Category Archives: American Literature

We Could Be Beautiful by Swan Huntley

Let’s talk about what happens when you’re so rich you have a massage room in your apartment. Not only that, you’re also drop dead gorgeous with an amazing sense of style. But the problem is that you’re still single. Sadly, tragically, desperately single–and over 40. Then a handsome man starts wooing you, and you are cautious, but soon realize he wants you, not your money. However, you have read lots of books in your life so you know what happens next–LIES DECEPTION TRICKERY SECRETS and…

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Zora Neale Hurston, Behave, Innocents and Others, Darkest Corners, Rereading Roald Dahl, All Of A Kind Family

Reading to my kids is the best. In the last month we’ve reread The BFG, The Witches, and George’s Marvelous Medicine by Roald Dahl. I also shared with them the first two books in the All of a Kind Family series and my girls love those girls as much as I did when I read them as a girl myself. Such a treat to hear them say the same kinds of things I said to myself when I read the books. In grown up reading:…

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Roald Dahl, Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Chains

My almost six-year-old and I have continued our Roald Dahl streak with George’s Marvelous Medicine, about a boy whose grandma is the meanest lady ever. Every day she drinks a horrible concoction so George decides to take everything in the house and mix up something truly dreadful for her–with unexpected results. It’s not as dark as The Witches but has that same trickster spirit. We both really enjoyed it. And we finally convinced big sister to join the Roald Dahl fun so now she’s listening…

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Sweet Lamb of Heaven, Girls and Sex, Wink Poppy Midnight

Lydia Millet’s Sweet Lamb of Heaven sounded like it had everything I could want from a book. Anna’s in a bad marriage and has a baby her husband doesn’t want. Now, several years later, her husband is running for public office and Anna is on the run, desperate to keep him from finding her and Lena and using them as pawns. What’s more, she constantly hears a voice running a largely incoherent and incomprehensible monologue in a mix of English and other (possibly unknown) languages.…

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Opening Belle, Hidden Bodies, Ann Patchett, Norse Myths, and Ellen Raskin!

When I started listing the titles for this post I thought, “wow, I’ve been on a hot streak!” But then I remembered that I’ve had to give up on a bunch of books recently, too. The life of a reader! I grabbed Opening Belle at the library based on the cover and title, and the description sounded too good to pass up. Set (like Everybody Rise) on the eve of the financial crisis, the story follows Belle, a mom of three with a high pressure…

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Everybody Rise, Burn Baby Burn, Rereading Roald Dahl

Sometimes as a parent you get those moments when you feel like you must be doing something right, and having my 5-year-old ask me to reread her The BFG and The Witches was definitely one of those moments. We enjoyed them just as much the 2nd time through, and now she’s eager to have me read The BFG a third time so that her big sister can get why we think snozzcumbers are so funny. Burn Baby Burn by Meg Medina hooked me right away…

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Viral, Lorrie Moore, Girl Through Glass, New Chris Bohjalian

I’m like my very on book club as my latest reads have all been women-centered and fairly mainstream. But while all of them were easy, diverting reads, only one of them lived up to the jacket copy. Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America was a departure for me as I hardly ever read short stories. This one I did in fact read for a book club, the first one I’ve joined in ages. As much as I love to read, I don’t generally do well in…

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The Singing Bone by Beth Hahn

Synopsis: When a documentary filmmaker decides to take on the infamous Jack Wyck murders, Alice, a professor of folklore, finds herself forced to confront the summer she and her best friends fell under the sway of the charismatic man who tattooed his name on the insides of their legs, and for whom they would do absolutely anything. Review: This is the one you need to read. So much beauty and horror and terror and humanity and tragedy and sadness and lightness, all perfectly calibrated and…

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Where I Lost Her by T. Greenwood

My love for T. Greenwood has been well-documented in this blog, and I eagerly await every one of her new novels. Thankfully she’s prolific, and with Where I Lost Her, she adds a level of suspense and mystery to complicated family dynamics she so deftly creates for each book. Tess is in trouble. She drinks too much, and she’s just learned something awful about her husband, Jake. On a visit to her childhood friend, Effie (from Greenwood’s debut Breathing Water), Tess is drunk driving home…

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Tolliver’s Secret + The Bronze Bow

Two classics in our homeschool that were a big hit. Tolliver’s Secret by Esther Wood Brady was assigned as a read aloud in our Sonlight core, and all of us loved the story of the girl who dresses like a boy to deliver a secret message to George Washington during the Revolutionary War. There was a lot of action and suspense wondering if Ellen was going to make it, and my 8 year old loved the adventure of it all. It wasn’t the tearjerker that…

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