Set in 1686 The Miniaturist by debut author Jessie Burton is the spellbinding story of an eighteen-year-old girl married off to an older merchant who lives in Amsterdam. She arrives on his doorstep with no idea of what marriage entails or the fact that she has been procured to enhance his reputation, for her family is poor but with a pedigree. Little does she know that her ... Read More...
Mambo in Chinatown
Jean Kwok is back with Mambo in Chinatown, another tenderly crafted novel about the assimilation process for Chinese immigrants in America. This time we’re absorbed into the life of Charlie Wong, a twenty-two year old woman, who, as the novel begins, is working as a dishwasher in a restaurant where her father is the master noodle-maker. When she has the opportunity to take ... Read More...
The Pearl that Broke its Shell
Nadia Hashimi merges the past with the present in the story of two women from one family. Rahima has the grave misfortune to be yet another daughter born into her family. In Afghanistan the lack of sons is a social and economic disaster. Her father is addicted to opium and does little or no work. Without a son to go out in the world and shop and work for the family their ... Read More...
The Word Exchange
A meme (/ˈmiːm/ meem) is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture." A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. - Coined by Richard Dawkins, 1976 ... Read More...
The Blazing World
Sometimes all it takes is a name and the die is cast. For Harriet Burden, the fact that her father called her Harry from a young age felt like a challenge; one that she grabs onto with all the tenacity of a pit bull, even when it causes her nothing but pain. Harriet is the protagonist in Siri Hustvedt’s new novel, The Blazing World, a tour-de-force of one woman’s determination ... Read More...
Amity & Sorrow
Earlier in the year I reviewed a novel (The Visionist) where a mother and her children run for safety to a religious compound. In Peggy Riley’s Amity & Sorrow it is the opposite situation. Amaranth and her two daughters, Amity and Sorrow, are running from their compound because its founder, Amaranth’s husband, has decided it is the end days and has set it on fire so they ... Read More...
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