A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier
★★★★☆ “Her brother was gone, her fiancé was gone, God was gone. It took a long time for the gap to close, if it ever really did.” So, she had moved the 12 miles...
Category: Book Reviews
Our War by Craig DiLouie
★★☆☆☆ Political novels usually fall into two categories. Some books take themselves very seriously, composed of intellectual arguments thinly veiled with story. Others are entertaining airport/beach books that take today’s headlines and run to...
Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
★★★☆☆ Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers wants to help us more accurately interpret the intentions of strangers, but does so in a way that’s disjointed and impractical. A variety of observations appear throughout: For...
Inland by Téa Obreht
★★★★☆ A curiously timely novel set around an Arizona homestead in the late 1890s, Téa Obreht’s excellent Inland finds a vein of magical realism in the reliably fruitful ores of Western Literature. When Nora’s...
Time Bomb by Penelope Wright
★★★★☆ Penelope Wright’s Time Bomb: Book 1 of The Collapse is a Waterworld-style dystopia with time travel, a sassy protagonist, and radiation. Typically, Rosarita Columbia only goes back in time to steal items necessary...
Everything Inside by Edwidge Danticat
★★★★☆ In Everything Inside, with movement comes creation: characters go from Haiti, to Miami, to New York City, and back, building families and love. Like Danticat’s other works, the Haitian diaspora is the continuing...
Be Recorder by Carmen Giménez Smith
★★★★☆ For many these days, it’s easier to recognize it as a feeling than it is to articulate its many layers. It’s not quite dread, and not quite a call to arms: politically and...
How to Know the Birds by Ted Floyd
★★★★☆ The yellow-breasted chat had just arrived on my birding stomping grounds, calling out incessantly in an interesting conversation I wasn’t invited to, when I flipped to a chapter dedicated to this species in...
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
★★★★★ The disappearances started small. A certain type of candy, let’s say, was one morning gone — not gone from the stores but wiped from existence. Every resident of the unnamed island of The...
