Anna is living with her family in Ireland, recouperating after an accident. Everybody is taking great care of her, but she can’t shake the feeling that people are tip-toeing around her. And she can’t seem to reach Aidan, who is still in New York. As soon as she’s healed she decides she must go back to her old apartment, her job as a PR for a beauty brand, her old life. Anybody out there is written in a light, breezy language with a likable […]
“Stray bullets and consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now.“
There There is an innovative and engrossing first novel from Native American writer Tommy Orange. Through his multiple character narration, he explores the question of what it means to be an “urban Indian” in the US. The title There There comes from a Gertrude Stein quote that is often taken out of context and misunderstood, much like Native Americans. In referring to Oakland, California, where Stein grew up and where the action of There There takes place, Stein wrote that there was no there there […]
In which a favorite from my childhood stands up to an adult re-read.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do on a summer day was to go with my mom to the New England Mobile Book Fair. The Book Fair was an amazing, enormous wholesaler Book warehouse in my town (Newton, MA), where you could look up books in an enormous database (or when I was really young, a HUGE book) that told you who the publisher was. The warehouse was set up by publisher, and all of the books cost less than […]
I’m pissed I didn’t like this more.
I’ve been sitting on this review for quite a while, not 100% sure what I wanted to say about this book. I was only about half finished with it during our book club discussion, but reading all of the comments, I knew I just didn’t feel as strongly about this book as most of you did. And I was pissed. I really wanted to love this. I was so fired up to read it. But maybe there was just too much hype, that when I […]
This book wasn’t written for me, and I feel fine
Dreadnought by April Daniels
Roger Ebert used to talk about how important emotional response was to him as a critic, often more important than the technical and artistic merits. Even the most technically and artistically exquisite film could be a hollow and unsatisfying experience if he didn’t connect emotionally, and the opposite could also be true: sometimes, without any other explanation, a seeming piece of trash could be surprisingly fun simply because it connected to something ineffable inside him. So when the whole “Brie Larson commits white genocide against […]
Trees did not talk back, or willfully disobey, or laugh at him. They were not here to torment him; indeed, they were not here for him at all.
I enjoy reading fiction that has to do in some way with horticulture or nature. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and Prodigal Summer are two of my favorites. The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall and The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin are also both really good. I’m not sure what you would call this genre, but I am always on the look out for this kind of book (Hint hint: any recommendations?) This led me to Chevalier’s “At the Edge of the Orchard”. This is going to be a love/hate review. Part of the story […]
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