Brian K. Vaughn is one of those comicbook writers whose name I cannot speak without emitting a dreamy sigh after it. This is similar to the way I said “Fonzie” when I was ten. I may have to start sighing after I say the name Fiona Staples too, because she’s responsible for the fantastically dreamy …
After two, or maybe three false starts, I finally made it through Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues. Usually, I wouldn’t be so dogged in reading a book that didn’t seem to be working for me, but the combination of vinyl record on the cover & LeAnn’s review gave me the extra persistance I needed. I’m glad …
On its surface The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg is the kind of the book I dismiss out of hand. Jewish suburban ennui? Been there. A fat character wrecking her family? Done that. Unhappy marriages and bratty teens. Got the t-shirt. Beautiful writing with a light plot? Don’t even get me started. And yet to dimiss …
As I recently confessed over in Book Riot’s Buy, Borrow, Bypass for most of my life I thought I had read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Turns out I read Watcher in the Woods, which is not at all A Wrinkle in Time. It’s like the Silver Eyes/Tiger Eyes episode all over again. Now, …
Glory Fleming is a seventeen-year-old piano prodigy living with her widower father in the Bronx. Frank is the hunky, artistic boy next door, a recent arrival from Argentina. When the two meet things start to go wonky in Glory’s world. Or at least the seem to. Chopsticks by Jessica Anthony & Rodrigo Corral really puts …
We’re in the waning months of 2012 and I think I’ve read what will be my favorite novel of 2012. It’s Carol Rifka Brunt’s fantastic, heartbreaking, and all together wonderful Tell the Wolves I’m Home. Unlike 2011 which was a rotten year for fiction, this is a high honor because the year is chock full …
The older I get the more I truly believe ignorance is bliss, especially if you’re the type to put heroes on a pedestal. I am that type and while the crumbling of the pedestal is a painful process, the knowledge that your heroes are really people with actual human failures is oddly comforting, after you …
One of the best things about reading Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar was the memories it brought back. You know how you sometimes have memories that come screeching out of the ether? Those memories of a long ago time that you had so completely forgotten that the …
One of my favorite things about being a reader is having a physical reaction to a book. Whether it’s tears or goosebumps or laughter, or in the case of Joshua Henkin’s The World Without You an audible gasp, reacting that strongly to written words is the best thing ever. It’s even more delightful, because I …
