Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life, rarely traveling any farther than his pantry or cellar. But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard Gandalf and a company of dwarves arrive on his doorstep on day to whisk him away on an adventure. They have launched a plot to raid the […]
Tag: book review
W&C: Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
‘Some day this oil will go and there will be no more fat checks every few months from the Great White Father.’ A chief of the Osage said in 1928. ‘There’ll be no fine motor cars and new clothes. Then I know my people will be happier.’ p. 26 Before the nitty gritty of this […]
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily’s fierce-hearted black “stand-in mother,” Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. […]
Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson
I wanted to immerse myself and be preoccupied with nothing Sequoyah, pg. 58 With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a fifteen-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family, Literally and figuratively scarred by his mother’s years of substance abuse, Sequoyah keeps mostly to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep […]
With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo
If Clap When You Land is on backorder at your local bookstore, see if With the Fire on High is available. Honestly, it’s a great book to read regardless of Acevedo’s other accolades. Side note: an easy book to read while miles deep in brain fog. Ever since she got pregnant freshman year, Emoni Santiago’s […]
W&C: The Guest List by Lucy Foley
There’s a lot going on in my life right now (as I’m sure is obvious by the lack of posts) but I can’t deprive this site of W&C. The Guest List was a book that I wavered on. I mean Reese Witherspoon likes it but I also bought Where the Crawdads Sing because of her […]
W&C: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
The most famous true crime novel of all time and one of the first non-fiction novels ever written; In Cold Blood is the bestseller that haunted its author long after he finished writing it. On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by […]
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
This book is in my top ten contenders for this year’s best novels. The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, souther black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their […]
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro […]
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time, Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what […]