Rarely have I felt like fist-pumping a book while I was reading it. But then, I had never read Diana Peterfreund before. I fell in love with For Darkness Shows the Stars and then realized that there was a companion novel. I was so excited. Across a Star-Swept Sea is not a direct sequel, but it involves the same world and even has a few cross-over characters (I won’t say anymore–it would spoil the surprise). This time, Peterfreund draws from the Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel. […]
Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Too
This review will be woefully inept as I finished this book over a month ago. I remember really liking it but I was surprised I gave it four stars rather than five. This is Tina Fey’s autobiography and the audiobook is narrated by Tina. If I read this book without any context I could still identify it as her work. Maybe that is because I loved 30 Rock but in any event this book is thoroughly Tina. In the book she discusses more of […]
A Feminist Post-Colonial Coming of Age Story
Set in the US in 1969, Lucy is the story of a 19-year-old who has just moved from the British West Indies for work and school. She becomes an au pere for an affluent family with 4 daughters and attends school briefly for nursing. This novel is her reflection on that year and on herself. One could read it as a sort of coming of age story, about growing up. Lucy is trying to break from her old life and especially from her mother with […]
Motherhood, am I right?
I reviewed another of Jessica Valenti’s books (“The Purity Myth”) for last year’s Cannonball Read, and she actually acknowledged my review on Twitter. That was a very happy day. I knew about this book but hadn’t read it; I discovered it on Audible on Friday ended up listening to it pretty much straight through. Ms. Valenti is a feminist author and mother of her young daughter Layla. Layla was born SUPER early, spending her first weeks in the NICU. Ms. Valenti spends time talking about […]
Dear Fake Character People: An Open Letter to (most of) the Characters in Jane Eyre
On this my third reading of this book, I thought I’d try something a little bit different for the review. It was either this or wax poetic like the ex-graduate student that I am, and nobody here wants to read that. (Not to mention, they don’t let you curse in graduate level writing, which is one of the many reasons I decided not to do that sort of thing anymore.) – – – Dear Mrs. Reed, You are a dick. In the parlance of your time, […]
The Golden Notebook: A Novel by Doris Lessing
There is a part of me that feels brazen and shameless for daring to write reviews of literary classics. Who am I to judge Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for example (which I did for Cannonball Read 5)? The Golden Notebook is another such a book, but it is also one of those novels that I have wanted to read because it appears on so many “must read” lists, particularly among feminists. So I will boldly proceed with this review in the hope that I do […]