So much of today’s zeitgeist revolves around the much needed recognition of vulnerable communities, but what about acknowledgement for the community that can’t hear? Sara Novic explores the realities of deaf life in her riveting novel True Biz. Set at the River Valley School for the Deaf boarding school, the novel encompasses the lives of the school’s headmistress and those of ... Read More...
Dust Child
The Vietnam War has been written about from many points of view in fiction, but for the most part my reading has focused on the years of the war, rife as they are with the atrocities perpetuated on the Vietnamese, both by their own people (ARVN soldiers in the South, Viet Cong in the North) and then the Americans. Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai takes a longer view by ... Read More...
The Queen of Dirt Island
The week Saoirse Aylward is born her father is killed in an accident, leaving her mother, Eileen alone to raise her. Their lives in a small village in western Ireland are at the heart of Donal Ryan’s boisterous, tender novel The Queen of Dirt Island. Although the novel stays within the village’s borders it’s an expansive story encompassing four generations of Irish women with ... Read More...
The Angel Maker by Alex North
Anyone else dealing with blah reading recently? I don’t know whether it’s the joy (not!) of dealing with tax prep, but I’ve DNFed two of the last 3 books I started. So, I thought it necessary to wrap up the week with the one book I could not turn away from. If you need reading that will pull you out of your head and onto the page then look no further than The Angel Maker by ... Read More...
This Other Eden
In 1911 there was a small island off the coast of Maine comprised of a group of families who were the descendants of the island’s original 1792 settlers—an escaped slave, his Irish wife, and later, other refugees from society. The island is still there, but its inhabitants are long gone. Paul Harding’s novel, This Other Eden, is the elegiac recounting of their history, lives, ... Read More...
The Writing Retreat
I’m a pushover for fiction about writers writing so The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz had the basic ingredients to draw me in. Alex has dreamed of being an author, but has had writer’s block since the unfortunate and very public shattering of her relationship with her best friend. Now, both have been invited to a prestigious retreat held by renowned feminist horror author, ... Read More...
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