This book should terrify and infuriate everyone who reads it because you know what? At the rate our local, state, and federal governments are defunding public education and deregulating what’s counts as “school choice”, this kind of child abuse will be allowed to proliferate instead of be curbed. And I say child abuse before I even get to the physical and emotional abuse in this book – child abuse as in denying your kid access to a real education. We’ve found one of my high […]
The Greeks know their tragedy
Sometimes before I write a review I look up the book here on CBR, just to see what my fellow readers thought. I’m really glad I did because I am not terribly well versed in Greek tragedy and totally missed Home Fire‘s tie back to Antigone. Like, I know enough to know how to pronounce it, but I knew nothing of the story. Knowing it now definitely changes how I reflect on the book. Anyway. I was definitely engrossed in this story. It started a little slow, […]
Grateful to never again be a teenager
Ugh. Youths. I understand that the writing style and descriptions and the poetry in the prose are beautiful in this book, but that doesn’t solve the simple problem that we spend all 300 pages in the head of a 17-year-old and 17-year-olds are insufferable. I would have rated this book higher but it so accurately portrayed a kid in love that I couldn’t help but gag. Teenagers overthink. People with unrequited crushes overthink. Teenagers with unrequited crushes oh holy shit. Even when it turns out the crush […]
I’m a sucker for books set here
That I enjoyed this book is directly related to it being set here in my city. I live in Washington, D.C., and I love every minute of it (go Caps?) and here this book fell in my lap and they talk about Mass Ave and Sidwell and Woodley Park and I almost fell for it. But aside from the location, this was not my kind of book. It was a slow book about people and their slow lives and set anywhere else it would have […]
Always remember: This is a true story
In roughly 1841, Oluale Kossola was born in West Africa, near modern-day Benin. In 1960 his village was decimated by the neighboring Dahomey and he, along with more than one hundred other human beings, were sold to white slave traders. The slave ship Clotilda bore them across the Atlantic to the Mississippi river and into Alabama where he was sold to a plantation in Mobile. There he was renamed Cudjo Lewis and there he worked until 1865 when Union soldiers told him he was free. This is all […]
Horrifyingly timely
The Leavers is a story of a mother and son torn apart by American immigration officials and oof was this a tough, timely read. Just like … be ready. There are a lot of award stickers on the cover and it deserves every one. I just wish the cover didn’t look so much like the one for The Girls because ugh that book. I’m getting away from myself. The Leavers is about Polly and Deming Guo. They live in the Bronx with Polly’s boyfriend, his sister, and her […]
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