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] We all have a story we tell about our lives. There is a certain power we harness in storytelling that lets us be whoever we want to be. But perhaps the telling becomes most powerful when we can speak truthfully, when we can come to terms with reality. In Laura Adamczyk’s debut novel, Island … Read more
[ad_1] Salomea Künstler, known as Mamie and all of eleven, has just arrived in California with her parents and grandfather when Cathleen Schine’s Künstlers in Paradise begins. An orange tree grows in the garden of their new home in Santa Monica, and in the “odd, shining fog” of their first morning, they ate oranges, “as … Read more
[ad_1] A list of Patricia Smith’s achievements in poetry could take up much of this interview. A poet, playwright, essayist, educator and mentor, she’s deservedly won nearly every accolade and award, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement, and earlier this year she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. … Read more
[ad_1] Our unnamed narrator meets Jude, a local antique dealer and washed-up actor, while on vacation with her mother in an isolated Australian coastal town. Jude is forty-two. Our narrator is twenty-four. Jude recognizes her copy of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. Our narrator is smitten. And so we embark on a doomed romance serving as … Read more
[ad_1] Perhaps there are no more famous witches than Shakespeare’s three “weyward” wenches. The crookedness of the Bard’s (and Britain’s) witches represented a cultural fear of an empty womb—the childless, the menopausal. Women were to be coupled and birthing. If they were not, they were witchy. Evil. Monstrously magical. But, for the reader, the witches … Read more
[ad_1] Dan Egan writes, “An exquisitely balanced phosphorus exchange existed for billions of years before humans corrupted the element’s flow through the environment.” Egan’s task in his new book, The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance, is to explore that “exquisite exchange,” detailing the element’s breakdown and passage through wetlands and across … Read more
[ad_1] Full confession: I read, but did not finish Eleanor Catton’s 2013 Booker Prize-winning, 900-page novel, The Luminaries. I don’t recall the reason. The book may have simply worn me out; and, of course, there are times in one’s life when the next book waiting is simply more desirable. Catton’s latest work, Birnam Wood, clocks … Read more
[ad_1] J.K. Chukwu’s debut, The Unfortunates, is so much more than a novel. It is visual art, emotional plea, nostalgia bomb, and bildungsroman all wrapped up in one. While the powerful themes explored in the novel can and will resonate in some way with anyone, this story particularly speaks to the isolation Black students often … Read more
[ad_1] Melinda Moustakis’ fiction is an expert tutorial in braiding a story’s environment with its characters’ paths, as much as it is an unveiling of how that braid is not a braid at all but an inseparability, place inextricable from human life. In her debut collection, Bear Down, Bear North, which won the Flannery O’Connor … Read more
[ad_1] Our lives aren’t movies, no matter how much we may dream of the cinematic pan out of a “happily ever after” conclusion. In real life, juries don’t reach a verdict within a 90-minute runtime, the killer doesn’t always face justice, and memories don’t play back clearly like a full scene. Oftentimes the truth is … Read more