In Piedmont, North Carolina in the 1990s two women are faced with raising young children on their own. Jade and her son Gee are Black while Lacey May and her three daughters are White. Both are living on the same edge of desperation, but in What’s Mine and Yours each responds to her circumstances in very different ways. Ways that come to clash a decade later, when despite it ... Read More...
November Reading
November? Seriously, how is 2020 not over yet?! This year has aged me a decade and not just because I’ve stopped coloring my hair. Even my bookish news is not great—my November reading fell off. There was still some great nonfiction, but my waning attention span (thank you doom scrolling) made great fiction harder to find. I finally let go of trying to read diverse, ... Read More...
The Heir Affair: A Novel
American Rebecca (Bex) Porter seems to have won the lottery when Britain’s second-in-line to the throne, Prince Nicholas, falls in love with her. Of course, it’s not that simple, but it does make for fun reading in The Royal We. That novel ended with Bex and Nick married, but already engulfed in scandal. When The Heir Affair opens they are hiding out in remote Scotland, but ... Read More...
Pachinko: A Novel
Historical fiction seems to be the safest bet for my reading right now. Novels that put me in another place, in a different century or even a different decade, all seem to work at distracting my scrabbling brain. Most recently, I fell into the world of Korea from the 1930s to the 1980s in Min Jin Lee’s expansive family saga, Pachinko. It’s four generations of one family as they ... Read More...
Beautiful on the Outside by Adam Rippon
I read a lot of dark and difficult books. Given my light and sunny personality, who knows why, but I like it. However, this year my nonfiction has included Bad Blood, She Said, Burn it Down, and Fall and Rise—all well-done books, but not in a happy way. Somehow the universe knew I needed some unequivocally bright and shiny reading and so dropped Adam Rippon’s memoir Beautiful ... Read More...
Feminasty by Erin Gibson
It’s difficult to imagine a book that could make me laugh out loud and feel enraged at the same time, but Erin Gibson’s Feminasty did just that. It might help to know that the subtitle of the book is: The Complicated Woman’s Guide to Surviving the Patriarchy Without Drinking Herself to Death. Which is all I need to see to know that this is likely to be a book I’ll love. And it ... Read More...
