My first Chabon! OOOOOOF. WOW. Holy crap, you guys, did you know that his prose is exceptional and that there’s no exposition, and that he creates an utterly believable alternate timeline and a narrative that ramps up until you’re flying down the other side of the rollercoaster with no brakes? Are they all like this? Is my brain going to melt? How have I missed out this my entire adult life? Full disclosure: it took me a really long time to gather momentum with “The […]
The Great Alaskan Memoir
Leigh Newman is hysterical, and also heartbreaking, and also insightful, and also unexpected, and so very, very human. I devoured this memoir in two days because I just kept needing to know what happened to her. “Still Points North” chronicles Newman’s life growing up between the Alaskan wilderness with her dad, and the wealthy suburbs of Maryland with her mom. Her prose is at once funny to the point of hilarity and heart wrenching as you watch her middle school self struggle with her parents’ […]
I’m the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you will ever meet.
The title is a quote from Ted Bundy, but it could apply to Joshua Wade. Ice and Bone is a report of the murders of Della Brown and Mindy Schloss, committed by Joshua Wade in Anchorage Alaska between 2000 and 2007. I’m not the most objective person to review this book because I knew Della Brown and Joshua Wade. Not well, but in passing and had met them several years apart. I met Della working for a victim’s advocacy group shortly before she was murdered. […]
A Fairy Tale in the Alaska Wilderness
The Snow Child (2012) by Eowyn Ivey is a book I had never heard of and wouldn’t have chosen to read if it weren’t for my book club. In fact, after reading the description, I was dreading it: “Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart–he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season’s first snowfall, they […]