I love when I read a mystery or thriller that is so tightly structured and interestingly written that it stays with me for days and sometimes weeks after I finish it. Noah Hawley’s novel, Before The Fall, was that kind of book for me. The novel pulled me in both because of the swimming angle and the idea of chance and paths crossing. A private plane going from Martha’s Vineyard to New York City crashes into the ocean. Twelve people get on the plane (including […]
In Which Our Intrepid Reader Takes a Trip Down Memory Lane
“It was a dark and stormy night.” The opening of this book imprinted itself on my ten-year-old brain in ways I didn’t fully realize until I returned to it over four decades later. I first read A Wrinkle in Time in 1975 when my grandmother, a children’s librarian, gave me a copy for my birthday. It wasn’t just any copy; it was a signed copy that my grandmother had purchased in 1963 when she attended the Newberry-Caldecott award dinner in Chicago—almost two years before my […]
Run Toward Who You Want To Be
Last month, Trevor Noah interviewed Jason Reynolds on the Daily Show and even before I had read any of his books, I became a fan. He talked about writing, reading, and young people in a powerful way and made a strong argument for the need to write books that would have spoken to him as a young teen growing up in the inner city. I’ve been a follower of the We Need Diverse Books organization and without mentioning the hashtag, Reynolds made their argument with […]
Now Read This
I haven’t read Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward’s earlier novel, though it’s been on my to-read list since it first came out, so this was my first experience with Ward’s writing. Sing, Unburied, Sing is a novel both beautiful and terrible, heartbreaking yet optimistic, and grittily realistic while tinged with magical realism. It’s a family story but one where the history of race, poverty, and violence is close to the surface. Jojo lives with his grandparents, Pop and Mam, while his mother, Leonie, hovers around […]
A Little Lost in Translation
This brief novel was my book club’s choice for January, and though we all appreciated the emotional arc of the story, we felt like something must have been lost in translation. The blurbs on the back cover of the paperback copy I interlibrary-loaned are full of glowing descriptions like “unforgettable” and “it will haunt you forever” and “written with crystalline simplicity, intense passion and lively, stirring humanity.” I kept wondering, “Did they read the same book as me?” The bones of the story are interesting—in […]
A Tale of Death, Magic, and Friendship with an Extremely Chatty Narrator
This YA novel was one of my Jolabokaflod books and I found it quite charming, even though I definitely felt like I was coming into the middle of a larger story. That’s because I was. Whichwood is a companion novel to Furthermore, which I haven’t read (but now want to). The bookseller at the Book Cellar (ha!) told my sister when she bought it that you didn’t need to read them in order, and I think she was right. This novel’s main character, Laylee, is […]
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