Petrona used to live on a farm in Colombia, with her nine brothers and her sister. Then the paramilitary showed up, burned down their house and their fields, and took her father and her three oldest brothers. Now, she, her mother, three of her brothers and her sister live in shack in the slums of Bogotá. At 13 she is sent to work as a maid for the Santiagos, a wealthy family in ... Read More...
Riots I Have Known
Sometimes a synopsis can come out of nowhere and make you pick up a book you never thought you would, but it’s a dicey proposition because marketing people are wily devils. Their entire purpose in life is to seduce. But it still doesn’t quite explain why I thought a novel about a Sri Lankan male inmate in an American prison in the midst of a riot would make for something I ... Read More...
Summer 2019 Reading Preview (Part 2)
Apparently this summer I have NO self control when it comes to books. I truly believed I would have four picks for today, but found that I had three more July books that fell into the 'look really interesting, but no one's talking about' so I had to add them. For everyone whose TBR is already blowing up, I'm sorry not sorry. Great reading lies ahead! (7/9, Nan A. ... Read More...
Mothers’ Week: Mother Country
Nadia’s life is not an easy one. She works not one, but two jobs—as a home attendant for an elderly man and as a nanny for a little girl. It’s necessary because she lives in Brooklyn while her daughter Larissa is still back in Ukraine. They’ve been separated for six years. Lonely years for Nadia as a non-English speaker, looked upon with distrust by the other Ukrainians she ... Read More...
Mothers’ Week: A Woman is No Man
It’s easy to become outraged about the treatment of women in the Muslim world when it takes place far away, as in the memoir Daring to Drive or fiction like Song of a Captive Bird or The Pearl that Broke its Shell. It’s ingrained through centuries of custom and dogma, but debut author Etaf Rum shreds any sense of complacency about American values superseding cultural ones in ... Read More...
Mothers’ Week: The Island of Sea Women
This coming Sunday is Mother’s Day so this week my reviews are focused on three books with very different perspectives on motherhood. Each offered something important in its own way and reminded me how, like so much of what women do, it is impossible to fit the role of mother into one finite slot. Off the coast of Korea’s mainland is an island called Jeju. There was ... Read More...
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