Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien

September 11, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. W.W. Norton & Company, 2016. 474 pgs. Purchased.  Marie’s father committed suicide in Hong Kong in the days after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre — duel sins referred to only in hushed tones. Ten-year-old Marie is unsure how she is supposed to grieve for the father than abandoned her and her mother back in Vancouver months before the protests were brutally ended. And her distance from mainland China leaves her unsure as to why her father […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Asia, Awards and Prizes, Canada, China, Chunkster, Fiction, Giller Prize, North America, ReadDiverse, Women's Prize • Tags: Madeleine Thien

Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane

September 9, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Scribner, 2019. 390 pgs. Purchased.  Francis Gleeson and Brian Stanhope both work as police officers in the New York City Police Department (NYPD), meeting first as trainees and then working together as partners on their first beat. It is Brian who tips first Francis off to a small, suburban community north of the city, but Francis and his wife, Lena, are the first to move there. After the birth of their second child, the Lena Gleeson is […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Fiction, New York, North America, United States • Tags: Mary Beth Keane

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

September 6, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – audiobook. Read by Grover Gardner. Blackstone Audio, 2011. Originally published 1906. 13 hours, 17 minutes. Purchased. Immigrating from Lithuanian to Chicago, Jergis Rudkus is eager to live out his own American dream with his wife, Ona, and her stepmother and stepsiblings. Jergis takes a job at Brown’s slaughterhouse in Chicago, expecting to make enough to support his wife and their extended family. But the family, including the children, are all sent out to find work as the family […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, AP Literature, Audiobook, Classics, Classics Club, Fiction, Food, North America, United States • Tags: Upton Sinclair

The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

September 4, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Knopf, 2015. 371 pgs. Library copy. Set in the not-too-distant-future, Bacugalupi’s novel finds the southwestern United States desolate and abandoned after a series of Category 6 hurricanes – a new categorization on our 1 to 5 scale – flattens coastal Texas and a massive, continuous drought has stopped the Colorado River from flowing downstream at the rate required by the Colorado River Compact of 1922. The details are sketchy as the story largely takes place in the […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Book Club, Dystopia, Fiction, Mountain West, North America, Science Fiction, United States • Tags: Paolo Bacigalupi

Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

August 30, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Random House, 2016. 401 pgs. Purchased. In the fall of 2007, a Cameroonian man named Jende Jonga is living in New York City and attempting to provide a better life for his wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son. Jende, who has a temporary work visa while his asylum case makes its way through the courts, is thrilled when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Readers, of […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Africa, Fiction, New York, North America, ReadDiverse, United States • Tags: Imbolo Mbue

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

August 23, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – audiobook. Read by Zainab Jah. Books on Tape, 2017. Originally published 2006. 18 hours, 10 minutes. Purchased.  Set in the 1960s, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel focused on the impassioned struggle of the largely Igbo population to establish the independent republic, Biafra, in southeastern Nigeria. In the early 1960s, readers are introduced to fraternal twins, Olanna and Kainene, and the men whom they become irrevocably tied to during the later portion of the 1960s. There is Odenigbo, a black […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Africa, Audiobook, Awards and Prizes, Chunkster, Fiction, Nigeria, ReadDiverse, Women's Prize • Tags: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zainab Jah

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

August 21, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Riverhead Books, 2009. Originally published 1998. 480 pgs. Purchased. In the afterward to my Kindle edition, Waters sums up the plot of her novel in the most perfect way possible: “…oh dear, how lurid it sounded, how improbable, above all how niche — the tale of a Victorian oyster girl [named Nancy] who loses her heart to a male impersonator, becomes her partner in bed and on the music-hall stage, and then, cruelly abandoned, has a […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Chunkster, Europe, Fiction, LGBTQA+, United Kingdom • Tags: Sarah Waters

The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

August 19, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone Books, 2011. Originally published 1924. 288 pgs. Purchased.  Evangeline Knapp threw herself into motherhood, obsessively monitoring the food her three children eat and keeping every spec of dirt out of the family’s home. Her eldest son, Henry, is unable to eat foods cooked by his aunt because they don’t match the delicate balance his mother has made to aid his delicate constitution. Her youngest son, Stephen, screams, hid, and is generally considered an unruly child. When […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Feminism, Fiction, North America, Persephone Books, United States • Tags: Dorothy Canfield Fisher

The Wild Inside by Christine Carbo

August 12, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Atria Books, 2015. 417 pgs. Purchased. In 1987, fourteen-year-old Ted Systead and his father were camping in the backcountry of Glacier National Park when a grizzly bear attacked Ted’s father, dragging him out of the tent and to his death. Ted managed to stay awake all night, starting a fire to keep himself warm and plotting how he would get help. But, in his delirious and anxious state, Ted tripped over a rock, smashing his head […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Animals, Crime, Fiction, Mountain West, North America, United States • Tags: Christine Carbo

The Last Summer by Ricarda Huch

August 7, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch. Peirene Press, 2016. Originally published 1910. 121 pgs. Purchased. Amid the political upheaval of the beginning of the twenty century in Russia, the governor of the state university in St. Petersburg shutters the university’s doors and decamps to his summer residence with his family. There, a letter arrives in the post, promising to kill the governor is he fails to take the “right” side by reopening the university. Concerned for […]

Categories: 20BooksofSummer, Crime, Europe, Fiction, German, Peirene Press, Russia, Translated • Tags: Jamie Bulloch, Ricarda Huch

Circe by Madeline Miller

August 5, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Little, Brown and Company, 2018. 393 pgs. Purchased. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Circe is a witch living on a remote island who changes Odysseus’ men into pigs. In Miller’s retelling, we are introduced to the complicated backstory to this seemingly minor character, the daughter of the sun god Helois who is perceived as a threat to the fragile dominion of Olympus over Titan. Banished to the island by Zeus, Circe must confront the unintended consequences of her […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Europe, Fantasy, Fiction • Tags: Madeline Miller

The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian

August 2, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Vintage, 2013. Originally published 2012. 299 pgs. Purchased. In 1915, Elizabeth Endicott arrives in Aleppo, Syria to help deliver food and medical aid to Armenian refugees. Women and children reach the city center in horrific condition, having been force marched across the desert without adequate food and water. Their husbands, fathers, and adult sons were accused of being traitors to the Ottoman Empire and killed in what would come to be known as the Armenian Genocide. Only […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Fiction, Genocide, Middle East • Tags: Chris Bohjalian