Maame is an African word for “woman” and the title of Jessica George’s debut novel, but for young Maddie it feels like a yoke on her shoulders. She lives at home as the part-time caretaker for her father. Her mother manages a hostel she inherited in Ghana and only returns to England intermittently. Her older brother James has his own apartment and says he’ll help, but never ... Read More...
The Cloisters: A Novel
The Cloisters by Katy Hays has a catnip premise for readers like me: A studious young woman graduates from college and moves to the big city to get away from her sad, small-town life. In this case the girl is Ann and the city is Manhattan where she’s got a summer internship at The Cloisters, a medieval museum. For Ann what begins as a simple job that will lead to the graduate ... Read More...
NSFW: A Novel
I recently read NSFW a debut from Isabel Kaplan and I’m fairly certain my visceral reaction to the novel is a response becoming more and more common to me and to many of the women I know given recent events in America. Which is to say, I found the novel to be triggering in a way that I would not have felt so strongly in the past. NSFW’s narrator is unnamed—an interesting and ... Read More...
Last Bit of Summer: Mini-Reviews
And by last I really mean LAST. Two more days left in August and then it’s September. But doesn’t everyone count Labor Day weekend as summer? I’m going to, even as ready as I am for this summer to be over. Thankfully, my end-of-August reading has been outstanding. More about that later, but today I’ve got two easy reading selections, both revolving around subjects near and dear ... Read More...
Cover Story: A Novel
It’s a happy Monday—I’ve got an easy 5-star, fun, tear-through novel that I literally started and finished in one day because I couldn’t stop reading. Cover Story, based on the Anna Sorokin scandal, is just that good. In it, a young writer, Lora, finds herself flunking out of NYU just before getting a summer internship at Elle magazine. Once there the entire trajectory of her ... Read More...
Must Love Books
Given how much I love anything having to do with books, today’s review won’t come as much of a surprise: Must Love Books a debut by Shauna Robinson. That title! How could I not read it, especially because it’s about Nora, a young Black woman working in the publishing industry. After five years as an editorial assistant at Parsons Press, a business publisher things are looking ... Read More...
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- Next Page »
