I plucked this book off my local library’s New Fiction shelf without knowing a thing about it and was more than pleasantly surprised. Jamey Bradbury sets her story in rural Alaska and creates a compelling but sometimes cryptic narrator in seventeen-year-old Tracy Petrikoff. It’s a story that is both grittily realistic and beautifully supernatural, though I was surprised to notice about halfway through that my library had labelled it as “Horror.” I definitely would not put it in that category. For years, Tracy’s family has […]
The weather outside is frightful…
I don’t live in a place that has much winter anymore, so when I get the hankering for snow and ice, I tend to reach for mysteries that take place in wintery places. Stan Jones writes a series of entertaining mysteries about an Inupiat state trooper in Chukchi. Nathan Active was fostered to a white family as a baby, so he knows little of the culture of the Inupiat – so an engaging fish out of water story. The focus of the mystery is on several […]
“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure.”
Jon Krakauer has a way of covering his subjects where he extends such dignity to the topic and the people involved, that it makes for such compelling, empathetic reading. Like with Into Thin Air, I was a bit young to grasp the gravity of these accounts of people succumbing to the perils of nature. The most that I had heard about either case was noises like “Of course it’s a tragedy, but what do people expect when they are underprepared/he was some kind of idiot […]
Oy Gestalt
Chances are that, if you are reading this or any other website concerned with popular culture, you have little more than a passing familiarity with ultra-orthodox Judaism. Like most fundamentalist sects, they mostly keep to themselves. They rarely make the news except for when their behaviour becomes excessive somehow – excessively strict, like when some Rebbe or other gets into hot water for forbidding women Jewish and non-Jewish alike to walk across a public sidewalk or tries to ban children from attending school because their […]