Under Red Skies by Karoline Kan
★★★★☆ When a government’s social policy resembles that of a dystopian novel, you know you’ve found a gritty slice of life worthy of attention. In Under Red Skies, second child Karoline Kan recounts her...
Category: Book Reviews
The Wild Bunch by W.K. Stratton
★★★★☆ Fifty years ago, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch blasted onto the nation’s movie screens with the impact of a Gatling gun mowing down an advancing army. The cowboy movie (and really, all movie-making)...
Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri
★★★☆☆ Amit Chaudhuri upends the traditional homecoming tale with his seventh novel, Friend of My Youth. Meta-narrated by a character named Amit Chaudhuri, this short work tracks his begrudging return to Bombay to...
The Parade by Dave Eggers
★★★★☆ Dave Eggers’ The Parade is a concise, finely executed work of understated elegance. It’s the kind of extended parable that need not flood you with backstory about its principal characters, and is even...
The White Card by Claudia Rankine
★★★★★ It’s not news that the art industry has a problem with its white-maleness — museums are grappling with these issues and mounting some of their best and most diverse shows in recent years...
Here Lies Daniel Tate by Cristin Terrill
★★★★★ Here Lies Daniel Tate by Cristin Terrill is the story of a boy fighting for survival and discovering who he wants to be. The novel begins with the narrator refusing to give his...
Nothing but the Night by John Williams
★★★☆☆ Written in 1948 while the author was stationed in Burma, Nothing but the Night is a curious early work by celebrated American novelist John Williams (1922-1994). The novella investigates the haunted past of...
We Are Not Refugees: True Stories of the Displaced by Agus Morales
★★★★★ Mass migration is in the news almost daily, but what’s lost in stark headlines and impassioned tweets is the human element. But people don’t leave their homes or their countries, often for good,...
Golden State by Ben H. Winters
★★☆☆☆ Unwarranted comparisons to 1984 should be punished with the severity of Orwellian dictatorships. Ben H. Winters really wants his novel Golden State to land among the authoritarian greats, but he spends too much...
