Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls and Dreams of Joy may be distinct publications, but they are two inseparable parts of the same story. They must be read together (and reviewed together), because without one, the other is far from whole. Shanghai Girls tells the story of two sisters, Pearl and May Chin, as they escape the […]
Dara Horn’s Eternal Life is a strange tale, rich with mystery and full of questions. In her novel, Horn tells the story of a Jewish girl, Rachel, who forfeited her death in order to save her baby boy. She has lived that sacrifice for two thousand years. Eternal Life begins in the modern day, but […]
I never tire of fantasy fiction–of the multitudes of worlds that authors can imagine, of the systems of magic that they can conceive, and of the quests and adventures that never wear thin. Scott Lynch’s best selling novel The Lies of Locke Lamora is a delightful new foray into that vast and generous world of […]
A ravishing, unconventional narrative, Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles reimagines Homer’s Greek and Trojan war. Instead of a tale of glorious war from the perspective of ruthless and powerful warriors, Miller’s story is a romance, told by the gentlest of the Greek soldiers. Miller’s saga of love and war is narrated by Patroclus, an exiled […]
In Brandon Sanderson’s dystopian fantasy world, a cruel tyrant called The Lord Ruler controls the Final Empire–a world with a blazing red sun, sickly brown plants, ash falling endlessly from the sky, and ominous mists that haunt the nights. In this world, composed of wealthy noblemen and wretched skaa slaves–a skaa street urchin named Vin […]
For the first (and possibly the last) time ever, I have discovered a book that is worse than the movie it inspired. Richard C. Morais’ novel The Hundred-Foot Journey is a picturesque ode to classical French cooking, but it lacks the heartwarming, hopeful excellence of Lasse Halstrӧm’s cinematic version. Hassan Haji, born in India to […]
Bunmi Laditan’s novel Confessions of a Domestic Failure provides a rare and bitingly funny look into the life of a new mother in today’s society. The tedium and tragedies of young motherhood are treated with humor, yet much of what Laditan writes is a little too real and a little too close to home to […]
Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Olive Kitteridge, tells the story of a strange and difficult woman from a quiet, cloistered community in Maine. The novel toggles back and forth from Olive’s own life to the lives of those around her–all the way from her husband to one of Olive’s former students whose memory of […]
Someone please call the experts and ask them to explain what makes Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera such a popular and well-known classic, because the greatness of the novel is lost on me. While the writing is poetic and the topic of love is boundlessly explored, I found the characters revolting […]
The twenty stories bound together in The O. Henry Prize Stories for 2018 are also bound by some common characteristics, although they span a wide variety of settings, themes, and lengths. The stories are similarly peculiar and haunting, leaving indelible imprints on their readers, and often, a melancholy ache in their chests. Short stories as […]