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Top Ten Favorite Books of 2016

December 26, 2016

favorite books

Good morning, lovelies! Did everyone get what they wanted from Santa? If what you got is bookstore gift cards, then this post will help you spend them. It’s the end of 2016 and I’m back with my favorite books of the year. (Each title links to my review of the book) In previous years this has been two posts: Favorites and Favorite Debuts because I simply had too many book ... Read More...

10 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction, Non-fiction Tagged: book clubs, favorite books, lists

The Mare: A Novel

December 21, 2016

mare

  The Mare by Mary Gaitskill begins when Velvet, a Dominican girl living in NYC, is eleven and ends when she thirteen, but her life experiences go far beyond her age. Through the Fresh Air Fund, she gets to go to upstate NY for a summer and stays with Ginger (“this blond lady…her face full of niceness with pain around the edges”) and her husband Paul. They live near a ... Read More...

12 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, coming-of-age, family, Vintage

The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma

December 19, 2016

private life

  Often the first person narrative is used by an author to create doubt in the mind of the reader. Ratika Kapur does the opposite in her novel, The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma, with a narrator who calmly tells the truth about her actions from the novel’s beginning to its end. She is a respectable woman—a wife and mother who works at a doctor’s office in Delhi, India. She ... Read More...

1 Comment
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: Bloomsbury, book clubs, contemporary life, cultural, India, marriage

Miss Jane: A Novel

December 12, 2016

miss jane

Jane Chisolm is a surprise baby, born to her parents long after her two older brothers have gone off to college and her sister is ten-years-old. But that’s not the only thing about Jane that’s unexpected. Her body didn’t fully develop in the womb and she is born with genital defects that rule out a normal woman’s life in rural Mississippi. It’s 1915, a time when no medical ... Read More...

4 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: family, historical fiction, literary, Southern life, W.W. Norton

November Reading Wrap-Up

December 9, 2016

november

  Apparently, I’m determined to ignore all kinds of guidelines this week. First, I posted my reading habits two days late and only now am I going to attempt a November reading recap. Suffice it to say it was a hell of a month. I know for some people out there the election was a non-event, but I also know more people who got completely knocked off the track by the result. ... Read More...

6 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Feature, Reading Tagged: books, mini-reviews

The Ornatrix: A Novel

December 5, 2016

ornatrix

  Those of us in the contemporary world often believe that our problems are new to civilization and have never been experienced before, but Kate Howard shatters that belief in her debut novel The Ornatrix. She takes three women and seals their fate to their faces in this gothic tale of beauty set in Italy in the 16th century.  Flavia is a country girl whose face is half ... Read More...

2 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: debut, historical fiction, Italy, The Overlook Press, W.W. Norton

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