Stay with Me by Nigerian author Ayobami Adebayo is an amazing portrait of a woman destroyed by the pressure to produce children for her husband’s family. After years of trying unsuccessfully to have a baby, yet being told there’s nothing wrong with her, Yejide starts to go a bit crazy. They story that unfolds from there is powerful and fully unpredictable. A brilliant book by an exciting new author. One I won’t soon forget.
The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty is a big juicy fantasy novel full of deavas and djinns and magic, set in ancient Egypt. I got fully drawn in to the story of Nahiri, a young con artist from the streets of Cairo who accidentally summons the djinn warrior Dara to her side and begins the journey to understanding her true destiny. After more than 500 pages I was disappointed that Chakraborty left so many characters and plot points hanging….
Armada by Ernest Cline, author of Ready Player One, is not the typical book I read, but I was in the mood for something different. Aliens are finally invading Earth and the worlds best video gamers are called into a real live battle that they’ve been training for their whole lives without knowing it. Filled with all the 80’s pop-culture references from movies, to music to old video games one would expect from Cline, I was in for the ride….
Summer Island is another novel by Kristin Hannah. A Mom and her daughters have been estranged for more than a decade. After a scandal and an accident, they all return to the island in the Pacific Northwest where they used to spend Summers together, and here the real healing begins. I liked this book, but not as much as other books by Hannah. I found the characters and story a bit hard to believe and hard to care about. A…
True Colors by Kristin Hannah is a family saga set on a ranch in Washington state. Three sisters who lose their mother when she is young, stay very close until a stranger comes to town one day and changes all their lives forever. Hannah delves into family dynamics as well as racism and how it plays out within the judicial system. I found it fascinating and deeply moving. Her characters were well developed, flawed and honest. A great book to…
The World in Half by Cristina Henriquez is about a daughter’s search for the Father she never knew in Panama. She finds love letters he wrote years ago to her Mother, who is now suffering from Alzheimer’s. Without telling her, she goes in search of her Father. This could have been a really great book, but it drifted off and never really went anywhere. I was having a hard time caring about any of the characters. Henriquez didn’t go deep…
The Fifth Avenue Artists Society by Joy Callaway is set in the Bronx in the 1890’s. It is a story about a family of artists, four sisters and a brother living in genteel poverty after their father dies. Ginny wants desperately to be a published author, yet struggles to find a publisher because she is a woman. When her brother brings her to a salon of artists she seems to find a place where all voices are equal, male or…
Touch by Courtney Maum is a timely and modern novel addressing life in our high tech, digital era where we often touch our iphones more than we touch each other. Sloane is a trend forecaster and anti-breeder. When hired by a huge tech company, she begins to sense that old-fashioned values and physical intimacy might be making a come back, along with the flip phones and postage stamps. I found this book at turns hilarious and terrifying, thinking of the…
The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in Heaven is Sherman Alexie’s first collection of stories, some written when he was only 19. The movie Smoke Signals, which I loved, is based on this collection of stories. Here, Alexie gives us a rather bleak depiction of reservation life near Spokane Washington for modern day Indians. Almost every story features very drunk Indians, often getting in fights. But there is so much more here. His writing is beautiful, poetic, sparse, lyrical, funny….
Hum if You Don’t Know the Words is the excellent debut novel by South African writer Bianca Marais. Set in the 70’s in Johannesburg, it tells the story of a privileged young white girl and Xhosa woman, who under normal circumstances would never have met, but end up changing each others lives forever. Told from alternating perspectives, it is a brilliant portrait of racism set in apartheid-era South Africa, yet sadly still relevant today. A great read.