazi persuasion, missing nuclear weapons, […]
It’s a Fine Line Between Transformative and Toxic
When my book club chose Truth and Beauty, Ann Patchett’s memoir about her friendship with fellow writer, Lucy Grealy, I had mixed feelings. I read the book when it first came out in 2004 and had read Grealy’s memoir, Autobiography of a Face, a number of years before that. I remember that I found Patchett’s book interesting but also disturbing but the exact reasons why had faded from my memory. A few months ago, I thought I might fake my way through the evening by […]
I Learned in School That Blood Has a Memory
I plucked this book off my local library’s New Fiction shelf without knowing a thing about it and was more than pleasantly surprised. Jamey Bradbury sets her story in rural Alaska and creates a compelling but sometimes cryptic narrator in seventeen-year-old Tracy Petrikoff. It’s a story that is both grittily realistic and beautifully supernatural, though I was surprised to notice about halfway through that my library had labelled it as “Horror.” I definitely would not put it in that category. For years, Tracy’s family has […]
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