When my sisters and I were younger mom used to wonder, aloud, if we’d ever get along. She would get really upset when we would say “I hate you” or “I hate her” to and…
Posts tagged Novel
The Best Kind of People
The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall is a very timely book. What does a family go through when a loved one is accused of sexual assault? Science teacher George Woodbury is the prep…
Love and Other Consolation Prizes
Told between shifting storylines in the early 1900s and 1962, Love and Other Consolation Prizes by Jamie Ford follows Ernest, a half-Chinese boy auctioned off at the 1909 World Fair in Seattle. Abandoned by his…
Bluebird, Bluebird
Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke is set in Lark, a small town in East Texas, where black people steer clear of a bar crawling with the Aryan Brotherhood and take solace at Geneva’s, a small…
The Children Act
I like Ian McEwan’s particularly British way of handling drama. By that I mean he picks smoldering topics – forbidden lust, crime, unreciprocated yearning – and presents them in a cool, tempered way. The hot-bloodedness…
Mrs. Fletcher’s Rude Awakening
Tom Perrotta has a talent for creating very relatable, very human characters and setting them in novels that feel timely and contemporary. With the exception of The Leftovers, which had a fantasy element, reading his…
Firing On All Cylinders
Like Will, I wasn’t a big fan of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You. However, even in reading that book I didn’t enjoy it was apparent Ng was a writer to be reckoned with…
Everything I Ever Crammed Into A Melodrama
Celeste Ng’s debut novel If you say “Harvard” a lot and have your characters work as professors and aspire to be doctors, can you make A Serious Novel out of a soap opera plot? That’s…
The Good Daughter
I can always tell if a mystery is really good because the moment I finish it I will text my friend, Adam, and tell him how much he needs to read it so I can…
Sing, Unburied, Sing
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward is a haunting tale of the Jim Crow south and its reverberations, generations deep. In rural Mississippi, thirteen-year-old Jojo lives with his aging grandparents who he refers to as…
But That’s Not How it Worked
I have a bone to pick with Jane Young/Aviva Grossman. In 1999, you could not just flop down on the bed of your dorm room with your laptop (which would have had to been plugged…
Well, That Was Offensive
I’m not sure why so many people who read Mona Awad’s collection of linked short stories, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, found it so funny. What was hilarious? The way the main…