We Are Okay, by Nina LaCour: I could tell that this novel was going to break my heart from the first chapter, but I kept reading it anyway because of how atmospheric and cozy it is. Reading We Are Okay is like being in a snow globe full of glittering flakes but wrapped up in your warmest, softest blankets. Even the cover art, which when I look at it again is a girl standing on a bed in front of… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Blog
Books of 2022, Part 4
The Five, by Hallie Rubenhold: The “five” are the five known victims of Jack the Ripper, with virtually no attention to their deaths themselves and a pure focus on their lives, which were bleak. I appreciate the author’s intentions to focus on the women as people rather than victims, but have to admit that I wouldn’t have minded a bit more information about the aftermath and investigations. There are other books for that, though. The Book of M, by Peng… Read more »
Books of 2022, Part 3
The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore: Something I think about quite a bit is whether we have – as a world, as a society, as scientists – gotten better at determining when materials/elements/products are going to be toxic too us than we used to be, or if we just believe we are because we’ve discovered and ceased using lead, asbestos, radium, etc. It’s possible that we are actually better – that we aren’t simply relying on having ruled out some… Read more »
Books of 2022, Part 2
The Kissing Bug, by Daisy Hernández: Apologies while I (perhaps undeservedly) go a bit hipster-epidemiologist and state that I’ve been afraid of Chagas disease as far back as at least 2011, when I added it to a saved email draft containing – among other detritus – a list of diseases to check if I ever have an unexplained illness. It hits the scare triggers for me – potentially deadly and largely undetectable until it’s too late (unless you proactively test… Read more »
Books of 2022, Part 1
Why We Can’t Sleep, by Ada Calhoun: Ada is a friend of a friend and my primary memory of her is from that friend’s wedding, where Ada had the best shoes and her husband’s karaoke of “The Thong Song” was so good that his preteen son was impressed and not at all embarrassed. I knew of and about this book already but, possibly, had avoided it because I was afraid it would give me ideas for a future mid-life crisis,… Read more »
Books of 2021, Part 12
Never Saw Me Coming, by Vera Kurian: It’s very possible that I saw this advertised on my Kindle’s homes screen and the title was already in my brain before I saw it recommended again (on Reddit, I think). And…it was an entertaining read but I’m not sure those are great sources for recommendations for me. The premise is that a college (cleverly named after a US president – the author is Canadian, or at least this was published in Canada… Read more »
Books of 2021, Part 11
Once There Were Wolves, by Charlotte McConaghy: Immensely well done. I have not read Migrations (yet) and didn’t know anything, really, about either the author or the novel before beginning it. The past and present are woven together expertly and everywhere you look there’s something else that the story is about – wolves, conservation, twins, mirror-touch synesthesia, place, domestic violence. I was impressed by the author’s writing and storytelling both, and the novel never stopped surprising me. Lost in Summerland,… Read more »
Books of 2021, Part 10
The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan: I’ve been dying to read my dear friend Jessamine’s novel since it was announced, and that only intensified after another good friend read an advanced copy and couldn’t stop raving about it. She lent it to me so that I could read it while awaiting my “bookshelf” copy to ship in January. I was so absorbed in it that I told my partner I wanted to watch something with him as soon… Read more »
Books of 2021, Part 9
Damnation Spring, by Ash Davidson: I knew there was an environmental contamination element to the plot – unexplained incidences of cancer, possible toxicity – before I started reading it, but that had grown hazy by the time I started, so my point of entry was “man wants to buy and cut down the world’s biggest tree” and the unease crept up on me as the references to “the spray,” miscarriages, mysterious cancers, etc slowly piled up. These are the things… Read more »
Books of 2021, part 8
Red Crosses, by Sasha Filipenko: This is brief, rich, and bracing. In every way but one it does not remind me of Philip Roth, but the framing device is the exception – a first-person narrator is not the main focus of the novel (though this one has a much more devastating backstory than Zuckerman is typically given); rather, he functions as a set of ears – stand-in for the reader – for the story of another character. While I thought… Read more »
