Okay, first of all, Rachel, the main character, is in her thirties. She’d a woman. She’s a WOMAN on the train. Second of all, uhm, sure, fine, I guess. The girl on the train is an easy read. Not much happens on the pages, the story is pretty straightforward even as Rachel blacks out and forgets large parts of it. But blackouts do not equal nuance. It’s impossible to miss anything. Everything that is lost in black outs or changes in point of view, are […]
We Were Alright
I picked this up solely because I adored the title. The cover seemed calm and mysterious as it stood there on the library shelf. I wasn’t in the market for new books to read, but I thought “eh why not?” Unfortunately I never came to love we were liars. It was a pleasant enough read, short and light. I, however, was expecting a beautiful slow read about families and secrets and the special bonds formed when people grow up together. It wasn’t. Instead it was […]
The Fishermen: a faint nipple on the debut book horizon
I had the immense pleasure of watching the author speak. Obiama is an incredibly charming, humble and wellspoken man and it is with great regret that his debut novel is nothing more that mediocre. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The novel is warm and full of faults and tiny promises. But it is also a novel in dire need of editing. Too many strands of plot got in the way of the story, overly flourish prose stilted the pace, and somehow still made […]
A plotty book.
“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm” In order to read this book you probably shouldn’t know anything about it. I’d heard it was about a black woman time traveling back to the antebellum south and I thought it was about the coolest concept ever. Time travel, check. Moral dilemmas, check. An exploration of the consequences of time travel for non-white, non-male people? Super check! And the opening line was just simple, intriguing. I was dying to know more. So […]