For The Book Obsessed
Should you read that book you’ve had your eye on? Will it totally rock or sink like a stone? Check out these book reviews from book lovers like you to help you find your next great read!
[ad_1] In the central pages of The Leaving Season, Kelly McMasters decides to leave her marriage. Together with her husband, a painter, she had moved from New York City to rural Pennsylvania to enjoy a slower pace of life, start a family, and later open a bookshop. The decision to leave upends it all. In … Read more
[ad_1] When I was in middle school, I was haunted by the Boomtown Rats’ song “I Don’t Like Mondays.” A local radio station in Atlanta played the song every Monday morning, and it would remind me of dreary weeks at school and what I thought was my sad, inevitable march toward adulthood. The song features … Read more
[ad_1] “I hid my queerness for years,” Daniel Allen Cox writes in I Felt the End Before It Came: Memoirs of a Queer Ex-Jehovah’s Witness, his memoir-in-essays about coming of age within two conflicting identities: “I knew there was something wrong with me because the books and magazines told me so.” In these reading materials, … Read more
[ad_1] Climate change has been the focal point of environmental concerns with the threat of rising seas, flooding, droughts, and food shortages attributed to it. Apocalyptic outcomes are on the horizon, and so many speculative narratives in recent years have projected end-of-world scenarios tied to the calamity. Sarah K. Jackson’s debut novel, Not Alone, finds … Read more
[ad_1] From the Kenzie and Gennaro novels that established him as a master of new noir, to the haunting crime thriller Mystic River and his magnum opus of the 1919 Boston Police Strike, The Given Day, Dennis Lehane has captured Boston neighborhoods with more grit, vitality, and unerring precision than any writer in recent memory. … Read more
[ad_1] Poet Amy Key’s first foray into nonfiction, Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone, uses Joni Mitchell’s Blue as a foundation for a personal meditation on long-term singledom that has endured into middle age. Using the album’s tracklist as a thematic guide, Key probes her lifelong desire for romantic love from various … Read more
[ad_1] A novel playlist is a very serious thing. While I draft, I curate mine obsessively because I know I’ll need it. Each song is a portal to a memory or an emotion, and listening to the right one at the right time can inspire me in a way nothing else can. Finding a song … Read more
[ad_1] Full disclosure first: I worked with Jen St. Jude at Chicago Review of Books for a number of years. Like many of the creative professionals here, I knew they were at work on a book though I didn’t know many of the details. Reading If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come first offers the pleasure of seeing … Read more
[ad_1] Stephen Buoro’s debut novel The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa announces the arrival of an exciting new verbal craftsman with a fresh voice, or perhaps multiple voices. There’s the Stephen Buoro who creates a memorable and sympathetic character in the book’s titular Andy Africa, there’s the Stephen Buoro whose satirical language is hilarious … Read more
[ad_1] Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water opens with a map of the state of Kerala. All its regions, ranging from the mountainous Wayanad to the urban Cochin to the southernmost point of Trivandrum. It is akin to any detailed map in an epic fantasy, and in many respects that is the narrative Verghese has … Read more