So, we all learned something about the Lewis & Clark expedition in school, right? They were the first official group to travel all the way to the Pacific coast and back, with brave Sacagawea leading the way, papoose strapped to her back. That’s honestly pretty much all I knew. But there’s got to be so […]
I don’t know whether I feel like I just made three new best friends or if I just lost them. This was one of those books where I truly felt like I was part of the characters’ lives, if only for a little while. I didn’t want it to end. Odette, Clarice, and Barbara Jean […]
Okay, this was weird. But it was a weird that I liked. Astronomer Irene Sparks decides to move back to Toledo on the day that she almost simultaneously creates a mini black hole in her lab and learns that her alcoholic mother has died. She’s always wanted to go back home and work for the […]
The Story of Land and Sea opens with young Tabitha contracting yellow fever on her tenth birthday. Her father and grandfather, having already lost her mother in childbirth, are desperate to save her despite the limitations of 18th century medicine. Her father takes to the sea with her in tow, thinking that the sea air […]
I don’t even really know what I read here, but I do know that liked it. Part love story, part coming-of-age novel, part environmental warning, Habibi covers a lot of ground. Dodola and Zam meet as children when they’re up for sale in a slave market in what appears to be the Middle East. Events […]
Fereiba lived a lonely childhood in Afghanistan. Her mother died in childbirth and her stepmother never treated her like a real member of the family. Her stepmother does eventually arrange a marriage for her and it becomes a love match. Three children later, the Taliban are in power, Fereiba has had to give up the […]
Caitrin is on the run from a bad situation at home. With only the clothes on her back, a few coins, and her box of scribing tools, she just wants to get away. Her money runs out late one evening in the middle of nowhere. She finds her way to a village called Whistling Tor. […]
4.5 Stars. Mostly what I took away from this book is humor and grace. Somehow Rick Bragg’s first memoir is the last one I’ve read and I have literally laughed ’til I cried in every one. I’ve read my family members bits here and there and retold stories I remember and made everyone listening to me laugh too. Maybe they’re just […]
Claire Harris is a New York socialite, throwing extravagant parties and softening up her husband’s potential business partners for him. Her past comes back to haunt her one night and she flees to Paris on the eve on the German occupation to find an old lover. Their reunion doesn’t go well and she finds herself […]
Allan Karlsson impulsively leaves his nursing home by way of his bedroom window on the day of his 100th birthday. There was no real decision-making involved; it was just done. So there he is, on the run in his “pee slippers” (so called because 100-year-old men don’t reliably miss their shoes in the bathroom) and […]
Young orphan Jim Burden is sent from Virginia to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. There is a Bohemian family on the train with him. None of them really speak English. They all get off at the same station in Black Hawk. It turns out that the family has just bought the farm next to […]