If your goal in writing a novel is to start conversation than Doree Shafrir succeeds in Startup. On the surface the novel is a quick-read satiric look at the young tech industry springing up in NYC, but underneath, business is the least of the issues Shafrir explores. At the center of the novel is Mack McAllister—the creator of TakeOff, an app that helps ease the stress ... Read More...
Break in Case of Emergency
Poor Jen. She was an artist while in college, but gave up after school and got a communications job at a non-profit. Which then hit hard times and laid her off. Now she’s at a new foundation started by Leora Infinitas (that’s not a typo on my part), a former sitcom star who achieved her wealth by marrying old money. Literally, her husband was old. And then he died and ... Read More...
The Sellout: A Novel
How do you review a book when you’re not quite certain that you should or even that you should have been allowed to read it? This was the question in my mind after finishing Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. The novel is set in a ghetto outside Los Angeles called Dickens and is about a young black man whose childhood is spent being homeschooled and basically tortured by his father, a ... Read More...
The Stager by Susan Coll
Given that we're still in the midst of our home remodel I thought it appropriate to re-publish this review The Stager, a book I loved from 2014. It's just been released in paperback and is a hilarious satire about the world of home staging and so much more. This time last year we were still looking for a house in Seattle so this novel gave me much needed laughs. Now that we're ... Read More...
The Diamond Lane
Life here was weighted with the vague feeling that if anything was happening, it was happening wherever one wasn’t. Maybe that accounted for all the driving…Eleven million people scurrying around, trying to find the exclusive exciting event that would make them feel at the center of something big. Mimi Fitzhenry is the type of living-in-Hollywood character who chooses to ... Read More...
