Violet and Kate are identical twins but they share an even more unusual connection, both are psychic (or as they prefer to call it “having the senses”). They realize their gift at a young age but when it gets out, becoming taunting and being called witches in school, Kate hides her abilities. Violet revels in them and grows up to use them as a source of income after her ... Read More...
Darker: The Orphan Master’s Son
By its very nature dystopian fiction is dark but Pulitzer Prize winning The Orphan Master’s Son is not technically dystopian. It is set in North Korea, which exists (as we are all too aware recently) and yet the events and lives of the characters are fantastical in their danger, impoverishment, and deprivation. The protagonist is Jun Do, a boy whose mother died when he was ... Read More...
Benediction
Yes. You know how much they think of you. Well, I think a lot of them too. But they never say much, do they? They never say much to me. You don’t let people, Daddy. You never have. You think that’s what it is? Yes, I do. Well. I don’t know about that. I couldn’t say. -Lorraine speaking to her father It is the beginning of summer but the end of Dad Lewis’ life. As per ... Read More...
The Great Work of Your Life
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. The Great Work of Your Life opens with these lines from the Gnostic Gospels of Thomas Author Stephen Cope then skillfully relates “what is within you” to the Hindu concept of dharma. However, as seen by the ... Read More...
In Between Days
He looks out the window to his left and notices a small row of brown stucco houses, all old and somewhat disheveled, and realizes then, with something like panic, with something like fear, that he doesn’t actually know where he is, that he must have made a wrong turn somewhere, that somehow, in this city where he’s grown up, this city where he’s lived all his life, he is ... Read More...
Yes, Chef: A Memoir
The odds that Marcus Samuelsson would survive infancy were slim. That he would not only survive but would go on to become a world famous chef is almost beyond reckoning. And yet, he did. In his memoir Yes, Chef, he writes of his life, not just in the kitchen but from his childhood as the adoptee of a Swedish family to the pinnacle of his career, cooking at the White House for ... Read More...
