Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, is difficult to digest. She’s the youngest of seven children in a fundamentalist Mormon family in rural Idaho. Her father rules with the proverbial iron fist. He’s a survivalist, a millennialist, a conspiracy-theorist. He keeps his children out of school, refuses them medical care, continually places them in physical danger. Her mother resists in small ways but ultimately caves whenever the father demands her submission. One of her brothers educates himself well enough to get into BYU and encourages Tara to […]
Nothing more than a conjuror of cheap tricks
How would you live your life if you knew when you were going to die? That’s the high-concept idea behind Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists, which opens in 1969 Brooklyn with the four Gold children, aged 7 to 13, visiting a fortune teller who gives each the exact date of his or her death. Three of the four are upset by their predictions, and each reacts differently in the following years. Simon leaves home at 16 and follows his sister to San Francisco where he can […]
More secrets from the Creekwood gang
I’m still three reviews behind, so I’ll get right to it with this one. Having read and loved Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda earlier this year, I figured I may as well read the follow-up, Leah on the Offbeat, especially since it was one of the few finalists for the 2018 Goodreads Awards that I already owned. The whole gang from Simon is back for senior year, and Simon’s long-time best friend Leah gets to tell her own story. The title is […]
I am now a Tade Thompson fanboy
The Kinokuniya bookstore above Shinjuku Station in Tokyo has become one of my favorite stores for its excellent selection of English-language books. They have a really good sci-fi/fantasy section, and on a recent visit, they had a whole rack dedicated to recent award winners where I noticed the winner of a new award for African speculative fiction — the Nommo Award — and was intrigued enough to buy a copy. And let me just say that if there’s a better science fiction book this year […]





