Rick Bragg’s memoir, All Over But the Shoutin’, has a lot of potential. He ostensibly claims it is a story about his mother and growing up extremely poor in Northeastern Alabama. Bragg grew up with a single mother and a father who drank a lot, and somehow turned into a reporter for the New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize. Bragg does some things really well with this book. His depiction of his mother is of a wonderful woman who gave up everything to […]
Maybe I am Too Old for Young Adult
Warning: Spoilers Ahoy Ransom Riggs’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is about Jacob, a 16 year‑old‑boy living in Englewood, Florida. Shortly after the story begins, Jacob’s grandfather dies and Jacob believes he has been killed by a rather creepy monster. Jacob eventually travels to an island off the coast of Wales in order to find out more about his grandfather’s history and the mysterious orphanage that he was sent to during WWII. Jacob finds the orphanage, which is stuck in a time loop such […]
Ignore the Haters, This Book Rocks
Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot is set in 1982 and follows three co‑eds as they graduate from Brown and embark on their first year post‑college. Madeleine Hanna is the gal at the center of this love triangle, an English major in love with the great Victorian romance novels, rather than the hip semiotics novels that her peers love. On the other two points are Mitchell Grammaticus, who is into Christian mysticism, and Leonard Bankhead, a manic‑depressive scientist. Eugenides’s writing is beautiful, but not for the […]
Read the first half, put the second half off until you can’t sleep
Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch follows Theo Decker, a 13‑year‑old boy living in New York who survives a terrorist attack at the Met that kills his mother. When Theo awakes from the attack, he provides companionship to a dying man, who gives him cryptic instructions, and, when leaving the scene of the attack, Theo steals the beautiful painting The Goldfinch. The novel follows Theo as he is taken in by a wealthy friend, then sent to the Las Vegas suburbs to live with his good‑for‑nothing father, […]