A startlingly unique and uncomfortable premise is at the heart of Self-Portrait with Boy: an artist is in the midst of taking a series of self-portraits against a window of her apartment when she hears a commotion and learns that the 9-year-old son of her upstairs neighbors, has fallen to his death from the roof. When she develops her film, she discovers one of the ... Read More...
Hell Hath No Fury: Mini-Reviews
OK, OK, the real quote ends with “like a woman scorned”, but I’m taking creative license and dropping “scorned”. I’ve spent much of the last year in a rage-y haze thanks to 1) a misogynistic Congress determined to take away every right women have and 2) learning that there are a lot of men in power, including the president, who like to use that power to sexually harass, ... Read More...
September Reading Wrap-Up
Goodbye summer! What an odd one it was—mostly chilly, but dry with only three days got that anywhere near hot. The worst of it was in with the fires in the Columbia Gorge when, even though we live up in Seattle, we had ash settling on our deck, trapping the heat and smoke for almost a week of hot, sticky, smelly weather. My reading was odd as well—four DNFs in June and mostly ... Read More...
Sing, Unburied, Sing
JoJo lives in Bois, a small town in rural Mississippi, with his Pop and Mam—his mother’s parents, and his little sister, Kayla. His mother, Leonie, is a sometime visitor, but drugs and other past-times mean she’s not around much. His father, Michael? He’s in Parchman prison. And he’s white, which means JoJo has a whole other family that wants nothing to do with him or ... Read More...
It’s Not You, It’s Me: Mrs. Fletcher
Eve Fletcher is an attractive divorcée in her mid-forties. Her husband left her for a woman he met on Craigslist and her only child, Brendan is heading off to college on the morning. Eve has a good job, but feels like it is all that’s left to her with her husband and her son gone and while she’s ferociously lonely she’s gotten no further in navigating the single world than ... Read More...
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore
I’m a sucker for fiction about books and bookstores so to find a novel about them that is also set in Denver, Colorado (where I lived and still have family living) means I didn’t have any choice but to read Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore. Add in the fact that in the first ten pages, Lydia, a kindhearted bookseller, discovers Joey, one of her favorite misfit ... Read More...
