This one is an interesting look at the relationships of four siblings through the lens of one shared experience in childhood. After hearing that a fortune-teller in the neighborhood can tell you the exact date of your death, Daniel (11) coaxed his siblings Varya (13), Klara (9) and Simon (7) to pay her a visit. Four bored kids looking for something to pass the time in the hot city summer are each given a date that will shape the trajectory of their lives. They began […]
Always Mañana. Tomorrow.
Young Adult fiction has been in heavy rotation in my reading for a good number of years now. Now that my kid is in middle school, I have a lot of really great books to pass on to him, but I have found that the bulk of it (aside from vampirey melodrama which I am sure he will have zero interest in) are dystopian trilogies. He flew through the Westerfeld Leviathan books (if anyone can recommend steampunk books appropriate for a middle schooler, let me […]
A boy and his parrot.
I’m a fan of a Michael Chabon. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” is an amazing book. “Telegraph Avenue” is one of my favorites as well. Those are serious tomes, so I was interested in reading this little book to see how he manages to encapsulate his general style of verbose prose into a novella. In 1944, a retired British detective in his twilight years is raising bees at his small cottage in the English countryside. He becomes involved in the investigation of a […]
Another man’s fate.
The story’s premise sounded promising: a young family from Cameroon try to make a life for themselves in New York City just before the bottom falls out of stock market and on the brink of swearing-in the first African-American President of the United States. Jende works hard at his new job as a chauffeur for a big shot at Lehman Brothers. Neni takes care of their young son, Liomi, while studying around the clock in hopes of getting into pharmacy school. The narrative alternates between the […]