Well, WHAT a dear darling book this was. The Intimacy Experiment is the second Rosie Danan book I’ve read, and it is far more the book of my heart than the first one (for reasons I’ll get into ). Both books feature protagonists who are sex workers, which kind of rules? Apart from Aya de Leon’s romantic suspense series, of which I have read the first two, and A Gentleman Undone by Cecilia Grant, I don’t know that I’ve ever read a romance novel with a sex worker protagonist. So yay for that! Naomi Grant has built her life around…
Leave a CommentTag: religion
Kevin Roose, son of liberal Quakers, decided to leave Brown University and spend a semester at Jerry Falwell’s “Bible Boot Camp”, Liberty University. There he attended classes on biblical history and evangelism, participated in a mission trip to Daytona Beach during spring break, and joined a support group for chronic masturbators. When he announced his intention to spend a semester at Liberty, his family and friends expected him to find a group of intolerant arch-conservatives marching in lockstep, but the reality (of course) was far more complicated. I could not put this book down. I must read thousands of books…
43 CommentsI recently read Mark Regnerus’s Forbidden Fruit, and found it unsatisfyingly lacking in good stories; I have had the opposite problem with Donna Freitas‘s Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses. Like Regnerus, Freitas is interested in exploring the intersection of religion/spirituality and sex in America’s youth, though she focuses on college students where Regnerus’s book was more interested in teenagers. She conducted interviews with students at different types of universities – Catholic ones, evangelical ones, regular public ones – about their spiritual and sexual lives and those of their community. Many good…
4 CommentsCecilia Galante is a lovely name. The Patron Saint of Butterflies is quite good too. It’s all about two girls in a religious commune, Honey and Agnes. As children they were the best ever of friends, always racing and playing and having a jolly time together, but now that they are a bit older, Honey has begun to rebel against their religious leader, while Agnes is getting ever more scrupulous about her religious observances. When Agnes’s grandmother comes to visit and discovers that the commune people (communists?) are being abused by their religious leader, she becomes determined to take Honey,…
6 CommentsThis review brought to you by: Indie Sister, the same girl responsible for my reading Neil Gaiman. I am always wary of Indie Sister’s book suggestions. Sometimes she says to read things like Coin-Locker Babies, which gave me terrible underwater nightmares, and which I have really tried hard to forget completely; and sometimes she says to read Neil Gaiman and gives me a massive huge new source of happiness. I checked out A Canticle for Leibowitz a month ago, and I only finished it last night. I kept putting it off. I’m not the hugest fan of science fiction that…
8 CommentsYeah, pretty much, Jodi Picoult. Her books tend to be largely the same. Keeping Faith has all the elements – moral quandaries, relationship troubles, fierce mothers, legal battles, and handsome men hopelessly in love with the protagonist. I read it because I was at my parents’ house and I didn’t have my books with me, and I needed something to read for a while. And then of course I got interested and took it home to finish it. As I say, it was much like all of Jodi Picoult’s other books. Always entertaining but not generally worth rereading.
5 Comments