William has known life with only one love, basketball. Due to a family tragedy when he was born his parents refused him love or any kind of interaction beyond his physical needs. Discovering a place where he’s accepted is the only lifeline he has to normalcy. His basketball talent leads to a scholarship to Northwestern where he meets Julia. Her attention changes his life, not ... Read More...
The Shadow of Perseus
For some, the retelling of Greek myths may have run its course, but for others (me!) I’m still on board to read mythology from a different perspective. My first 5-star novel of the year was Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes, a fiercely feminist, wickedly funny adaptation of the Medusa myth. Now, author Claire Heywood is tackling the same subject in her new novel, The Shadow of ... Read More...
True Biz by Sara Novic
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...
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...
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