Note: I received Tell the Wind and Fire from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. Okay, despite having shared that article about how people should stop hating so much on YA love triangles, I am slightly over YA love triangles, not because there aren’t authors who can write them well, but because YA authors who can’t write them well insist on writing them anyway. So to read a book like Tell the Wind and Fire, which is about a girl and two physically identical dudes, and which specifically and deliberately steers away from love triangling, made a refreshing change.…
20 CommentsCategory: 4 Stars
Okay, before I include a picture of the cover of Gabi a Girl in Pieces, I want you to know that I know that this cover is terrible. It’s a terrible cover that will nevertheless make you cry when you encounter the reason for it in the course of the book itself. By contrast, Gabi a Girl in Pieces is so totally non-terrible that you must instantly dash out and read it, particularly if you liked Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging1 but wished that it had more there there. Gabi is a Mexican-American girl in her last year of high…
21 CommentsTwo things to know about Sathnam Sanghera’s Marriage Material: I don’t like comic (by which I mean humorous) (by which I mean that “funny” is a primary selling point in marketing materials) (actually it is sort of hard to describe exactly what I mean so never mind) novels. I’ve been wanting to read this one for years. So the thing is that I don’t care about comic (humorous?) novels or book awards, with a primary exception that I care very much about the Costa Book Awards. This is not, as catty persons have suggested, down to my excessive fondness for…
28 CommentsMy A+ year with African literature continues in José Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion, translated by Daniel Hahn. When I first heard about this book, I believed I squawked at Whiskey Jenny, “Look, ooh, oh, look at this! It’s about an Angolan woman who walls herself up in her house during the Angolan fight for independence! Sounds amazing!” and Whiskey Jenny was like, “….Does it?” I get her point. When you read a lot about nations fighting free of colonialism, there are patterns of violence and oppression that repeat themselves in exhausting, predictable ways. Police oppression, warring ideologies, journalists…
10 CommentsMount Pleasant was translated from French by Amy Baram Reid, but don’t let that put you off. If you are a fan of Salman Rushdie and the way he writes about Indian myth and history, Patrice Nganang’s novel of colonial Cameroon is going to be right up your alley. There are stories that must be told just for the story itself, just for the story. This was one of them. A historian called Bertha comes to Cameroon to speak to a 90-year-old woman, Sara, who was given to the sultan Njoya when she was only a small child, to be…
11 CommentsTry not to collapse from shock, but here is one more person assuring you that Louise Erdrich’s latest book, LaRose, is really quite good. It begins with a tragedy: Landreaux Iron goes hunting a deer and shoots a child instead, the five-year-old son of his best friend Peter Ravich. As the Ravich family begins to crumble, Landreaux and his wife decide to give their own five-year-old boy, LaRose, to the Raviches in restitution. The story unspools from there, telling the story of LaRose’s Ojibwe family and the many LaRoses who have come before him, as well as the stories of…
27 CommentsBefore I get into Bellweather Rhapsody, let’s conduct a quick poll amongst the viewing audience. Hands up everyone here who loves The Westing Game. Okay, yes, that is what I assumed. Well, your luck’s in because Bellweather Rhapsody is pretty much The Westing Game for grown-ups, except instead of a murder, they’re trying to solve a suicide; and instead of a block of rental flats, it’s a hotel people are staying at during a statewide musical convention for musically talented youths; and instead of an inheritance they’re all competing for, it’s the potential for a full and happy life. Twenty…
25 CommentsTIME TRAVELING PIRATES. This book The Girl from Everywhere is all about time traveling pirates. The Girl from Everywhere is about TIME TRAVELING PIRATES. Just so you know. At sixteen, Nix has sailed everywhere from the lands of the Arabian Nights to present-day New York to eighteenth-century Calcutta — if her crew can find a map of a place, she and her father can sail them there. But all her father truly wants is to find a map of Hawaii in the year that Nix was born, so that he can prevent her mother from dying in childbirth. As long…
42 Comments