Into another month and somehow we’re nearly three-quarters of the way through 2020. Madness. To distract yourself from your own insanity (I’m blaming mine on cabin fever), here are some cool books you should consider adding to your TBR! World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Fumi Nakamura As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places […]
Tag: fiction
Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram
Suicide isn’t the only way you can lose someone to depression. Übermensch to Darius, p. 286 A four hour read that’s a lot more uplifting than the above quote suggests. I loved this book from its front cover to its end. Darius Kellner speaks better Klingon than Farsi, and he knows more about Hobbit social […]
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 […]
Looking Forward: July 2020
Another month, another set of books to brighten my life – that’s what I always say. Wherever my 2020 summer is spent, I’ll at least have some fresh pages to keep me company. The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America’s Wildlands by Jon Billman These are the stories that defy conventional logic. The […]
Paper Towns by John Green
When Margo Roth Spiegelman beckons Quentin Jacobsen in the middle of the night – dressed like a ninja and plotting an ingenious campaign of revenge – he follows her. Margo’s always planned extravagantly, and, until now, she’s always planned solo. After a lifetime of loving Margo from afar, things are finally looking up for Q… […]
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who’s “saying” the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than […]
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Standing on the fringes of life offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor. This haunting novel about the dilemma of passivity vs. passion marks the stunning debut of a provocative new voice in contemporary fiction: The Perks of Being a Wallflower. This is […]
W&C: Miracle Creek by Angie Kim
Miracle Creek gripped me. I tore through its pages in just a few days. When I got to the acknowledgements and read that this was Kim’s first novel, I was shocked. My husband asked me to lie. Not a big lie. He probably didn’t even consider it a lie, and neither did I, at first […]
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; […]