Orange World by Karen Russell
★★★★☆ For a long time, it felt like there was no place for magic in contemporary literature. Ghosts, spirits, and devils were a thing for comics and chunky TOR paperbacks; highbrow fiction didn’t deal...
Category: Book Reviews
The Stone Circle by Elly Griffiths
★★★★☆ It is February 2016, a leap year, and Valentine’s Day nears. An ominous letter comes to DCI Harry Nelson; it seems to be from a long-dead murderer involved in a twenty-year old case...
How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee
★★☆☆☆ Singaporean author Jing-Jing Lee’s How We Disappeared portrays the gruesome horrors of war that are often misrepresented, sanitized, or omitted entirely from retrospective conversation. As innocent civilian characters persevere through deprived conditions of...
Sir Christopher Wren by Paul Rabbitts
★★★★☆ Those who know Christopher Wren usually think of him solely as a remarkable architect whose glorious designs still shine some 350 years later. But, as this very brief biography reveals, Wren was so...
The Ash Family by Molly Dektar
★★☆☆☆ “You can’t be a non-conformist if you don’t drink coffee,” the South Park goth kids famously told Stan during his cultural initiation. Molly Dektar’s debut novel The Ash Family invokes the same paradox...
EEG by Daša Drndić
★★★★☆ Daša Drndić’s final novel EEG is a hypnotic and challenging treatise about trauma and history and the importance of painful remembrance. Originally published in 2016 (two years before her death) and translated from...
Spring by Ali Smith
★★★★★ Ali Smith’s Spring is one of the great literary achievements of 2019: it is a novel of vitality in every sense of the word, as energetic and lively as it is timely and...
Is, Is Not by Tess Gallagher
★★★☆☆ Its title suggests the endless arguments of two children, that something “is!” or “is not!” While we are not encumbered by mere recitation of unresolvable argument in Tess Gallagher’s collection, the reader experiences...
Sea Witch by Sarah Henning
★★★★☆ Sea Witch by Sarah Henning is the story of how a young girl, desperate to protect those she loves and find a place in her society, becomes the villain in “The Little Mermaid”...
