How do you review a book when you’re not quite certain that you should or even that you should have been allowed to read it? This was the question in my mind after finishing Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. The novel is set in a ghetto outside Los Angeles called Dickens and is about a young black man whose childhood is spent being homeschooled and basically tortured by his father, a ... Read More...
The Stager by Susan Coll
Given that we're still in the midst of our home remodel I thought it appropriate to re-publish this review The Stager, a book I loved from 2014. It's just been released in paperback and is a hilarious satire about the world of home staging and so much more. This time last year we were still looking for a house in Seattle so this novel gave me much needed laughs. Now that we're ... Read More...
China Rich Girlfriend
As summer appears in all its sweltering glory China Rich Girlfriend is the sumptuous equivalent of a decadent ice cream in book format. The novel is Kevin Kwan’s follow-up to his biting and over-the-top debut Crazy Rich Asians about people with more money than brains and taste. In China Rich Girlfriend, much of the original cast is back, along with some new stereotypes ... Read More...
The Diamond Lane
Life here was weighted with the vague feeling that if anything was happening, it was happening wherever one wasn’t. Maybe that accounted for all the driving…Eleven million people scurrying around, trying to find the exclusive exciting event that would make them feel at the center of something big. Mimi Fitzhenry is the type of living-in-Hollywood character who chooses to ... Read More...
The Stager: A Novel
As the real estate market appears to be rebounding it has given birth to an entire new industry—staging. And you know an industry has arrived when it makes its debut into fiction. Susan Coll’s new novel The Stager is about a quirky stager, who remains nameless for much of the novel (which is not surprising as these people slip into your home, remove everything that is yours and ... Read More...
Crazy Rich Asians
“I don’t think she cares how fat her ankles get. Do you know how much she inherited when her father died? I heard she and her five brothers got seven hundred million each." When a novel begins with a woman and her children being turned away from a fancy hotel and she’s so upset her husband buys the hotel that same night, you can count me in. Kevin Kwan doesn’t miss ... Read More...
