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 […]
Pobody’s nerfect?
CBR10Bingo: Cannonballer Says I’ve tried to branch out more into other genres and new authors with my reading this year, and some of the bigger gaps in my library include YA and lesbian lit. Just my luck, then, that MrsLangdonAlger posted a review for not one but two YA coming out novels with female protagonists: Ask the Passengers by A.S. King and It’s Not Like It’s a Secret by Misa Sugiura. I’ve had an eye out for both books for a few months now, finally […]
This book wasn’t written for me, and I feel fine
Roger Ebert used to talk about how important emotional response was to him as a critic, often more important than the technical and artistic merits. Even the most technically and artistically exquisite film could be a hollow and unsatisfying experience if he didn’t connect emotionally, and the opposite could also be true: sometimes, without any other explanation, a seeming piece of trash could be surprisingly fun simply because it connected to something ineffable inside him. So when the whole “Brie Larson commits white genocide against […]
Lies, love, and facing reality
It’s Juneteenth, which makes an incredibly appropriate day to review Lies We Tell Ourselves by Robin Talley. This book was on my radar since it first came out in 2014, but it took a wee bit of time to actually find time to read it. (Seriously, on this site, I know I’m not the only one who’s reading list is longer than the time I’ll ever possibly have to read over the course of my entire life…) What first drew me in was that the […]