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A Prayer for Travelers

July 15, 2019

prayer

Cale doesn’t have a lot of people in her life. In fact, there’s only one since her mother left her in a hospital room when she was an infant. Her grandfather, a quiet old man who has no experience with children, who takes her to casinos while he gambles, but whose face, voice, and familiar smells are all she knows of love. It’s a small life in nowheresville Nevada until she ... Read More...

4 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: coming-of-age, debut, literary, Riverhead Books

How to Be Famous by Caitlin Moran

July 10, 2019

famous

Sometimes, when I enjoyed a book I like to give it a bit of renewed love when it comes out in paperback. This week it's How to Be Famous—a feisty hot pepper of a novel from Caitlin Moran. Ready to be re-invigorated about being female?! This is your reading… When we left Johanna Morrigan (aka Dolly Wilde) at the end of How to Build a Girl (which I loved) she had come into ... Read More...

2 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: coming-of-age, Harper, new adult, social issues

Cygnet by Season Butler

June 24, 2019

cygnet

The narrator of Season Butler’s debut novel, Cygnet, is known as the Kid. She’s 17 and her parents have dropped her off at her grandmother’s house on an island off the coast of New Hampshire to live while they try and get their lives together. It’s supposed to be for a few weeks, a month at most, but three months later, the Kid’s grandmother has died and she’s never heard from ... Read More...

2 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, coming-of-age, debut, Harper, literary, New England

Normal People by Sally Rooney

April 15, 2019

ten

Marianne and Connell live very different lives in the same small Irish town. She has a wealthy family and a big house, but is an outcast at their school, while he is everyone’s best friend, a natural athlete, a good student. His mother cleans her family’s mansion, so he comes over every afternoon to pick her up. On one of these afternoons they talk. This innocuous circumstance ... Read More...

7 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, coming-of-age, Hogarth, Ireland, literary, relationships

Trust Exercise

April 12, 2019

trust exercise

Susan Choi’s new novel, Trust Exercise is a polarizing book, with Goodreads reviews divided between 1 star and 5. That can be a good thing or a bad thing. I decided to hope for good, because the story is about teens attending a dramatic arts school, which sounds like The Ensemble, a novel I loved. Did my hopes pan out? Or did I wish I could have back the hours I spent reading ... Read More...

10 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: coming-of-age, Henry Holt and Company, literary

A People’s History of Heaven

March 18, 2019

history

It’s funny, being a girl. That thing that’s supposed to push you down, defeat you, shove you back, back, and further back still? Turn it the right way, and it’ll push you forward instead. A People’s History of Heaven was one of my winter picks. It’s set in a 30-year-old slum called Heaven in Bangalore, India and centers around the lives of five young girls: Banu, Padma, Joy, ... Read More...

5 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: Algonquin Books, book clubs, coming-of-age, contemporary life, cultural, friendship, India

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