I loved this book so much! In many ways, it was a straightforward tale, with many elements familiar with traditional fairy tales but Arden created such sympathetic character and played with history and religion so well to create something that went deeper while feeling completely true to folk tales and fairy tales. Arden does not waste time in foreshadowing the themes that will drive the story. The novel begins on a cold, hard winter night with four children gathered around the fire to listen to […]
This book is a delight.
I picked this up because it was on everyone’s to-read lists. I thought it was probably about Cold War spies, maybe something along the lines of John le Carré. This is not a book about Cold War spies. This is the story of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who has been sentenced to house arrest in the Hotel Metropole, where he is in fact already a resident, for writing a poem. (It could have been worse–it could have been a bullet to the head.) Rostov is […]
Maybe you’re trying to distract yourself.
You know when you have a long stretch of five star reviews and you start to wonder, are my standards super low? Does everything delight me? Am I some kind of a hack reader that just loves everything that passes in front of my eyes? Well, if you have these concerns, may I highly recommend The Marvelous Misadventures of Ingrid Winter to you. It will alleviate all of those suspicions, because it’s seriously the worst, and no one could possibly like it. How on earth […]
Not Just History
I was raised in an interfaith household, and I read a lot of books about young Jewish girls when I was growing up. There was Judy Blume’s Sally and Margaret, Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, and the All-of-a-Kind Family, of course, but there was also the lesser-known Rachel Bloom and Sashie from The Night Journey. The Night Journey is a simple story–Rachel is 13 years old, growing up in Minnesota with her parents and her great-grandmother, Nana Sashie, who lives with them. Sashie tells the story […]