The Leavers is a story of a mother and son torn apart by American immigration officials and oof was this a tough, timely read. Just like … be ready. There are a lot of award stickers on the cover and it deserves every one. I just wish the cover didn’t look so much like the one for The Girls because ugh that book. I’m getting away from myself. The Leavers is about Polly and Deming Guo. They live in the Bronx with Polly’s boyfriend, his sister, and her […]
You’ll want to take notes
This was one of the longest books I have read in a while, and it can be a bit of a slog. The writing twist does help to keep things fresh but overall the book is a beating because it just never ends. 800+ pages on this bad boy and you feel every one of them. Paul Auster uses these way too many pages to tell the story of young Archie Ferguson growing up in the 1960s, and he tells it four different times in […]
The spirits that live inside us
I love me some good magical realism, as nebulous a genre as that is and this definitely falls into the “good” category. Unfortunately not as memorable as I’d like it to be, though I did read this at an interesting time (big family gathering + sad memorial service = not a lot of brain space for books). Freshwater centers on a young Nigerian woman named Ada though in this story, even in her own body, she is not the sole protagonist. Emezi has given voice […]
I want this book to end up like Gatsby
I’m temporarily skipping two reviews I owe y’all because I need this book closed and behind me just as fast as possible. The Golden House may have started a little interesting, teasing the hidden history of a family trying to start fresh, but it started to go downhill fast and then just wallowed at the bottom. It’s another one of those books that doesn’t feel the need to use full quotations or breaks for dialogue and thinks it’s artsy. At one point, a character is trying […]