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...
Goodbye, Vitamin: A Novel
Rachel Khong's debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin begins with a young woman named Ruth making the trip home for the holidays and her mother asking her if she could stay for a while longer because of her father. Because her father, a well-regarded history professor has begun forgetting things, to the point of being asked to take a leave from his job. And it turns out that by ... Read More...
March Reading Recap
I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t tell lion or lamb about March all month. We had warm warms and cold colds. My reading kind of felt the same way. On the one hand I read another 5 star book, but by and large consistency was not the name of the reading game because I stalled out on so many books. I also found myself turning more towards other media to fill my brain ... Read More...
Good Wives: Mini-Reviews
There are Biblical verses, poems, and a plethora of folksy sayings about the value of a good wife or what it takes to be a good wife. There is also no shortage of wives as the mainstay in fiction throughout the ages. I recently read two new novels with wives as the focus: one that looked at the criteria needed to be a good wife in modern day Houstonian society and the other ... Read More...
The Beautiful Bureaucrat
The Beautiful Bureaucrat has been raved about and reviewed by almost every book blogger I know and discussed at The Socratic Salon so I’ll try and keep this brief. No matter what else I think about The Beautiful Bureaucrat, author Helen Phillips has to be commended for writing one of the most immersive novels I’ve ever read. The premise is a bland, grey, dreary world in ... Read More...
The Widow’s Guide to Sex and Dating
While still in her early twenties, Claire Jenks married Charlie Byrne, renowned sexology author and twenty-three years her senior. For ten years she gave up her own writing career to support his fame. One morning as he is walking home from his mistress’s apartment he is killed by a bronze statue that falls from a crane moving it from an apartment. The Widow’s Guide to Sex ... Read More...
