Parveen is like most young women her age—graduating college, but not sure what she wants to do with her degree in medical anthropology. Until she reads a memoir, written by a man who goes to Afghanistan and after a traumatic incident that left a woman dead from giving birth, founds and funds a women’s health center in a small isolated village. Parveen is Afghan-American and ... Read More...
Mothers’ Week: The Island of Sea Women
This coming Sunday is Mother’s Day so this week my reviews are focused on three books with very different perspectives on motherhood. Each offered something important in its own way and reminded me how, like so much of what women do, it is impossible to fit the role of mother into one finite slot. Off the coast of Korea’s mainland is an island called Jeju. There was ... Read More...
Dark Fiction: Waiting for Eden
Much of Elliot Ackerman’s Waiting for Eden takes place in a hospital room. A room where Eden Malcolm has been in a coma for three years. He was a young man so full of life that He treated the whole world, too, like it was a series of cliffs that existed for no other reason than for him to jump off. But now his body below his torso is gone, lost to an IED in Iraq, ... Read More...
What I’m Reading This Week (10/19/18)
This is a very interesting reading week for me. For the first time in several months I don’t have any upcoming releases I plan on reading. I’ve finished with October and there is nothing in November until the middle of the month. All of which means I’m left to my own devices—which could be a good thing or a not-so good thing, depending on how I choose. Do I go with ... Read More...
The Silence of the Girls
Whether you read The Iliad in the original Greek, in an academic translation, or watched Brad Pitt and Eric Bana glisten as they warred on a sandy beach what everyone knows of the Trojan War is the men. And why not? It’s a story of men told by men. Author Pat Barker is having none of that. Instead, she’s looks at the war that lasted nine years and was set off by one man’s pride ... Read More...
The Map of Salt and Stars
Making maps is the fulcrum for Jennifer Joukhadar’s debut novel, The Map of Salt and Stars. Rawiya and Nour are young women who tell their stories side by side even though they are separated by almost a thousand years. Rawiya is a sixteen-year-old in ancient Ceuta who longs to see the world beyond her village so she leaves home in the guise of a young man and becomes an ... Read More...
