Can I say that it’s much harder to write a review for a book written by someone you know? Yes, it’s hard. I bought a copy of Relative Disenchantment, co-written by Patricia Shinn Wojtowicz and my friend, Christine Petersen Streed, both to support my friend and to support local authors in the Chicago suburbs. The good news is I don’t regret my decision because there was a lot to like about this first novel. The overall story is both engaging and important to tell. Relative […]
Walk a Mile in Their Shoes
One of my students this semester is originally from Morocco. In her literacy narrative, she wrote about reading passionately in both French and Arabic as a young girl, so I asked her about the books she read then and the books she reads now. The next week, she loaned me The Attack by Yasmina Khadra, which she had read originally in French. Even before I began the story, I was intrigued by the author—a former Algerian army officer writing under a nom de plume. The […]
Not as Compulsively Suspenseful as I Had Hoped
This mystery/suspense novel set in Minnesota was my book club’s pick for February, and I was excited to read a debut that had won or been a finalist for several mystery awards and was penned by a criminal defense attorney. However, my overall reaction was, “Meh.” On paper, there was a lot to like about this book and its narrator/hero. Joe Talbert is a slightly older than average college student, who has transferred up to the University of Minnesota from Austin, Minnesota (home both to […]
Do You Think There’s Such a Thing as a Perfect Day?
So, here I am, more than a month after finishing this novel, trying to write a review. Sigh. First of all, I enjoyed reading this YA outing, as much as you can enjoy a novel where one of the main characters is bipolar but doesn’t seem to fully understand what that means. It’s the story of two very different teenagers, trying to survive high school but for very different reasons. Finch is the classic loner, obsessed with death, smart but unable to fully follow the […]
That’s Where I Started to Be My Own Person
The Boston Girl felt to me like an interesting mix of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books and my grandmothers’ stories and the result was engaging, sometimes deeply moving, but not groundbreaking. That is, this novel feels a bit old fashioned even though the narrator, Addie Baum, herself talks frankly about women’s issues in the first half of the 20th century. The frame is that Addie Baum is being interviewed by her granddaughter, Ava, in 1985 and is asked to discuss how she became the […]
I Miss Paul Newman
I have a soft spot in my heart for Richard Russo and his ability to make hapless and problematic white men, often working-class white men, likeable protagonists. These men make questionable choices, they have huge blind spots about themselves and others, and they exasperate the women in the their lives quite a bit. Yet, they are enjoyable to spend time with, perhaps because at their core, there is decency. In Everybody’s Fool, the sequel of sorts to Nobody’s Fool, Russo returns to the small upstate […]
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