book review
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This Is How It Always Is: A Literary Hug
Family and change: two of the world’s most favorite topics.
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Review: American Dirt
Ignore the controversy. Ignore the writer’s background, ignore cancel culture, ignore the finger wagging, ignore the hindrances: Is American Dirt good? To put it simply? No. American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummins, desires to inhabit immigration and the Immigration Experience, but it ends up being more about the journey of parental love in the vein of…
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Sally Rooney’s Second Novel ‘Normal People’ Finds Beauty
Normal People, Sally Rooney’s second novel, doesn’t sound magical or special in summary: Connell is the popular high school boy, Marianne is the odd girl whose family hires Connell’s mother to clean for them. Connell and Marianne proceed to weave in and out of one another’s lives over the course of high school and college…
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The Dreamers: Like Sleep, Rich and Beautiful
How often is it that we hear, even from ourselves, the longing for more rest, more sleep? In my house alone, it’s once a day. In Karen Thompson Walker’s new novel The Dreamers, it is much more about trying to awake. The Dreamers centers on the fictional, small college town of Santa Lora, California where a mysterious…
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Engaging and Concerning – A Review of Education: A Memoir
Two things strike immediate concern with Tara Westover’s highly lauded Educated: A Memoir: author J.D. Vance offers the first blurb on the back cover and the opening line of the book proper is “My strongest memory is not a memory.” Okay. Educated recounts author Tara Westover’s childhood and some of her adult life as she is raised…
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Review: The Electric Woman is a Memoir for the Ages
There’s a moment in Tessa Fontaine’s extraordinary memoir The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts where the owner of a sideshow tells her, now a performer, that they are “always playing. It’s all just playing.” That’s a hard-won lesson. Two-and-a-half years after her mother has a near-fatal stroke, Fontaine sought solace and work and answers in…
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Review: The Cabin at the End of the World is a Excellent Novel for Halloween
The horror genre often works at its best when the characters are not only people that are believable but also fictional beings that cause readers to care, to develop concern about their fates. In Paul Tremblay’s latest offering The Cabin at the End of the World, he manages the best of those developments: he constructs characters…
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Book Review: Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime
Wow, does Ron Stallworth have a story. Lucky for readers, he divulges exactly how it all came to be in Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime. As the first African-American detective in the history of the Colorado Springs Police Department, Stallworth randomly answers a newspaper ad to join the Klu…
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