Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCraken is set in New England at the turn of the twentieth century. Full of all sorts of unusual characters starting with Bertha Truitt who appears out of nowhere passed out in the cemetery one day with nothing but a bowling ball, a candle pin and some bars of gold. From there the story unfurls and twists and turns and comes back on itself eventually through several generations of Truitts. McCraken’s writing is truly original, an unexpected…
City of Girls is the new novel by Elizabeth Gilbert. It follows Vivian, a young, spoiled, naive girl who moves to NYC in the 1940’s and begins making costumes at a local theater. The parts describing her life as a seamstress I found really interesting. Otherwise, I found her shallow and boring and just not that original. Gilbert gives the reader a glimpse into the life of a showgirl in NYC at that time, but I still found this book…
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus, is another book that takes the reader on a magical journey. This time through a magic door to an underground world full of books and stories and of bees and honey, keys and crowns and of course The Starless Sea. Morgenstern is a master of creating a fantasy world that the reader wants to live inside and not come out of, and in that sense this book doesn’t disappoint….
Educated:A Memoir by Tara Westover is the best memoir Ive read since The Glass Castle. Raised in Idaho by a family of survivalists who stockpiled food and guns, preparing for the end of the world, never letting their kids go to the doctor or go to school, Westover didn’t even have a birth certificate until she was 9 years old. Her Father was a bi-polar owner of a scrapyard, her Mother a midwife and healer, her older brother was violent…
The Broken Earth Trilogy: The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin is a collection of Sci-fi fantasy unlike anything I’ve ever read. Jemisin so completely creates and populates a new world in the future, where all the rules of survival have changed, it took me most of the first book to entirely grasp it. I actually found this tiresome at first, but am glad that I stuck with it. By the final book I couldn’t…
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo is an incredible novel told through the voices of twelve separate modern, black British women. Their stories are each personal and unique, yet they overlap just enough to keep a thread running through the entire narrative. This book blew me away; although each vastly different, Evaristo showed the inter-connectedness of all her characters, highlighting issues of gender, race, sexuality, class, family, and culture. One of the best books I’ve read in ages, I didn’t…
Red at the Bone is the new novel by Jacqueline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming. Written in sparse, lyrical, poetic prose, Woodson tells the story of Melody, 16 years old at her coming of age party, as her family looks back on the same event that was meant to be celebrated for her mother 15 years earlier. Told in different voices, moving back and forth through time, Woodson writes about issues of family, race, culture, identity, place. Masterfully written…
The Affairs of the Falcons is the debut novel by Peruvian author Melissa Rivero. In the novel, Ana and her family have just fled Peru for a better life in New York; being young and undocumented they have little chance for decent work and become reliant on loan sharks and less than gracious cousins. Ana goes to extraordinary lengths to try to stay in NY and keep her family together. Her husband is ready to send their kids back to…
The Hidden Life of Trees, What They Feel, How They Communicate-Discoveries from a Secret World by ecologist Peter Wohlleben is an interesting look at the inner lives of trees and forests that are so essential to our health and the health of our planet, but in our fast paced world, we mostly take for granted. Wohlleben anthropomorphizes trees to a fault, but his intention is to describe in terms we can understand that they actually do communicate, protect their offspring…
Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, is a coming of age story set in the 1950’s. Eilis is an Irish girl who comes to Brooklyn for work and finds unexpected love. It is a story that sneaks up on you slowly, as the characters develop and grow. A quiet and straightforward novel that packs an emotional punch. Eilis is torn between two countries and two men, searching for a place to call home. A beautifully written book, a great read.