So many “new adult” romances, so little time. I recommend The Ivy Years series by Sarina Bowen and will be looking into her back catalogue. Taking place at a New England college, Harkness, the stories are not light and yet avoid melodrama. These are young people coming into their own and figuring out who they want to be. Each story features at least one character who is an athlete, mostly they are involved in hockey, but there are also soccer and basketball team members, and […]
An Impressionist Painting in the Form of a Novel
She has come to understand the importance of structuring details around a narrative, the expectation of histories having a beginning, a middle, and an end, though she doesn’t really believe this is the way life works: she does not know the way life works. For CBR6 last year, I reviewed Kate Walbert’s 2004 novel Our Kind and among other things I was struck by the stream-of-consciousness narration. It allowed Walbert to move back and forth through time, building a web of interconnectivity between events and […]
I think the book should have been about Ben or Radar instead
Quentin “Q” Jacobsen is a fairly average, if overly anxious teenager. He has lived next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman for most of his life, and been in love with her for as long as he can remember. Margo is one of the most popular girls in school, has a nearly legendary reputation. Of course, she also barely seems to know that Quentin or his friends Ben and Radar exist, but that doesn’t stop Quentin from dreaming of her from afar. So when Margo climbs […]
Growing up (in the north of Sweden) is hard to do
Matti grows up in a tiny town in the remote north of Sweden in the 1960s and 70s. The chapters in this book are more like little short stories about different aspects of his childhood and adolescence, chronicled with humour and the occasional forays into strange, magical realism-inspired fantasy sequences. The inhabitants of his town and the surrounding areas seem to be either deeply puritanically religious or Communists, not caring for the trappings of religion at all. The gruff and peculiar inhabitants are set in […]