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Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan

June 8, 2020

exciting

At 22 Ava decides the best way to have a happy life is to move as far from Dublin as possible. She chooses Hong Kong where she is hired by a private elementary school to teach English grammar. She makes one friend, Julian, who is an investment banker, but what begins as friendship segues into something else. What that is is hard to define in Naoise Dolan’s subtle, but sharp ... Read More...

2 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary life, debut, literary

May Reading Recap

May 29, 2020

May

It’s getting harder and harder to tell the end of any month. Who knows when one has ended and a new one begun, but apparently May is over. The loss of normalcy and routine means that even as restrictions in Michigan ease I feel unsettled going out and saddened by the fact that what was once normal may not be that way for the foreseeable future. This ongoing uncertainty has led ... Read More...

6 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Feature Tagged: historical fiction, literary, memoir, mini-reviews

Rodham: A Novel by Curtis Sittenfeld

May 20, 2020

rodham

Seldom has there been a public figure more scrutinized, disparaged, and talked about than Hillary Rodham Clinton. You might think it’s the price to be paid for entering politics, but the level of personal attacks against her often seem largely based on the fact that she is a she. Add to this her marriage to a man not known for his fidelity and her defeat in the 2016 ... Read More...

8 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, historical fiction, literary, politics, women

Little Family by Ishmael Beah

May 18, 2020

family

In an abandoned field hidden by a maze of thickets, trees, and shrubs is a downed airplane. When it crashed is unknown, but in this unnamed African country it has become home for four young people and one little girl. In Little Family they use stealth, determination, and their wits to survive in a world that either views them with suspicion or has forgotten them entirely. At ... Read More...

6 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary life, cultural, literary

Old Lovegood Girls by Gail Godwin

May 14, 2020

lovegood

No one could be more surprised than me to be back again this week with another slower paced, character driven novel, but here I am. Gail Godwin’s Old Lovegood Girls is the story of Feron and Meredith (who goes by Merry), two young women who meet when they are fortuitously matched as roommates at Lovegood College, an all-girls Southern school. They are an unlikely pair who ... Read More...

2 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: Bloomsbury, book clubs, friendship, historical fiction, literary, women

All Adults Here

May 11, 2020

adults

Astrid Strick is in downtown Clapham where she’s lived for most of her life, when she witnesses a school bus hitting and killing a woman she knows. A tragic death like this could be the focus of most novels, but instead it is the pebble in the pond that creates the widening ripples of life in All Adults Here. We don’t learn much more about Barbara, the dead woman, but she ... Read More...

6 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: family, literary, Riverhead Books

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