It’s so hard to review books that are just okay. I didn’t hate The Turner House, and I didn’t love it. It left very little impression on me at all. I feel like maybe I was missing something, because it’s certainly won a lot of awards. I just didn’t feel much connection to the plot or the characters. I had to force myself to finish it, because I knew if I didn’t there was no way I could squeeze out a review. The Turner House […]
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
Without You, There is No Us ranks right up there with the scariest books I’ve ever read. Suki Kim, a South Korean-American journalist, takes a job at a university in North Korea. The school is run by Christian missionaries hoping to crack into the “evangelical Christian Holy Grail. . .converting [North Korean] people would guarantee the missionaries a spot in heaven.” Suki’s not actually a missionary–she’s there to write an expose on North Korean culture. The result is Without You, There is No Us, a […]
Not Just History
I was raised in an interfaith household, and I read a lot of books about young Jewish girls when I was growing up. There was Judy Blume’s Sally and Margaret, Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, and the All-of-a-Kind Family, of course, but there was also the lesser-known Rachel Bloom and Sashie from The Night Journey. The Night Journey is a simple story–Rachel is 13 years old, growing up in Minnesota with her parents and her great-grandmother, Nana Sashie, who lives with them. Sashie tells the story […]
Manic Pixie Dream World
I knew nothing about Ready Player One when I picked it up. Somewhere along the way I had gotten the impression that it was in the Hunger Games/Running Man kinda book–this was way off. Ready Player One is the story of a dystopian future USA, dominated by a virtual reality universe called OASIS. James Halliday, the man who created OASIS, before he died, hid a series of clues within it. The person who finds and solves these clues (Easter eggs) will be rewarded with Halliday’s […]