Hotel Magnifique by Emily J. Taylor
This was a nicely structured fantasy novel with the kind of plucky heroine I enjoy. Jani and her younger sister, Zosa, are living grimly in a port town called Durc. They made the trip to Durc after their mother died so that Zosa could pursue a singing career but four years later, Zosa is no closer to becoming a singer than she was when they arrived and Jani is working at a tannery to try to earn their passage back home (a task that looks […]
Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera
Though my life growing up as a heterosexual, cis-gender white woman in the Midwest is worlds away from that of Juliet Milagros Palante, who describes herself as a “closeted Puerto Rican baby-dyke from the Bronx”(5), I think anyone with a heart and a soul can relate to this coming of age story. Even more importantly, everyone can learn from it. The year is 2003 and 19-year-old Juliet is about to spend a chunk of her first summer home from college far away from her Bronx […]
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams
This novel is one of the books that I received from Bonnie for the Cannonball Read Book Exchange. One thing to know is that I had the hard cover copy of the book checked out from my community college library (which has an amazing collection of new fiction with few folks on the waitlist) for an embarrassingly long time—since maybe July (just kept renewing it . . .). Just when I was starting to get threatening e-mails from circulation mentioned the replacement cost of the […]
Patina (Track - Book 2) by Jason Reynolds
Sunny (Track - Book 3) by Jason Reynolds
Lu (Track - Book 4) by Jason Reynolds
Last February I read Ghost, the first book in Jason Reynold’s middle grade Track series and enjoyed it immensely though I understood I was definitely not the intended audience. I had seen Jason Reynolds on The Daily Show, started following him on Twitter, and all that made me want to read his work—all of his work. He’s a prolific writer, so catching up and keeping up will take some work. Flash forward to mid-December when I discovered a display of the remaining three books in […]
Thanks to all the Cannonball Read folks who raved about Madeline Miller this year. Because of the accolades, I read The Song of Achilles back in May and Circe in November and both were books that engaged and transported me. Thanks to my procrastinating ways, I decided to review both books together and because they’ve been reviewed by a lot of folks already, I thought I’d talk more about my experience reading them and spare you the plot summary. I read Song of Achilles on my […]
Like many books that I pick up, An American Marriage by Tayari Jones ended up on my to-read list after I heard a story on NPR. Interviewed by Karen Grigsby-Bates last February, Jones said she had done a lot of research on criminal justice and race to prepare to write a book but that nothing was clicking until she went home to visit her mom over the holidays and overheard a conversation in an Atlanta mall: JONES: The woman was beautifully dressed, and the young man, he […]
