To be effective, a self-help book requires two things. First, the help it suggests should be helpful. Obviously. And second, without which the first is impossible, the self it’s trying to help should have some idea of what help is needed. For our collaboration to work, in other words, you must know yourself well enough to understand what you want and where you want to ... Read More...
The First Rule of Swimming
It did not help that on Rosmarina there was no such thing as privacy, one house so near to the next that a man could hear his neighbor’s toilet flush. Grudges went back generations and children were judged by things their parents had done, sometimes years before their birth. Magdalena and her younger sister Jadranka live on the island of Rosmarina with their ... Read More...
Crazy Rich Asians
“I don’t think she cares how fat her ankles get. Do you know how much she inherited when her father died? I heard she and her five brothers got seven hundred million each." When a novel begins with a woman and her children being turned away from a fancy hotel and she’s so upset her husband buys the hotel that same night, you can count me in. Kevin Kwan doesn’t miss ... Read More...
Darker: The Orphan Master’s Son
By its very nature dystopian fiction is dark but Pulitzer Prize winning The Orphan Master’s Son is not technically dystopian. It is set in North Korea, which exists (as we are all too aware recently) and yet the events and lives of the characters are fantastical in their danger, impoverishment, and deprivation. The protagonist is Jun Do, a boy whose mother died when he was ... Read More...
And the Mountains Echoed
I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us. The first time we met Khaled Hosseini was ten years ago when he took us to a place called Afghanistan, which most of us knew only as a foreign enemy, not a country. In The Kite Runner we walked through the door to another world that both opened ... Read More...
On Sal Mal Lane
Where does one begin with Ru Freeman’s On Sal Mal Lane? On the surface it is the story of the Herath family and their lives in their new home on Sal Mal Lane. They are a traditional Sinhalese family, with a mother whose beliefs on what is right and proper leave her children little room to maneuver in their lives. The oldest, Suren, is a gifted musician but is expected to become ... Read More...
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