Absolutely fantastic story about a middle-school-aged girl born with no arms getting through life. It’s a first-person narrator with a wry tone and wonderful sense of humor. She’s adopted, and…
Contemporary U.S. Literature
Beyond the Bright Sea
June 10, 2019A friend brought this for my daughter (8), but the book is too “mature” for her, in both plot and style. It’s a pretty good story, a coming-of-age tale about…
Winter Garden
December 27, 2018God save me from women writers who hate their female leads. There must be some term for this–oh wait, Adrienne Rich calls it male-identification. In her essay on “Compulsory Heterosexuality,”…
The Christmas Box
December 13, 2018Sentimental crap. Don’t bother.
Choir Boy
November 18, 2018Reviews of the play call it a coming-of-age story, but it’s too brief a blip in time to really be a bildungsroman. The play is fast-paced, covering maybe a year…
Everything I Never Told You
August 6, 2018This novel was picked for the first-year program’s common read at my university. So of course I also imposed this as a common read pick for the three-family beach-house week…
The Mothers
March 14, 2018This was one of the best novels I’ve read in a very long time. I thought it would be about women struggling with infertility (provenance of mistaken belief: a half-listened…
Camino Island
February 17, 2018Camino Island, by John Grisham, definitely felt like a guilty pleasure. I listened to it, for the neighborhood book club, while driving around town for a few weeks. It’s the…
All the Missing Girls
October 27, 2017Another pick from the neighborhood book club. Like Gone Girl but with the innovation of narrating the story backwards. So you get the protagonist, an unsympathetically drawn woman from a small…
The Giver
September 21, 2017Rather depressing story about what we might give up if we wanted a perfect world of “Sameness”: colors, music, real feelings, holidays, family bonds. Don’t get attached to the kid…