As in my post for Beirut’s preceding, award-winning companion title, A Game for Swallows, I find I need to start at book's end. "I remember Georges Perec!" the final image announces. Initially seeming to be unrelated to the rest of the book, the unexpected homage to the experimental...
"This is the story of a cruel mother, her daughter, and her blind son." That 'cruel' is fair warning that this is not a happily-ever-after fairy tale. It is, however, "one of the most ancient and commonly told [stories] in Inuit history," filmmaker/creator Alethea Arnaquq-Baril writes in...
What are the chances: I seem to be island-hopping this week ...
The first of a trilogy (#3 debuts next month; I'm arriving on Jar Island a little late), Burn is inarguably shocking, but it definitely sets the stage for more chills to come. Mary, who left Jar Island in 7th grade, is back in 11th completely transformed. Lillia, once...
OH. MY. What a tiny world. Although I don't personally know first-time kiddie book author Anna Kang, I could definitely recite and/or impersonate (badly) parts of her graduate thesis film, not black or white, on command as I've used it some 148 times in classrooms over the...
As a young man, Anders Hill was rather a rebel, abandoning his stifling southern roots, estranging himself from his acerbic father by forsaking Duke University for an exclusive New England college. There he fell in love with his roommate's girlfriend who would become his wife. Becoming a husband, then...
If the cover looks somewhat familiar, that's because Sisters continues Raina Telgemeier’s highly entertaining (for the reader, certainly) coming-of-age escapades she shared in Smile, published four years ago to bestselling success. In Sisters, she's hasn't quite shed her braces, but she's heading to high school come fall. That pivotal summer...
Probably my brain is showing its advancing age, but I can't remember the last time I stayed up half the night to finish a book unless I had an impending deadline (procrastinate? me?!). While I started Sleepwalk-ing in daylight stuck in the ears (debut novelist Mira Jacob...
"Every Wednesday, Little Round and Big Square get together to play their favorite game," the story begins. "As soon as one of them says a word, they transform themselves into it." Since one is Round, the other Square, their shapes are uniquely different as they...
Oh, oh, oh. You know something special is coming when I start with those three simple syllables. Because big words like 'remarkable,' 'marvelous,' 'resonating' just don't carry the same admiring adoration as plain old 'oh, oh, oh.' I'm also hoping that sort of speechless reaction...
London-based Xiaolu Guo’s third novel in English (she published six prior in China) opens with a desperate love letter-in-transit "from a place I cannot tell you about yet…when I am safe I will be able to let you know where I am." Over almost 400...
Oh, oh, oh ...
If you've never read a Julia Glass novel (2002 National Book Award winner that she is, chances are slim, I suppose), just don't until after you've finished this one. If you have, forget you ever did. Only after the final Dark Sacred page (or last track; if you choose to...
