The Age of Miracles is a coming of age story against the backdrop of a celestial/environmental disaster. Rather than going into great detail about the science behind the event, the novel focuses on how the seemingly mundane aspects of life are affected by our actions when we no longer can take the stability of the world around us for granted. Goodreads summary: “On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, 11-year-old Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the […]
“My life might have been so different, had I not been known as the girl whose grandmother exploded.”
The Vanishing of Katharina Linden is a whimsical mystery with a creepy underbent. It balances a scary proposition — little girls going missing in a small German town where everyone knows each other — with the idealistic naivete of its 10 year old protagonist, who understands on one level that the girls who go missing are her classmates, near and around her age, but doesn’t make the connection that she may herself be in a particular danger. It’s this dramatic irony that propels the story, […]
Reads like a pipe dream
This may seem like a weird connection to make because of their very different background settings, but I feel like if you liked the movie Boyhood, you would like the novel Arcadia. Both stories have a very loose story structure surrounding the coming of age of a boy, and both prefer to offer seemingly random glimpses of moments, most rather innocuous, rather than focus on the most dramatic possible events in life. As such, depending on your attention span and personal preferences, some might see […]
Mindbending
So I finally read Alif the Unseen. Wow — what a genre-bender. So many questions about belief, ideology, loyalty, technology, humanity, and identity are explored across multiple metaphysical planes and in achingly familiar real-world contexts. To back up to a plot summary, which I’ll ape from Goodreads: “In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients—dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups—from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif—the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and […]
Everyone on your train is drunk
The Girl on the Train is a read-in-one-sitting thriller from the perspectives of three women in each others’ orbits. They’re all flawed-to-unlikeable, but somehow still sympathetic, which is a nice balancing act and the result of some skillful writing. Overall, the whole book is successful on so many levels, from being an enticing character study, to a fast-paced, compelling mystery. Have you seen that Donald Glover sketch about crazy women stories vs crazy man stories? If you haven’t, I recommend you watch it, but if […]
“But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.”
Fiona Maye has had a long and successful career as a High Court judge. She works in the Family Division, deciding what is best for children in messy divorce cases and matters of religion. Professionally, Fiona is “almost ironic, almost warm,” and she is respected for striking a balance between compassion and distance, understanding and objectivity. But after years of parents “dazed to find themselves in vicious combat with the one they once loved” and children used as “bargaining chips,” Fiona has become ever so […]
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