I am reviewing the first two of the books of this series. This whole collection of novels involve the Berrybender Clan, a British “aristocratic” family coming to America in the 1830s for an extended adventure and hunting trip. The tone of the first book is cartoonish and a little goofy throughout. It changes for the second novel, but I will get to that later. The first novel Sin Killer focuses primarily on the oldest daughter, Tasmin, a headstrong and talkative woman, who in an act of […]
There are some people whose motives don’t deserve further investigation…
Vol. 1 Fever and Spear I am not sure what to tell you about this one. I was seriously worried when I got started because I bought the first two volumes of this trilogy/long novel because I found the third one for free and didn’t know once I got started if I was going to hack it or not. The opening section of this involves the narrator/protagonist making a series of observations about himself and the world. The first few pages show him watching a […]
Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed…It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.
Native Son is a challenging book for a lot of reasons. The language is rather straight-forward, but Wright gives us a character that commits first by accident, then on purpose, some of the most heinous crimes imaginable and asks us to reckon with it as readers. He does this through a trial scene that does not show us someone innocent being railroaded by the justice system, but by someone on trial for crimes they did commit being railroaded by the whole capitalistic system of the […]
A glimpse into our past, and god forbid our future.
Sometimes I really hate dialect in books. And part of the reason I do is that too often is crosses racial, class, or regional bounds between the author and the character and becomes downright offensive. As beloved as the Henrietta Lacks book that came out recently is, it made me cringe so desperately to hear how the white author portrayed the Black speech in that book. My girlfriend even asked “She knows they’re speaking English right?” Dialect is hard to pull off because ultimately, unless […]
She was honest enough to admit that her privacy cloaked a fear: the fear of being found out as a hypocrite.
So I read Pachinko last year, and pretty much think it was the best book to come out in 2017. It was incredibly strongly written, very compelling, and told a story that I wasn’t very familiar with or knowledgeable about. This novel does several of those things as well. It’s perfectly well-written and a compelling story. It’s a little well-worn territory, minus the fact that there are not remotely enough Korean-American voice working in contemporary fiction. This novel is primarily about Casey, a young Korean-American woman graduating […]
“For, how else to seize such an instant? How to shout out into the empty air just the right words, and on cue? Frame a moment to last a lifetime?
This is book two of the Frank Bascombe series by Richard Ford. I think it would more or less make sense to read these out of order, as I was actually thinking of doing, but regardless, they are more or less in order. This series reminds me of the projects of several other writers, especially male American writers where an everyman type American guy stands in for the author’s desire to cast a light on late 20th century American white maleness. This isn’t inherently a […]
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