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The Falconer by Dana Czapnik

February 4, 2019

falconer

On page two of The Falconer, when Lucy Adler says I met that basketball for the first time only thirty minutes ago but I already know I love it unconditionally, and that it loves me back in a way that no carbon-based life-form ever will. you need to understand you’ve just seen into her very soul. On the court, she is a beast, a player so good she routinely plays pick-up ... Read More...

8 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: Atria Books, coming-of-age, debut, literary, New York City, teen years

Katerina: A Novel by James Frey

September 27, 2018

katerina

Last week I wrote about The Golden State, a novel that literally flowed, with very little punctuation or grammar, from the protagonist’s mind. Oddly, enough immediately after that book, I read James Frey’s Katerina and he utilizes the same style. The good news? In both cases it works. Katerina is the story of Jay, a writer at two very different points in his life. In 1992 he is ... Read More...

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: coming-of-age, contemporary life, Paris

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

August 15, 2018

crawdads

On Monday I mentioned having a book hangover and Delia Owens’s debut, Where the Crawdads Sing, is the culprit. What is worse is that I tried to read my way out of it and got mired in overwrought, pretentious prose that pushed all of Crawdads beauty out of my head and filled it with a tarry gunk that immobilized my brain. A foolish mistake that I’m paying for now. Still, I’ll ... Read More...

18 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, childhood, debut, Putnam, Southern life

How To Be Famous: A Novel

July 16, 2018

famous

When we left Johanna Morrigan (aka Dolly Wilde) at the end of How to Build a Girl (which I loved) she had come into her own at a music magazine, dropping snarky, rude reviews to focus on music and artists she loved. Now she’s broken free of her hilarious but toxic family and is, at eighteen, living on her own in London. Which is where author Caitlin Moran begins in her sequel, ... Read More...

2 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: coming-of-age, England, Harper, social issues, women

Everybody’s Son by Thrity Umrigar

June 22, 2018

son

This month Thrity Umrigar's novel, Everybody's Son, was released in paperback so I'm revisiting my review of this entertaining and  thought provoking book. Even more good news: Umrigar has a new novel, The Secrets Between Us, coming out later this month. It's a sequel to her novel, The Space Between Us, which is my favorite of her novels.   When a novel opens ... Read More...

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: coming-of-age, contemporary life, family, Harper, racism, social issues

The Map of Salt and Stars

May 14, 2018

map

Making maps is the fulcrum for Jennifer Joukhadar’s debut novel, The Map of Salt and Stars. Rawiya and Nour are young women who tell their stories side by side even though they are separated by almost a thousand years. Rawiya is a sixteen-year-old in ancient Ceuta who longs to see the world beyond her village so she leaves home in the guise of a young man and becomes an ... Read More...

3 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: coming-of-age, contemporary life, cultural, Middle East, mythology, Touchstone, war

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