CBR10Bingo: Home Sweet Home Growing up in Nebraska, Willa Cather was required reading. I loved loved loved My Ántonia in junior high, but I soured on her after reading O Pioneers! and hating the bummer of a preachy ending. When I first saw the Home Sweet Home square, I thought I might have to give one of her other books a try until I remembered I have a new favorite Nebraska author, thanks to CBR: Rainbow Rowell! Eleanor & Park went right to my wishlist […]
Good ole Nebraska U
This book took me completely by surprise. I mean, of course I knew I’d like it, since Rainbow Rowell is a favorite around these parts, but I had no idea it would hit so close to home. I added Fangirl to my wishlist along with a whole mess of other books at the beginning of my push to even out the male-female author ratio in my library. I knew the basic premise of the book but nothing about the author besides her gender, so when […]
An absolutely perfect little book.
I’ve made no secret of my dismissal of the romance genre. It’s not that I don’t enjoy romance, or am indifferent to love, it’s that I’ve found the heaving bosoms and overflowing adoration to be blindly fantastical and willfully dismissive of actual romance. I’ve generally avoided the genre because I’ve never thought of it as even adequately representing real world love. I know that bodice rippers aren’t all the genre has to offer, but I have never encounter romance that spoke to me. Until Rainbow […]
A Real Love Story (in all its 80’s glory)
This YA novel has been on my to-read list for a while and I loved it just as much as I thought I would. Rainbow Rowell’s novel, set in the 80’s, tells the unlikely love story of Eleanor and Park, two high school students who don’t quite fit in their Nebraska high school but for very different reasons. Park is the only Asian in his school—the son of a white father and a Korean mom, and has dealt with being “different” all his life. Though […]