I love Indian writers and fiction so was very excited for Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, but this story of two strangers from India who have been trying to make life in America work went all kinds of wrong for me. Sunny’s and Sonia' families still live in India and are known to each other as neighbors in New Delhi, but the two young people have never met. ... Read More...
Maame by Jessica George
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...
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 5
- Next Page »
