I plucked this book off my local library’s New Fiction shelf without knowing a thing about it and was more than pleasantly surprised. Jamey Bradbury sets her story in rural Alaska and creates a compelling but sometimes cryptic narrator in seventeen-year-old Tracy Petrikoff. It’s a story that is both grittily realistic and beautifully supernatural, though I was surprised to notice about halfway through that my library had labelled it as “Horror.” I definitely would not put it in that category. For years, Tracy’s family has […]
The weather outside is frightful…
I don’t live in a place that has much winter anymore, so when I get the hankering for snow and ice, I tend to reach for mysteries that take place in wintery places. Stan Jones writes a series of entertaining mysteries about an Inupiat state trooper in Chukchi. Nathan Active was fostered to a white family as a baby, so he knows little of the culture of the Inupiat – so an engaging fish out of water story. The focus of the mystery is on several […]
“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure.”
Jon Krakauer has a way of covering his subjects where he extends such dignity to the topic and the people involved, that it makes for such compelling, empathetic reading. Like with Into Thin Air, I was a bit young to grasp the gravity of these accounts of people succumbing to the perils of nature. The most that I had heard about either case was noises like “Of course it’s a tragedy, but what do people expect when they are underprepared/he was some kind of idiot […]
Oy Gestalt
Chances are that, if you are reading this or any other website concerned with popular culture, you have little more than a passing familiarity with ultra-orthodox Judaism. Like most fundamentalist sects, they mostly keep to themselves. They rarely make the news except for when their behaviour becomes excessive somehow – excessively strict, like when some Rebbe or other gets into hot water for forbidding women Jewish and non-Jewish alike to walk across a public sidewalk or tries to ban children from attending school because their […]
To run a shtinker, you have to see the broken heart inside the deadest pan.
My first Chabon! OOOOOOF. WOW. Holy crap, you guys, did you know that his prose is exceptional and that there’s no exposition, and that he creates an utterly believable alternate timeline and a narrative that ramps up until you’re flying down the other side of the rollercoaster with no brakes? Are they all like this? Is my brain going to melt? How have I missed out this my entire adult life? Full disclosure: it took me a really long time to gather momentum with “The […]
The Great Alaskan Memoir
Leigh Newman is hysterical, and also heartbreaking, and also insightful, and also unexpected, and so very, very human. I devoured this memoir in two days because I just kept needing to know what happened to her. “Still Points North” chronicles Newman’s life growing up between the Alaskan wilderness with her dad, and the wealthy suburbs of Maryland with her mom. Her prose is at once funny to the point of hilarity and heart wrenching as you watch her middle school self struggle with her parents’ […]