When Sara’s mother was 8 months pregnant, she lied to the airlines and flew from Missouri back to Kuwait, determined that her daughter be born in the country of her ancestors. This is just the first of many miles and countries crossed by the indomitable women in Mai Al-Nakib’s sweeping novel, An Unlasting Home. A fitting title for a book populated by women whose lives span ... Read More...
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
A Turkish woman lying murdered in a rubbish bin hardly seems like the appropriate subject for a piercingly tender novel about the damage done to innocence in childhood and the bonds of friendship as family, but 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World is a singular work that defies labels. The same is true of the dead woman, Leila, who, at 40 years old, has been a prostitute ... Read More...
Memphis: A Novel by Tara Stringfellow
Memphis is both the title and location of Tara Stringfellow’s stirring debut novel. Three generations of women pass through the family’s home and tumultuous times in a city where racism and violence flourish. Hazel, August, Miriam, and Joan share lives that spill over with trauma, love, and resilience in this novel about the abiding strength in love and family. It's 1995 and ... Read More...
Four Treasures of the Sky
From the near-future in The Candy House I read my way through the distant past in Jenny Zhang’s Four Treasures of the Sky. The novel is the story of Daiyu, a young girl in China, kidnapped and smuggled to America in the early 1880s. A government law banning all Chinese from entering America had no impact on the market for beautiful young girls, a world Daiyu is forced into. Not ... Read More...
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
Not every story needs to be told. Easy-to-digest reading has been a nice break lately, but I was happily pulled back into literary fiction with Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House. Set in a time in the not-so-distant future advances in technology change the meaning of the individual, privacy, connection and begs the question: How far do we want to let computers go? Bix ... Read More...
Brown Girls: A Novel
Who are the brown girls? When Daphne Palasi Andreades’s novel, Brown Girls, opens it’s Nadira, Khadija, Anjali, Yesenia, and Sophie, a group of 10-year-olds growing up in the “dregs of Queens”. In under 250 pages they pass from childhood to old age in lives that are as singular as they are relatable. Not to mention riveting. Andreades makes bold stylistic choices in Brown ... Read More...
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