Hiding in the security of all things books, with some movies and tv - occasionally food...
In Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, Jack and Mabel are a middle-aged married couple who have moved to Alaska in the 1920′s to attempt the successful farming of a homestead. The land is harsh and unforgiving, and though it is of their own choosing, the couple is isolated from family, and have made no friends in the tiny [...]
The complexities and tragedies of Rwanda and the Tutsi-Hutu tensions are intricately and beautifully captured in Naomi Benaron’s emotionally stirring debut, Running the Rift. Jean Patrick Nkuba is a young Tutsi boy who loves his family, excelling at his studies and running with his brother. A school visit from an award-winning runner awakens Olympic dreams in Jean-Patrick, but his world begins to [...]
Cinder by Marissa Meyer, is the story of a half-cyborg girl adopted by a businessman, but left in guardianship of his wife when he dies suddenly. Cinder lives with her stepmother, Adri, and stepsisters, Peony and Pearl, in the kingdom of New Beijing. Though she has a strong relationship with Peony, her place in the household is precarious due to the resentment filled relationship [...]
Ella Thomas is a down on her luck eighteen-year-old – just days away from not being able to pay rent – when she auditions for a gig as a jazz singer. After completing of a rigorous interview process she finds out that she has been recruited by an arm of the military for an assignment that only she [...]
15-year-old Pearl lives with her mother in a small house on her uncle’s property in Fallbrook, California. She is used to hanging out with her cousin Robbie and her Uncle Hoyt, an avocado farmer using both legal and illegal immigrant labor to work his ranch. When Pearl spots Amiel, a young migrant miming and juggling in the [...]
Stories for the Nighttime and Some for the Day by Ben Loory is one of the strangest little collections of stories that I have ever read, and oddly, it’s really resonant. While longer than sudden fiction (though some of it really is just that), each of these short stories are dark and offered up something [...]
It wasn’t until after I’d read Audrey Niffenegger’s novels The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry that I found out she was also an illustrator and graphic novelist. She has two earlier “novels-in-pictures” The Adventuress (which I’ve since read) and The Three Incestuous Sisters. The Adventuress was really, really strange, but still I picked up a [...]
Jasmine is carrying around a big secret, and it’s threatening to destroy her life and friendships in Janet Gurtler’s If I Tell. Her relationship with her mom has always been tense. Jaz is the result of her mother’s teenage interracial relationship with a talented high school football player. Jaz’s father and his family abandoned her [...]
I loved reading about Kathleen Flinn‘s teaching adventures in The Kitchen Counter Cooking School. I can’t recommend it highly enough for those who want, very simply, to master their kitchen domain. Flinn had the idea to start the “school” after she sneakily followed a mother and daughter around the supermarket pondering their choices, which all seemed [...]
A version of this review first appeared at Reader Unboxed on 11/10/11. In Lisa Black‘s Defensive Wounds, the fourth in her series on the adventures of forensic scientist and crime scene investigator Theresa McLean, Theresa continues working cases and raising her teen aged daughter in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work often overlaps with that of her cousin Frank, who [...]