In rural Ireland 44-year-old Sally lives alone with her elderly father. They seldom come in contact with the outside world because Sally is neurodivergent and interactions with people never seem to go well. When Liz Nugent’s novel Strange Sally Diamond opens her father has just died. Sally handles the situation exactly as he told her to, but the after effect of her actions ... Read More...
Banyan Moon: A Novel
The complex and delicate relationships between mothers and daughters is at the center of Thao Thai’s debut novel, Banyan Moon. Towards the end of the Vietnam War, Minh and her daughter, Huong, left Vietnam for America to settle in Florida. Huong’s daughter, Ann, is born there and the three live together in a decrepit mansion called Banyan House until Ann leaves home. Now, Minh ... Read More...
Juno Loves Legs
With a personality as incendiary and out of control as her flaming red hair, Juno bursts onto the pages of Juno Loves Legs like a wildfire. She and Legs, her best friend, live in a housing estate in Dublin and in an abbreviated 300 pages the novel follows them from childhoods where even home isn’t safe to an adulthood that comes far too fast and too hard. And yet, through it ... Read More...
The Swimmers: A Novel
A beautifully composed, but unusual novel, there's not a lot of action in The Swimmers so if plot and pace are a criteria for your summer reading, save this contemplative beauty for the fall. It's the story of a swimming pool and the group of swimmers who churn, wade, bounce, and glide through its lanes. In the first half of the novel the narrators are the collective ‘we’ of ... Read More...
Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult
I’d left off reading Jodi Picoult after disliking her last two books and so didn’t read Mad Honey until two readers I trust said I would enjoy it. I listened to them, but this may be the briefest review of a 4 star novel I’ve ever done. Not for a lack of thoughts, but because the plot twists in this story just keep coming until the very end. Given that each is substantive and ... Read More...
June Reading Recap
This June recap is a little special. Monday, July 3rd, is my mother’s 85th birthday and I want to give her the biggest shout-out I can because aside from being a wonderful mother, this blog, the podcast, my career as a librarian, none of it would have happened without her passion for books. She’s the lovely high schooler in the photo above and my love of reading is one of the ... Read More...
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