It’s possible I’m the only one who didn’t know this is the first book of a trilogy. I don’t know if I’ll read the other two. There’s a mysterious place, Area X, where some kind of cataclysmic change happened, and it’s now abandoned and “walled” off, by an invisible barrier. Physically this place is unbelievably lush. VanderMeer somehow made me feel threatened by the growth of things. Psychologically the place has something else going on. A number of expeditions have tried to investigate or map […]
She had me at Dolly Parton.
Dumplin’, whose real name is Willowdean, is a smart, kind, capable, funny, and fat (her term) 16-year-old in small-town Texas. Being sixteen is sucky enough, am I right?!, but the “fat” part causes even more trouble than one would expect for Dumplin’ since her mom is the local pageant queen-turned-pageant director, still living on her own pageant days, staying thin to fit in a 30-year-old dress. She was herself once Miss Teen Blue Bonnet and you better believe that’s a big effin’ deal in Clover […]
thought-provoking, but this one’s not for me
Hello! This one’s hard for me to review, and I haven’t figured out why yet. The short story is this: a woman whose husband was killed by Muslim extremists has a short rendezvous with a married Muslim man she meets under run-of-the-mill circumstances (some kind of trade show, I think?). As I said, that’s the very short story, and if I add too much more I’ll be editorializing rather than summarizing. So: here are a few things I thought while reading it or upon reflection… […]
when perfect isn’t enough
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS Hello! It’s hard for me to write about this one without giving away the whole plot, so I’m going to be oblique. Yejide and Akin are a young, happily married, childless couple, and their childlessness leads them both to some questionable and desperate decisions. Yejide’s life seems damned near impossible, while somehow simultaneously completely normal. Or maybe “normal,” but either way it seems impossible, but there she is, making it happen, in the way that so many women do. What she doesn’t […]