Tag: Recommended Reading
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Friday reads: Foxlowe and The Girls
I discovered Foxlowe by Eleanor Wasserberg and The Girls by Emma Cline because both were short-listed for the Shirley Jackson Awards this year (which is one of my favorite award lists–always something good to read on that shortlist). I read them back to back and was struck by how similar, and different, they were from each other. Both are about young…
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Recommended reading: Universal Harvester
If you are of a certain age, you likely remember the video store as a regular stop on the errands run. And if you grew up in a small American town, you may remember the locally owned video store as a peculiar confluence of people and culture in a place where there wasn’t a whole…
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Recommended Reading: Ill Will
“Most people seemed to believe that they were experts of their own life story. They had a set of memories that they strung like beads, and this necklace told a sensible tale. But she suspected that most of these stories would fall apart under strict examination — that, in fact, we were only peeping through…
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Recommended Reading: Underground Airlines
I highly enjoyed and appreciated Ben H. Winters’s gripping new novel, Underground Airlines, on three levels. First, it presents a fascinating what-if scenario. In this alternate America, instead of having a civil war, the states came to a compromise that essentially made slavery constitutional into perpetuity. In the present day, slavery continues to be legal in…
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Recommended Reading: Crooked Heart
Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans — Ten-year-old Noel Bostock is an odd boy, smart, a reader, independent. He lives with his godmother until she goes senile and then dies. Left bereft, Noel is evacuated with other London children at the start of the Blitz, when Vee takes him in on impulse. Vee lives hand-to-mouth, always with some…
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Recommended Reading: Generation Loss
Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand — Cass Neary was once a young photographer on the burgeoning punk scene who made a name for herself with a ground-breaking book, but a couple of decades later, she’s burnt out, damaged, and still working in the storeroom at the Strand bookstore. A friend gives her a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to interview…
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Recommended Reading: When We Were Animals
In a small town somewhere in America, when the children reach adolescence, they breach. On the nights of the full moon, they give in fully to instinct and run wild and naked in the streets. Everyone else stays indoors. There is sex, there is violence; anything can happen, and almost everything is allowed. Lumen Fowler,…
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Recommended Reading: Hag-Seed
Hag-Seed is Margaret Atwood’s contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series, which are retellings of Shakespeare plays set in contemporary times. (Previously, I read The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterston, also in this series.) Atwood takes on one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, The Tempest, locating it in the world of small-time Canadian politics. Felix…
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Recommended Reading: The Long and Faraway Gone
The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney follows two characters–only slightly connected–who are both from Oklahoma City and are both struggling to get past unresolved mysteries from their youth. Wyatt, now a private investigator living in Las Vegas, returns to Oklahoma City as a favor for a friend to find out who is harassing a woman…
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Best Reads of 2016
An annual tradition with me is choosing my top 5 reads of the year–not necessarily books that were published during the year, but books that I read and stayed with me, that stood out above the crowd. This year’s roundup is a varied assortment, but I highly recommend them all. 1. A Head Full of…
Shannon Turlington 