The title of my post is Google Translate’s translation for the Spanish language title for this book. It’s a much cooler title and doesn’t allow for all the annoying working of the title into reviews for this novel. Oh this book reads like a fever dream, you say? Isn’t the title…so like you’re not being clever by saying that, you’re literally just repeating the title of the book. My favorite part of the scarlet letter is the scarlet letter; I guess I will forever wear […]
I checked the date of this book like four times as I was reading….
…because years ago I read Never Let Me Go like the day it came out. In addition, there’s even a line about “Never Let Me Go” in this novel. But this one came out first. Not that it matters because they are much different novels from one another. In this book, Matteo is born a clone for a drug lord in a future narcostate that has been built between the US and Mexico. Matt’s life has been destined to be an organ farm for the kingpin, […]
Good Companion Piece to Hidden Figures et al
This novel involves several revolving stories related to a place more than a specific set of circumstances of plot. Brewster Place is a sort of government housing project equivalent to Linden Hills, the planned community of a later Gloria Naylor novel. If you read Hidden Figures you already learned about the planned communities of the early 20th century and the ways in which race impacted those developments. If you’ve read Toni Morrison you know how those communities survived white onslaught, developed their own character and quirks, […]
Sludging Toward Bethlehem
Recently I had lunch with my mom. About an hour in she revealed to me that my older aunt had died, but that she was worried about mentioning it because of her own weird kind of unresolved feelings with my dad’s side of the family. She was older and quite ill, so it was not surprised or unexpected, but it weighed on my mom in a weird way. In this novel, a middle-aged woman on the cusp of a trip out of town also sits […]
The Mad (Angry) Buddha in the Attic
This book like the previous Julie Otsuka’s novel is a good exercise in what fiction can be. However, this one is also necessarily limited in its capacity because of its form. It’s an exercise in storytelling, but it can only do so much. I suppose that’s more or less true about every novel, but at the end of this one, I feel like I have been told a story, but I have also witnessed something altogether different from that. What I am getting at here […]
In his moccasins
Another book by my intrepid students who decide that if they’ve ever read a book, they should ask me to read it. No worries, this one is perfectly good. I liked this book just fine. I am glad that my student asked me to check it out. I have read two other books by Sharon Creech, Love that Dog and Hate that Cat, about a student who is earnestly fighting against an assignment designed to make him love poetry. This one is a little different. In this […]
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