Things You Save in a Fire by Katherine Center

October 7, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. St. Martin’s Press, 2019. 320 pgs. Purchased. As a firefighter in Austin, Texas, Cassie Hanwell is accustomed to running into emergencies when others are running away. As one of the few female firefighters, Cassie is accustomed to people questioning her fitness for service during those tense moments. But there are two situations Cassie has always run away from: her estranged mother’s desire to spend time with her after leaving Cassie and her father for another man on […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Feminism, Fiction, New England, North America, United States • Tags: Katherine Center

My Ex-Life by Stephen McCauley

May 17, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Flatiron Books, 2018. 336 pgs. Purchased. Twenty years after their marriage ended, David Hedges and Julie Fiske are living on opposite sides of the United States. Julie is going through her second divorce; her husband, Henry, is demanding Julie come up with the money to buy him out of their rambling Victorian along the coast north of Boston. He is also insisting their daughter, Mandy, come up with plan for college, or he’s going to push […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Fiction, New England, North America, United States • Tags: Stephen McCauley

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 Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

August 23, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Ann Arbor Media Group, 2006. Originally published 1826. 414 pgs. Purchased. Set in 1757 during the French and Indian War (or, Seven Years’ War for non-Americans), the second novel in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales follows two young women named Cora and Alice Munro as they travel through the woods from Fort Edward to join their father at Fort William Henry. The two women are escorted by Major Duncan Heyward of the British Army and a singing teacher named Gamut, and […]

Categories: 101 Great Books, 2018 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Classics, Classics Club, Fiction, Indigenious Peoples, New England, North America, United States • Tags: James Fenimore Cooper

The Sleepwalker by Chris Bohjalian

July 12, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Cady McClain and Grace Experience. Random House Audio, 2017. 9 hours, 38 minutes. Library copy.  When Lianna Ahlberg awakens one morning at her parents’ home in Vermont and realizes her mother, Annalee, is missing, she immediately feels the worst because Annalee is a sleepwalker whose affliction causes her to wander out of the house and into dangerous situations. Once, Annalee sleepwalked right on to the ledge of the bridge over Gale River, requiring Lianna to pull […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Audiobook, Book Club, Crime, Fiction, New England, North America, United States • Tags: Cady McClain, Chris Bohjalian, Grace Experience

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

March 14, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Maggie Gyllenhaal. HarperAudio, 2016. Originally published 1963. 7 hours, 24 minutes. Library copy. Sylvia Plath’s novel opens with her main character, Esther Greenwood, in the midst of spending the summer in New York City. Having won a fashion magazine’s contest, Esther is being mentored by editors and writers on both her chosen field and the state of her complexion — a combination of feminism and femininity — as she and the eleven other winners of the […]

Categories: 101 Great Books, 2018 Reads, Audiobook, Classics, Classics Club, Fiction, New England, New York, North America, United States • Tags: Maggie Gyllenhaal, Sylvia Plath

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

February 19, 2016 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Matilda Novak. HighBridge, 2005. Originally published 1999. 6 hours, 15 minutes. Library copy. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, Lahiri’s collection of nine short stories address the conflict between one’s identity as an Indian and the America in which the individual now lives. This common theme connects all nine of the stories irregardless of the exact identity of the central character (male or female, Indian or Indian-American or white American) or the location (Boston, […]

Categories: 2016 Reads, Asia, Audiobook, Fiction, India, New England, North America, ReadDiverse, Short Stories, United States • Tags: Jhumpa Lahiri, Matilda Novak

Betrayal by The Investigative Staff of The Boston Globe

December 17, 2015 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Little, Brown, 2008. Originally published 2002. 304 pgs. Library copy. As a resident of Boston and someone who briefly worked in journalism, I felt compelled to see “Spotlight”, a feature film that follows the Boston Globe‘s reporting of the Catholic Church child-abuse scandal in 2001-2002. The film certainly makes a compelling case for supporting the local paper and, more specifically, the investigative journalists who take months to develop a story rather than the click-bait headlines that seem to be […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Crime, New England, Nonfiction, North America, Religion, United States • Tags: Ben Bradlee Jr., Kevin Cullen, Matt Carroll, Michael Paulson, Michael Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer, Stephen Kurkjian, The Boston Globe, Thomas Farragher, Walter V. Robinson

Yes Please by Amy Poehler

December 9, 2015 by Christina

Nonfiction — audiobook. Read by Amy Poehler, Carol Burnett, Seth Meyers, Michael Schur, Eileen Poehler, William Poehler, Patrick Stewart, and Kathleen Turner. Harper Audio, 2014. 7 hours, 31 minutes. Library copy. Memoir is likely the wrong word to describe this book. Yes, it provides some details into Poehler’s life — her childhood just north of where I currently live in Burlington, Massachusetts; her time at Improv Olympics in Chicago; her experiences living in a rat-infested, basement in New York City […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Audiobook, New England, New York, Nonfiction, North America, United States • Tags: Amy Poehler, Carol Burnett, Eileen Poehler, Kathleen Turner, Michael Schur, Patrick Stewart, Seth Meyers, William Poehler

Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay

May 22, 2015 by Christina

Fiction — print. Harper Perennial, 2010. 496 pgs. Purchased. Nina Revskaya, an eighty-year-old former acclaimed ballerina from the Bolshoi Ballet in the Soviet Union, has decided to sell her jewelry collection – unique for both its contents and its origins in Soviet Russia – in an auction to benefit the Boston Ballet Foundation. Since her retirement from the Boston Ballet, Nina has largely become a recluse in her Back Bay brownstone interacting with only two chosen friends infrequently and with […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Chunkster, Europe, Fiction, New England, North America, Russia, United States • Tags: Daphne Kalotay

The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant

April 29, 2015 by Christina

Fiction – print. Scribner, 2014. 320 pgs. Library copy. Eighty-five year old Addie Baum recounts her life story to her twenty-two year old granddaughter beginning as a teenager in 1915 and ending with her current affairs in 1985. The American-born daughter of poor, Jewish immigrants living in Boston’s North End, Addie’s desires to become an independent and educated woman are often spurned by her father and mother. The local Sunday club for young ladies offers Addie the opportunity to take […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Fiction, New England, North America, United States • Tags: Anita Diamant

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

March 31, 2015 by Christina

Fiction – audiobook. Read by Ariadne Meyers. Listening Library, 2014. 6 hours, 27 minutes. Library copy. Seventeen-year-old Cadence is a Sinclair. This singular fact is the probably the most important aspect of Cadence’s life as it explains her privileged upbringing on a private island near Martha’s Vineyard, her mother’s constant admonishment for Cadence to “get it together”, and why Cadence, her teenaged cousins, and a family friend named Gat call themselves “the liars”. Now, during “summer seventeen”, Cadence has returned […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Audiobook, Fiction, New England, North America, United States, Young Adult • Tags: Ariadne Meyers, E. Lockhart