Reviews 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…
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The Haunting of Hill House
September 5, 2018Extremely rewardingly creepy read, by which I mean that reading it completely creeped me out and now I can’t be alone at night in my house anymore. The plot finds…
The Magic Misfits
August 22, 2018Doogie Howser, MD is all grown up now, having finally gotten past the White Castle era, and now he’s writing children’s books. Or at least his ghost writer is writing…
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
August 18, 2018A former student of mine, let’s call her “Madison,” insisted I read this book because it’s her favorite book and she reads it annually. This is a lot of pressure…
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 Woman Who Did
July 13, 2018Probably the most depressing thing I’ve read all year. This 1895 novella by Grant Allen features a fiercely principled woman, Herminia Barton, who refuses to marry (before and after she…
A Wrinkle in Time
June 1, 2018Here’s my contribution to the “unpopular opinion” trope going around social media: I do not like this book. I tried, but I failed to see what people seem to appreciate…
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…
Au Bonheur des Dames
January 11, 2018While I enjoyed this novel, in part for its detailed descriptions (Zola’s realism is exquisite), it also felt like it took me forever to read it. For a while I…