As a young girl growing up in the 1970s there were few reading experiences more ubiquitous than discovering that author Judy Blume understood you. That she seemed, in fact, to be a teenage girl herself who was reaching off the page to make you feel less alone. I don’t know many women who did not read and relate to Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Blume has gone on ... Read More...
Americanah
Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love when they are teenagers in Lagos, Nigeria. As the time comes for college and moving on they know that they have no wish to stay in Nigeria. Ifemelu gets into a school in the United States and Obinze goes to London. While this may sound straightforward it is anything but in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, Americanah. Instead, Ifemelu and ... Read More...
The Water Knife
Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They’d had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming. It can be dicey to open a review with a strong declarative sentence but I’m taking a chance with The Water Knife and stating that I have never read a ... Read More...
The Book of Aron
Set in a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland The Book of Aron is, like any Holocaust novel, difficult reading. But what makes it so, is not graphic depictions of violence against Jews it is the interminable grind of life lived in circumstances that have nowhere to go but down. At first, it is simply that the community is being segregated as a health precaution against typhus. ... Read More...
It’s Not You, It’s Me: Mini-Reviews
This month's It's Not You, It's Me is especially true because I am not really liking, much loving, anything I've read. In fact I DNFed (did not finish) 3 books in a row, which is a first for me. There are any number of bloggers who have blamed this syndrome on the novel A Little Life, which I did read and which is an incredible piece of writing that still haunts me, but I’m not ... Read More...
Hausfrau
Anna is an American, married, mother of three who lives in a suburb of Zurich with her Swiss husband. Despite her efforts she cannot acclimate to Switzerland and exists in a state of low-level depression that expresses itself through having multiple affairs. She is the wife in Jill Anderson Essbaum’s Hausfrau, a new novel that is evoking a plethora of vigorous response, largely ... Read More...
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