A Love for Leah by Amy Lillard

December 16, 2018 by Christina

Fiction – print. Zebra, 2018. 352 pgs. Library copy. Having returned to her hometown in Mississippi, Leah Gingerich has started a secondhand store in the community and agreed to raise her twin sister’s teenage son while Hannah works towards joining the Amish church. What Leah won’t do, though, is consider becoming Amish again. She and Hannah left nearly twenty years ago, and Leah has found her religious community among the more liberal Mennonite church. When Jamie Stoltzfus moves to the […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Amish, Fiction, North America, United States • Tags: Amy Lillard

Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena

December 13, 2018 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Translated from the Latvian by Margita Gailitis. Peirene Press, 2018. Originally published 2015. 196 pgs. Purchased. In Ikstena’s novella, the title refers to the emotional and physically nurturing (not) offered by the oppressive, political regime of the Soviet Union in present-day Latvia. A nameless mother and her nameless daughter serve as the narrators and central focus of the novella with Ikstena following them from 1969 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In Latvian […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Europe, Fiction, Latvian, Peirene Press, Translated • Tags: Nora Ikstena

In the Woods by Tana French

December 11, 2018 by Christina

Fiction – audiobook. Read by Steven Crossley. Penguin Audio, 2007. 20 hours, 24 minutes. Purchased. In 1984, twelve-year-old Adam Ryan is found clutching a tree in the woods of Knocknaree, a suburb of Dublin. This discovery would be unremarkable if Adam and his two friends hadn’t been missing for days and if one of Adam’s shoe wasn’t filled with blood. Adam is unable to remember how he ended up in the woods, and his two friends – a girl named […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Audiobook, Crime, Europe, Fiction, Ireland • Tags: Steven Crossley, Tana French

The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer

December 2, 2018 by Christina

Fiction – print. Riverhead Books, 2018. 454 pgs. Library Copy. College freshman Greer Kadestsky is set adrift. Disappointed with where she has ended up for college, Greer struggles to connect with her classmates and plans to structure her life around visits to her high school boyfriend, Cory, at Princeton. As time passes (but the pain of losing out on Yale fails to fade), Greer is dragged to parties and lectures by her dorm-mate, Zee. At a party, Greer has an […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Book Club, Chunkster, Feminism, Fiction, New England, New York, North America, United States • Tags: Meg Wolitzer

The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi

November 29, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Tor Books, 2017. 333 pgs. Library copy. In the generations since humans left Earth and settled across the galaxy, an empire known as the Interdependency has formed. Headed by the Emporx, the galaxy is economically ruled by a series of Houses — or families — who control certain segments of inter-galactic trade and rely heavily upon the Flow to move their goods. Except the Flow, an anomaly that allows for travel between planets in a matter of […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Book Club, Fiction, Science Fiction, Space • Tags: John Scalzi

Voyager by Diana Gabaldon

November 11, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Davina Porter. Recorded Books, 2007. Originally published 1993. 43 hours, 46 minutes. Purchased. The third installment in Gabaldon’s Outlander series picks up with the aftermath of the events of Culloden, where Jamie planned to stand in battle with the Mackenzie and Fraser lcans, and Claire stepping back through the stones to her life in post-World War II. In the twenty years since that moment, Claire has reunited with her first husband, Frank Randall, and traveled to […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Audiobook, Caribbean, Chunkster, Europe, Fantasy, Fiction, United Kingdom • Tags: Davina Porter, Diana Gabaldon

Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal

October 21, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — Kindle edition. Translated from the Catalan by Laura McGloughlin and Paul Mitchell. Peirene Press, 2011. Originally published 1985. 128 pgs. Library copy. In the nineteenth century, thirteen-year-old Concepció — known as Conxa to her family — is sent to live with her childless aunt and uncle among the foothills of the Catalan Pyrenees because her parents have too many children to feed. And Conxa’s position as the youngest girl makes her all the more of a burden to her […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Catalan, Europe, Fiction, Peirene Press, Translated • Tags: Maria Barbal

The Waste Land and Other Writings by T.S. Eliot

October 18, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Borders Classics, 2007. Originally published 1922. 151 pgs. Purchased. This collection of poems and essays includes a selection of Eliot’s poems written between 1917 and 1920, critical essays on poetry and the nature of criticism itself from 1917 to 1923, and “The Waste Land”, which was published in 1922 and is largely considered Eliot’s masterpiece. Poetry is not a particular love of mine; I often find myself caught up in cleverness of the rhyme rather than the […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Classics, Classics Club, Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry • Tags: T.S. Eliot

Frozen Assets by Quentin Bates

October 14, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — Kindle edition. Soho Crime, 2011. Originally published 2010. 288 pgs. Library copy. Prior to the 2008 global financial crisis that bankrupted Iceland’s major banks, a blogger named Skandalblogger was insisting there was something between a minister in the government, his wife’s public relations firm, and plans to build a new power plant near Hvalvík, Iceland. When the head police officer of Hvalvík, a woman named Gunnhildur, is called to the harbor because of recently discovered body, few believe it […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Europe, Fiction, Iceland • Tags: Quentin Bates

The Mothers by Britt Bennett

October 11, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Riverhead Books, 2016. 288 pgs. Gift from a friend. Grief-stricken over the sudden death of her mother, seventeen-year-old Nadia Turner starts acting out in the ways “The Mothers”, the older women of her church, disapprove of. One of those ways is her sexual relationship with the preacher’s son, Luke, who is older than her and still mourning the end of his football career. Luke wants to keep their relationship on the down low; Nadia thinks his request […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Fiction, North America, ReadDiverse, United States • Tags: Brit Bennett

Shatila Stories by Omar Khaled Ahmad, Nibal Alalo, Safa Khaled Algharbawi, Omar Abdellatif Alndaf, Rayan Mohamad Sukkar, Safiya Badran, Fatima Omar Ghazawi, Samih Mahmoud, and Hiba Marei

October 9, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Peirene Press, 2018. Translated from the Arabic by Nashwa Gowanlock. Purchased. For Shatila Stories, the publisher commissioned nine Palestinian refugees — some born in the camp, some who fled to it from Syria — to tell the story of the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. Their short stories were then interwoven together to create a narrative that follows Adam and his extended. Adam’s older sister finds liberty within the camp; the economic freedom of having her own job […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Arabic, Fiction, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Peirene Press, ReadDiverse, Translated • Tags: Fatima Omar Ghazawi, Hiba Marei, Nibal Alalo, Omar Abdellatif Alndaf, Omar Khaled Ahmad, Rayan Mohamad Sukkar, Safa Khaled Algharbawi, Samih Mahmoud, Sefiya Badran

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

October 7, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Harper, 2009. 508 pgs. Purchased. Young Harrison Shepherd is taken to Mexico by his mother in the late 1920s as she follows her heart — and her goal of marrying a more interesting and wealthier man than Harrison’s American father. There, Harrison falls in love with writing stories and keeping a diary of his experiences of his life in Mexico, of the Depression Era riots in Washington D.C., and of working for exiled Soviet leader Lev Trotsky. […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Chunkster, Fiction, Mexico, North America, United States, Women's Prize • Tags: Barbara Kingsolver