I often geek out when visiting historical sites. The whole “OMG, so and so ACTUALLY walked here, lived here, died here…” gets me every time. No surprise then that Juliana Gray’s dedication in “A Strange Scottish Shore” definitely spoke to me: To all those who have stood where history was made and felt its echo.” This is the second in what I truly hope is a continuing series about a no-nonsense administrator, Emmeline Truelove, her employer, the Duke of Olympia, and her would be paramour, […]
when perfect isn’t enough
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS Hello! It’s hard for me to write about this one without giving away the whole plot, so I’m going to be oblique. Yejide and Akin are a young, happily married, childless couple, and their childlessness leads them both to some questionable and desperate decisions. Yejide’s life seems damned near impossible, while somehow simultaneously completely normal. Or maybe “normal,” but either way it seems impossible, but there she is, making it happen, in the way that so many women do. What she doesn’t […]
In the Bleak Midwinter
My book reading year ends, and starts with, this classic children’s novel by Susan Cooper. The second book in the series of the same name is a seasonally appropriate touchstone being set between the winter solstice and twelfth night and since I first read it as a child is a book I return to most years at this time. The book is the tale of the youngest son in a large family turning eleven and finding out that he is the last of the “Old […]
Hating, after all, was just a drier form of drowning
The Woman Next Door concerns two elderly women, neighbors and antagonists for the past twenty years or so, since shortly after the abolition of Apartheid, in an upscale suburb of Cape Town. One is black, the other white. Circumstance forces them to turn to each other for help. I picked this book up in Cape Town last fall, wanting to buy at least a few books by South African authors I hadn’t heard of. I thought I knew where this story was headed. Old white […]
It’s gross you guys.
Lolita is a narrative that permeates pop culture, in advertisements, references and romanticizing of things that are not okay. This narrative probably originates from the 1997 film adaptation starring Jeremy Irons: When I was a teenager this novel was a way to live out my own sexuality and confused feelings about adults around me. These adults were mostly male teachers making Humbert Humbert the perfect stand-in. However engaging with this story as an adult is a bit different. It’s gross you guys. Lolita is […]
Where’d You Go, Bernadette? is a Question I Didn’t Really Need Answered
Bee, Bernadette, and Elgin are three idiosyncratically named family members of a very idiosyncratic family. Bee is arguably precocious, arguably angsty, certainly adolescent, and well beyond her years. She’s a brilliant child with a bright future and a good heart. Elgin is incredibly busy, rather aloof, and growing more and more tired of his wife. But he’s brilliant, and behind Samantha 2, one of the most hyped (fictional) Microsoft products that allows you to control robots with your brain. Bernadette is agoraphobic, misanthropic, neurotic, but […]
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