Let me tell you, defending my opinion about this book at book club—despite the gal way across the circle who was one-hundred percent with me—got heated. Literally, my face was super hot, uncomfortably hot. Some people really love this book, turns out, and are willing to contradict anything I say in order to defend it.…
I’m not sure that A Long Petal of the Sea is Isabel Allende’s most lauded work. I have been meaning to read her, but I started here only because it was a book club thing. This is one of Allende’s more recent books (2019, out of the 28 listed on her site; she’s published four…
I have seen five movies in the past couple months which are related to books in one way or another. Since the Oscars are creeping up on us and two of the movies have Oscar noms, I thought I should go ahead and put my two cents out there for you. The first—and arguably most…
I wasn’t sure about this one by Jennifer Moorman because it’ didn’t really grab me. It wasn’t the characters, story, or setting, which were all cute right from the get-go, but the writing style. However, because I had an ARC in hand and wanted to give it a fair shot, I read on… until I…
I had just read Little Thieves and was so happy to see all the German food. And then I picked up my next book club read, The Seep by Chana Porter, and found even more food! It is a very short book—probably a novella, actually—and the food tradition is set in a dystopian, sci-fi world,…
I have just started reading Don Delillo’s White Noise for a literary classics book club. On chapter six, at page 22, I came across this scene. I knew it would never make it whole into my quotes from the book, but I also knew that–despite this book maybe not being what I am totally into–this…
It is the month for St. Patty’s Day and it is the month for the Oscars. It’s also just another month, the third month of 2024, and a time when we’ll still be book-clubbing and TBR reading and noticing a few of the new books. As for Irish literature in honor of St. Patty’s Day…
“Yeah, I am the least athletic person in the universe, but I compare writing to training for a sport. You have to do it every single day and nobody cares about your effort or how much time you spent or how much was wasted time. It doesn’t matter. It’s the end of the performance that…
A truly strange book, The Seep by Chana Porter is extremely short (for long-form) science fiction. In fact, it’s really a novella and has small pages, large margins, and space between the lines. And really, I suppose, the book itself isn’t that strange, but the feeling while reading it is of being among strangeness. It…
I really enjoyed Little Thieves by Margaret Owen. I enjoyed it so much that I didn’t even notice it was first person, present tense until I was practically done reading it, which is a testament to when that very thing works for YA. First-person is the most popular POV these days for YA and present…
You already know that I am obsessed with books. You might not already know that I am obsessed with food. Before this blog, I had two different food blogs, and only stopped maintaining them because I couldn’t keep all those plates spinning along with everything else. But I kept cooking and baking. It goes without…
*NOTE: The following review might make it sound like I hated this book. I didn’t. I enjoyed the first half or third, but by the end I was bored and exhausted, an experience I find is not uncommon. If I had rated this book and written about it halfway through, I would have had much…
A book club read, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell is another great read of 2024, for me. I’m even going to call it a favorite. It has little things (and one big thing) wrong with it, but overall, it is an amazing book that deserves book club reads and awards and whatnot. It helps that I…
Valentines Day is a couple weeks away. Some of you will choose to ignore this holiday, and that’s one way to do it. Others of you will take the opportunity to put a wreath of hearts on your door, make a reservation at a fancy restaurant, and curl up with some chocolates and a good…
Normally I would post this as a “First Line” and make it pretty, like a meme. But it wasn’t the first line, exactly, that I wanted to feature, here, as it is the first paragraph that is notable, as a whole. And it would not fit in a neat, little, pretty box (literally, digitally). To…
I felt like I was doing cartwheels while reading Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, and I mean that in a good way. Or like I was watching Garmus do cartwheels. Her writing style, characters, and plot are so free-wheeling. The subject matter is often sad, serious, and even brutal, but somehow this book is…
Mothman’s Curse by Christine Hayes is a fun, little, middle grades read and I would definitely recommend it for MG readers (maybe even late elementary school) who like mysteries and spooky stuff. It is somewhere in the neighborhood of Scooby Doo but with tween and younger protagonists, but when reading that level of creepy in…
Holy crap, this is an amazing book. I kinda feel like it’s been done—family at the outbreak of society’s collapse/civil war, or stream of consciousness, or modern family in dystopian times—but it also has not been done. For one, the maternal perspective in Prophet Song by Paul Lynch is pitch perfect, intimate, and novel (hard…
I like Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It’s a great classic and in many ways, it is right up my alley: gentle, warm, deep, encouraging, historical, full of three-dimensional characters and relationships, and challenging ideas. It is a little vignette-y for me, but I forgive it because it feels right for the time and…
Oh boy. I might catch it for even reviewing (or reading) this series. And I might catch it for what I have to say about it, by a completely different readership. I probably shouldn’t have even bothered and avoided both forms of angry customers, but I have read and I have judged accordingly and there’s…
the starving artist 