I wish I hadn’t waited so long to write this review because now it’s harder to remember why exactly I found this book emotionally compelling (but I did). It’s an interesting trick that Anna North uses—to tell the story of a person through the eyes and experiences of people around her—and I think it works, precisely because Sophie Stark is a filmmaker, who creates stories of others’ lives so it makes sense that others should tell her story. The basic plot of Sophie’s life is […]
Miles from Harlan County but Still Close
My favorite mysteries have a strong sense of place, where the setting is as much of a character as the detective or police chief or in this case, the prosecuting attorney at the center of the story. In A Killing in the Hills, the place is Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, a small town hard hit by addiction and the illegal prescription drug trade where Bell Elkins, a local girl made good, but with a traumatic past, has returned to take on the community’s ills as […]
Why Katee Sackhoff Could Have Been the Perfect Casting Choice
I’m a big fan of Craig Johnson and the mythical Absaroka county in Wyoming that’s he’s created to house Sheriff Walt Longmire, his friends and family, and a cast of intriguing characters both on and off the reservation. Though I picture the actors from the USA/Netflix series in my mind as I read now, this latest book really cemented for me the divergence between the books and the series and that divergence involves two main female characters—Victoria Moretti, Walt’s Undersheriff and love interest, and Cady, […]
The Dreamers Need to Shut Up and Listen
As the #Blacklivesmatter and #Alllivesmatter debate wages, I can’t help but think of the line from Animal Farm (that I first read at age 9, thinking it was a story about talking animals like Charlotte’s Web)—“All Animals are equal but some Animals are more equal than others.” What I think the #Alllivesmatter folks don’t get is that it’s precisely because ALL lives matter that the #Blacklivesmatter movement started because clearly, in this country, some lives matter more than others. It is within all this sound […]
Get Your Unreliable Narrators Here!
I’ve been reading this book on and off (alternating with two other nonfiction books) for the last three weeks or maybe longer—a sure sign that my sabbatical is over, over, over. I’ve read a lot of student writing in the last four weeks and that’s made me more prone to drooling in front of the TV at the end of the day instead of picking up a book. As a result, I’ve been reading Paula Hawkins’s novel in brief bits—when I wake up and before I […]
I Wish the Movie Had Been a Little More Faithful to Its Source Material
So I can only imagine how people who read this book first felt when they went and saw the movie version last winter, “Uh, what?” The movie version of The DUFF isn’t terrible exactly; I enjoyed seeing Mae Whitman in a lead role. However, for all its message of “Everyone feels like a DUFF at some point,” it couldn’t quite shake the teen romance clichés. Also, the movie bears only the slightest resemblance to the book. The main characters are the same—Bianca Piper and her […]
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