This makes an interesting companion piece to the last novel I read, Homegoing, as it, too, is about two sisters who grow up in completely different worlds. Here, we have…
Contemporary U.S. Literature
Homegoing
June 20, 2021Phenomenal storytelling–I was mesmerized by the very balanced structure of the text. There’s an elaborate family tree at the front of the book that I kept returning to, as I…
Leave the World Behind
April 19, 2021I took this novel’s advice and left my world behind one recent weekend. My family and I enjoyed a long weekend at a friend’s beach house. The long drive there…
Books I Did Not Finish
September 5, 2020For the Summer 2020 edition of Things I Started and Stopped, I’ve got three books. First up is Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. When this book first came out…
The Great Believers
August 16, 2020Ambitious novel set in two different time periods–1980s Chicago during the AIDS crisis and 2015 in Paris–with characters, timelines and plots that converged, but sometimes in confusing ways. The novel…
Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus
August 1, 2019Absolutely 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…
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…