At once troubling and lovely, infuriating and breathtaking, Claire Fuller’s SWIMMING LESSONS is a triumph in literary fiction—and one that demands you have your next read ready if you want any chance to cope.… Read More We’ll Never Know What We’re Leaving Behind: Reading SWIMMING LESSONS by Claire Fuller
Happy Sunday! I’m grateful to announce the re-launch of my Poem of the Day Series, in addition to my new arrivals, Favorite Fiction Friday and Saturday Spotlight. Read on to see how to submit! … Read More There’s a New Series Coming! How Do I Submit?
Here is a link to my review of K. Arsenault Rivera’s THE PHOENIX EMPRESS, available now over at BookPage.… Read More Book Review Up at BookPage!
Hi everyone and Happy Tuesday! And HAPPY FALL! This is my favorite-favorite time of year: the weather is just how I like it, I love all the colors and smells, pumpkins and costumes, creepy things, and the impending doom that is winter and all that I always pile on myself around this time of year.… Read More Hello Fall! Here’s What’s Coming in October.
Readers, let me explain first that I am not one to contest reviews, whether overly positive, unconstructively negative, or anything in-between. But when a review makes a claim that is societally problematic, I have to respond—not to the review as a whole, but to its thematic issues. A week ago, a review appeared for… Read More To the New York Times Book Review, Domestic Violence is Never Funny: A Response Review of Jill Alexander Essbaum’s Hausfrau
I will not lie to you, from one reader to another, this was a difficult book and topic to trudge through. It follows the last few weeks of one couple’s engagement, in which the main character, Tara, discovers her fiancé, Seth, is addicted to pornography and has to decide whether to further pursue the… Read More Commitment & The Portrayal of a Wife: Reading Rebecca St. James & Nancy Rue’s One Last Thing
We all have to grow up someday. And some of us are dealt a better hand than others—some during our childhood, others later in life, and even others not at all. But we find a way to persist, to perceive the world and how to function within its barriers. We learn how to love,… Read More The Two (or More?) Sides of Friendship: Reading Rufi Thorpe’s The Girls from Corona del Mar
Happy New Year, all! I hope you had a wonderful celebration of the upcoming new year and were able to spend some time recounting the good memories of 2014. Along with going to school and becoming a mom, this was definitely a year for reading and reviewing books. I learned a great deal this… Read More Counting Down to the New Year: Five of My Favorite Books of 2014
Even when you read regularly, it takes time to find something truly great; but every once in a while, there will be a book, a poem, a story, that truly turns you on your heel, holds you in place, and keeps you loving, recommending and discussing that piece for months. Though first described to… Read More The Surrealist and Bodily Nature of Grief: Reading Kristin Bair O’Keeffe’s The Art of Floating
After reading Désirée Zamorano’s The Amado Women, many readers have claimed to have found a new story with women who are more properly, culturally portrayed, an interesting story which offers new commentary on the larger themes of love and loss, family and finding strength in numbers and learning from our past. As I begin… Read More A Unique Design of Women and Culture: Reading Desiree Zamorano’s The Amado Women
I. “I have not read this author’s books, and if I have read them I have forgotten what they were about.” These words are reported as having been uttered in our midst not a hundred years ago, publicly, from the seat of justice, by a civic magistrate. The words of our municipal rulers have a… Read More Joseph Conrad’s “Advice on Writing a Novel”
