Despite its upbeat sounding title Lucky Boy is a novel saturated in desperation. Desperation for a better life, desperation for a child, for success…for happiness. Solimar is eighteen, lives in a dying town in Mexico and with money her parents procure she leaves with a man who is supposed to get her to California where she will meet up with a cousin who has already ... Read More...
Miss Jane: A Novel
Jane Chisolm is a surprise baby, born to her parents long after her two older brothers have gone off to college and her sister is ten-years-old. But that’s not the only thing about Jane that’s unexpected. Her body didn’t fully develop in the womb and she is born with genital defects that rule out a normal woman’s life in rural Mississippi. It’s 1915, a time when no medical ... Read More...
Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist
Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is one of those novels that runs on pure adrenaline. Author Sunil Yapa drops the reader into the chaos of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle with such force that the fight or flight mechanism kicks in and there is no choice but to keep reading. The stream of consciousness style he employs means full immersion in each of the ... Read More...
Delicious Foods: A Novel
Everybody black knows how to react to a tragedy. Just bring out a wheelbarrow full of the Same Old Anger, dump it all over the Usual Frustration, and water it with Somebody Oughtas…Then quietly set some globs of Genuine Awe in a circle around the mixture, but don’t call too much attention to that. Mention the Holy Spirit whenever possible. If I were handing out book awards, ... Read More...
Cruel Beautiful World
Sometimes a book’s marketing can end up working against it. I found this to be the case with Caroline Leavitt’s Cruel Beautiful World. The synopsis and various blurbs referenced the Manson murders—a real piece of clickbait and yet, aside from being set in the summer of 1969 and the main protagonist’s worry about being left home alone the novel had nothing to do with ... Read More...
The Mothers: A Novel
Upper Room Chapel is a church that is at the center of a Southern California black community in Brit Bennett’s debut novel, The Mothers. In the last year, it is where Nadia Turner’s mother was last seen alive before she killed herself, where her father, Robert goes every day to volunteer his truck in an effort to assuage his grief and where her friend Aubrey appeared, crying ... Read More...
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