The two volumes of Maus are Art Spiegelman’s attempts to document the struggles of his parents before and during the Second World War, as well as his not always harmonious relationship with his elderly father. The framing narrative shows Art interviewing his father Vladek about his recollections of the time before and during the war, as well as trying to deal with his temperamental parent, despite their many differences. The illustrations are famous and the subject matter is, of course, very worthy. So why didn’t […]
Some of us Will Like this Book
Buddha in the Attic is an experimental novel about the immigrant women who came to the US from Japan in the 1920s and 1930s. How well this novel works for you will depend mostly on how much you like the experimental style the novel is written in. I was less fond of it, so while I found the novel to be worth reading and interesting, it didn’t really move me in anyway and I didn’t find it particularly memorable. Otsuka tells her story in the […]
I am time-lagged, but this is a great book
To Say Nothing of the Dog was delightful, especially reading it so quickly after the extended bleakness of Doomsday Book. I liked the latter, but To Say Nothing of the Dog had humor, levity, and, importantly, seemed much more edited. The story follows Ned Henry, a future historian who, along with the entire time travel research group at Oxford, has been enlisted by a demanding, omnipresent, and stubborn benefactor to rebuild the previously destroyed Coventry Cathedral in Oxford. Why, you ask? Well, her great-great-great grandmother […]
All the Sudden People Were Dying Everywhere
Rating: 3.5/5 Summary: The Farming of Bones begins in 1937 in a village on the Dominican side of the river that separates the country from Haiti. Amabelle Desir, Haitian-born and a faithful maidservant to the Dominican family that took her in when she was orphaned, and her lover Sebastien, an itinerant sugarcane cutter, decide they will marry and return to Haiti at the end of the cane season. However, hostilities toward Haitian laborers find a vitriolic spokesman in the ultra-nationalist Generalissimo Trujillo who calls for an […]
It is a truth, universally ignored, that servants have lives too.
Longbourn joins the very long tradition of auxiliary Jane Austen novels and deftly moves to the head of the class. It is one of the better ones out there and MILES ahead of the hated “Austen novel tittle and monster X” books. The book succeeds largely because Jo Baker doesn’t try to ape Austen’s style or plot, she simply tells a story around the narrative structure of Pride and Prejudice. It’s a fairly compelling book that details the lives of the servants to the Bennet family. […]
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere
3.5 Stars. This book was suggested by a friend who knows her romances, so I was eager to dive in. Unsurprisingly, this historical romp was a complete delight. Willig deftly weaved the main romance from the early 19th century into a modern story featuring a quirky student doing her dissertation on English spies during the Napoleonic era. Eloise Kelly has always loved stories about the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian, but she can’t resist a mystery. When she gets the chance to go to […]
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