Okay, I confess the cover put me off from opening the book for months (well, actually, years); I recently compromised by choosing to go aural and was surprisingly delighted to spend almost eight hours with narrators Laural Merlington and Emily Durante (who take turns reading as mother and...
While production doesn't seem to have started just yet, news that Marie Lu's bestselling dystopic trilogy is coming to a theater near you keeps resurfacing since CBS Films bought rights to Legend in 2011. That Lu has a much-hyped new series, The Young Elites, hitting shelves this fall, will surely add pressure to...
The title here is your first warning: Oxford Dictionaries describes 'double bind' as "[a] situation in which a person is confronted with two irreconcilable demands or a choice between two undesirable courses of action." Think on that, then brace yourself as you open the cover...
First, a few details to address before we get to award-winning Lauren Groff's down-the-rabbit-hole, delightfully convoluted debut novel ...
Hauntings, posthumous marriage proposals, addictions, not-quite-human heroes, in-between spirits growing old, burnt offerings that are actually real in another world. Interest piqued? Get ready for this absolutely ingenious debut novel! And (there's more!), as an exponentially satisfying bonus, the crisply-voiced author herself – Yangsze Choo, a fourth-generation Malaysian...
Determined to become a clinical psychologist, young Futaba arrives in an unnamed city to begin college. Before he even gets to his lodgings – arranged through a friend of his father's – he helps a young woman who collapses in a crowded plaza. While he can't deny...
Before discussing content, I must start with a warning about presentation – think of it as a public service announcement: Choose the page, choose the page, choose the page! Although narrator Sumalee Montano (an American actress of Filipina and Thai/Chinese descent with a Harvard degree) lists...
*STARRED REVIEW In her first title since she received a 2010 MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, Yiyun Li again explores the far-reaching repercussions of a single person's death. While her mesmerizing The Vagrants (2009) revolved around the execution of a young political victim, here, three childhood friends take...
That the film version of If I Stay is currently in production is reason enough to read the book before Hollywood leaves its indelible imprint too soon. Trust me: 99.9% of the time, the book is better. The intensity and ferocity that author Gayle Forman offers with...
In just her protagonist's name alone, author Nina Schuyler imbues linguistic magic in her latest novel about language, communication, understanding, and ultimately, the bonds of family. Schuyler's leading lady is Hanne Schubert, a 53-year-old woman who speaks seven languages including Japanese, German, along with her...
Even though the Yoko Ono comment made by an angry daughter about her hapless father's extramaritally knocked-up girlfriend gets apologized for some 40 pages later – "'I called her Yoko Ono that night because she was the one who broke up the Beatles. Not because she's...
In Susan Conley's debut novel defined by deep relationships, the most intriguing alliances get neglected and overlooked for the more commonplace and predictable. Willow – called Willie – moves to Paris to be closer to her peripatetic brother Luke who was most recently in China bringing safe...
Cath and Wren are twins – how they got their name is just too entertainingly clever. They've been each other's best friend their whole lives, sharing the same room which also serves as a near-shrine to Simon Snow (à la Harry Potter, who does get a...
So here's the last of my recent unintentional assemblage of end-of-World-War-II novels that began with Elizabeth Wein’s wrenching Rose Under Fire, and progressed with Chris Bohjalian's desperate Skeletons at the Feast and continued with his latest, the vengeful The Light in the Ruins. Of this week's quartet, Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins (how about that...
On the evening of her 12th birthday, Mira Levenson receives three life-changing (death-defying) gifts: a diary, a charm, and her period. As one-quarter of a school writing class (led by an author named Miss Print!), Mira finds her voice – silently at first through the diary...
Warning: This harrowing memoir is the most difficult book I've read this year. Since I actually started it in 2012 (highly recommended by one of my editors), it's actually the most difficult book I've read over two years (and more). To get to the final...
Here's another tiny-world overlap that convinces me that some higher power is directing my reading choices: first-time author Christa Parravani is married to Gulf War veteran author Anthony Swofford (Jarhead) – 'Tony' in Her – who appeared in the 2008 Oscar-nominated documentary, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, which was directed by...
Eleanor Brown's eponymous "weird sisters" – introduced with a quote from the good Bard's Macbeth: "I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters" – are perhaps the most erudite characters I've encountered in a long time. Trained by a professor father who speaks to them mostly in...
At 24, Susannah Cahalan, life was just about perfect. She was a budding journalist working for the New York Post, she went home to a tiny but cozy Manhattan studio, and she had just started a promising new relationship. And then the madness set in, starting...
First things first: choose the page, not the headset. Carrington MacDuffie's voice is just too old to narrate the inner lives of two teenage sisters – no lilting resonance, no youthful lightness. Might I suggest that the better options for aurally appreciating the extraordinary Francisco X. Stork would be Marcelo...
