In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo breaks down a whole lot of complicated issues surrounding race in America into accessible pieces. I found it to be a quick read, mostly because of how beautifully clear and direct it was. With chapter titles like "What is the school-to-prison pipeline?", "What are microaggressions?" and... Continue Reading →
This is a tough one to review. Jazz Jennings was fifteen when she wrote it, and I want to say things like "this is a book written by a teenage girl, so take it with a grain of salt", but there's something about that that feels icky and dismissive of teenagers. Teenagers are as complicated... Continue Reading →
This was one of those books that I enjoyed, but that felt somewhat vague. Reading it was more like experiencing the impression of a story, rather than the story itself. Sometimes it was beautiful and sometimes it was boring. I often struggle to summarize the plots of novels in my reviews: it seems important to... Continue Reading →
This book was a delightful surprise--not the fact that it was so good, but the fact that it exists. I read the first three books in Scott's delightful Astreiant series last summer, and assumed that would be it. Scott and her partner wrote the first two books way back in 1990s and early 2000s. After... Continue Reading →
This novel felt similar to me as the only other book of Kincaid's I've read, A Small Place. The prose is gorgeous, lyrical, haunting. It casts a spell. When I read A Small Place, an essay about Kincaid's home of Antigua, I fell under the spell of the words and was captivated. But The Autobiography... Continue Reading →
As predicted, with spring slowly but surely making its way to the island, I've been neglecting blogging. Between turning over my new community garden plot, actually reading books, taking long dog walks, writing fiction, and work getting steadily busier every week, I've had a lot less time to devote to posting reviews. Updates are going... Continue Reading →
There is so much going on in this novel, and I've been putting off reviewing it because while I loved most of it, the ending drove me crazy, and I've been struggling with how to write about it. Simply put, this is a book about two British Muslim families and the various ways their lives... Continue Reading →
First off, this audiobook was just fantastic, and I found myself sneaking away to listen to it every chance I got. It's one of those books I can't really imagine reading in print, because both narrators brought both Will Graysons vividly to life. I highly highly recommend it in that form. Even the songs scattered... Continue Reading →
One Crazy Summer is an understated middle grade novel about Delphine and her two sisters, who travel from Brooklyn to Oakland during the summer of 1968 to spend a month with the mother who left them when they were small. While there, they spend their days at a summer program put on by the Black... Continue Reading →
This quiet novel, based on the life of the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzhad, is the beautiful and sometimes harrowing story of a woman determined to live her own life and tell own stories, despite a world that continually blocks her way. It spans ~25 years, from the 1940s through the late 1960s, and it's both... Continue Reading →
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