The theme of Deep in the Sahara is simple: An Arab girl of the Sahara who wants to wear a malafa, the veil/dress worn by the women of her faith. She wants to wear the malafa to be like the women of the village, but it is not until she learns what it really means that her mother allows her to wear it. Kelly Cunnane tells you that the malafa represents all the things the girl thinks it is: beauty, mystery, tradition and belonging. But it also means […]
You can’t go home again
I still remember watching E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in the theater as a kid. The nearest movie theater was an hour’s drive from our little town in the Deep Midwest, so we didn’t get to go more than a few times a year. I’d been begging my parents to take us to see E.T. for weeks when they finally surprised me for my 8th birthday. I was enchanted from the start, so wrapped up in the story by the time Eliot said goodbye to E.T. that […]
I enjoyed it but have a hard time not complaining about problems
The epistemological vagueries of this novel was what annoyed me the most, followed closely by the lack of information concerning the relationships and actual descriptions of/between the three species participating in this narrative. Or in plainer English, there’s a few troublesome holes in the world-building that seem pretty important to the story. This is mostly a novel about characters and action; I appreciate this. However, when much of said action is directly related to the systems of faith, values, knowledge, and inter-species relationships in the […]
So much talk of faeries, and none of it good
I love physical books. Aside from not being able to read e-books for any sustained period of time, I love the look and feel of physical books and wish every room in my home were lined with shelves that I could fill with a never-ending stream of new books. Hannah Kent’s The Good People is one of the most gorgeous physical books I’ve ever seen, with the murky underwater blues and teals overlaid with a metallic copper leaf that partially obscures the title and amplifies […]