Apparently I have no problem reading books (though I’m slower than I used to be); I just have a problem sitting down to write about them. So, again I’m about to unleash a few CBR updates about my reading from August to now. First, Edward Carey’s Heap House. Heap House was my book club’s selection for August/September, and as it’s been quite some time and I rated it one star on Goodreads, this review will be brief. Heap centers on Clod Iremonger, an ill-treated and […]
Airplane Crashes and Bobby Socks
The queen of YA writing has written another great novel for adults. Judy Blume’s In the Unlikely Event is the story of the town of Elizabeth, NJ, in the early 1950s after a series of successive plane crashes terrorized the suburb of Newark and changed the lives of Blume’s characters forever. Event’s main character is young Miri Ammerman, who lives with her mother, grandmother and uncle in a duplex close to Newark airport’s flight path. She is fifteen and just starting to glimpse adult life […]
Bayou Quirks Do Not a Plot Make
Tom Cooper’s The Marauders was set up to be something I would really enjoy. My library bills it as a Mystery, and its jacket implies that as well, but it’s really not. Marauders is a story about a small town in Louisiana, just after the BP oil spill ravaged the gulf waters and destroyed an entire generation’s livelihood in one explosion. The central character in The Marauders is Gus Lindquist, a one-armed fisherman out of Jeanette, LA, who has spent his life searching for the […]
Yes Please!
Amy Poehler’s Yes Please is just the right mix of professional and personal essays that I think I wanted out of Lena Dunham’s memoir, and with more relateable life experience, since I consider myself more of Amy’s generation than Lena’s. I’m 36 so I’m in between them, but my resistance to new technology and fondness for 90s alternative rock puts me squarely in Generation X, I decided. In Yes Please, Amy writes a series of essays covering her childhood in New England, finding success but […]