Revisiting a classic

I believe that I have only read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn once, somewhere around 6th grade, but I might have read it in high school as well. Certainly, though, it was all before I was 20 years… Read More

Quiet transformation

Still Life with Bread Crumbs, by Anna Quindlen, is a book that doesn’t have an initially heavy impact, but it sticks with you. It’s about a woman in a situation to which many of us in our 60s… Read More

Scalzi saves the day

So…I have a couple of rules that I rarely break here. One is that I don’t utterly pan a book, but rather try to say something nice even if it wasn’t a book I enjoyed, and if I… Read More

A deep dive into fantasy

While I was a teen librarian I had the pleasure of discovering the book Graceling, by Kristin Cashore. It’s one of those fantasy books that was (perhaps) written with teens in mind but which appeals more widely to… Read More

Fictional Food

I guess that should really be “food in fiction,” because there’s nothing fictional about the food except that it appears in a novel. Are you one of those readers who has to ration your supply of cozy mysteries… Read More

Intricate plotting

My next book came recommended from the Facebook readers’ group (What Should I Read Next?), but I was careful not to find out too much about it before I read it. As it turns out, it wouldn’t have… Read More

The Horse Dancer

I decided on a re-read this week, and picked one of JoJo Moyes’s lesser known books, The Horse Dancer. I enjoyed it enough the second time around to want to revisit (for my newer readers) the review I… Read More

A boy and his dog

I seem to be gravitating lately towards coming-of-age stories about boys and their dogs (see The Story of Edgar Sawtelle), but although it is, in fact, a coming-of-age story, A Boy and His Dog at the End of… Read More

Wings

As with her book The Language of Flowers, Vanessa Diffenbaugh has found a nature-based analogy to support the story in We Never Asked for Wings. The theme of birds and their migratory habits is connected to more than… Read More

2nd chance romance

I have to admit that I don’t know how I ended up with this book. I ordered a bunch from bookoutlet.com (you have to spend $35 to get free shipping, and since the books are mostly between $3.50… Read More