Naomi Novik’s Uprooted feels like an old familiar fairy tale, but it’s different than any you’ve heard before. In a quiet, ordinary little village, at the edge of the Wood, lives a plain, ordinary teenage girl. Only neither the village nor the girl are truly ordinary. The village, Dvernik, is nestled between an enchanted, evil […]
Last month I reviewed Fredrik Backman’s novella The Deal of a Lifetime, which was actually his second novella. His first one was titled And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer–a whopper of a title. For all its lengthy title, the story itself is brief as can be. I read all 76 pages […]
Lisa See’s Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is set in rural nineteenth-century China, where women spend most of their lives confined to the four walls of upstairs women’s quarters. They are bound by customs and rules in silent subservience to fathers, husbands, and sons. They cannot travel, they cannot receive a formal education, they […]
People often seem amazed at how many books I can read as the mother of two small children. I try to read fifty-two books a year, and let me tell you: it is a serious challenge. For those who ask how I do it, the simple answer is that I prioritize reading above other forms […]
After I readThe Map of Salt and Stars, everyone urged me to read The Kite Runner, and even though I’m over a decade late to this party (what can I say? It came out when I was ten), I read it. It’s finally checked off my list. Everyone was right, of course; Khaled Hosseini’s The […]
Whatever Fredrik Backman writes, I will always read. I’ll even buy a brand new copy, which I don’t often do; I usually get my books from the library, and if I do buy them, I try to buy them used. Backman’s works are always worth the expense to me, because he writes with such hard-hitting […]
I finished Mr. Dickens and His Carol on Christmas Eve, and it still isn’t sitting right with me…kind of like Scrooge’s imaginary “undigested bit of beef.” I honestly cannot decide if I liked it or or not. It isn’t often that I feel that way about a book.
I carried our memories all this way, the story of what happened to us. It was heavy on my shoulder this whole time, but I didn’t fall down. ….. The Map of Salt and Stars, Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar’s debut novel, is a stinging lungful of air and a gut punch that took my breath away. […]