Hello! This one’s hard for me to review, and I haven’t figured out why yet. The short story is this: a woman whose husband was killed by Muslim extremists has a short rendezvous with a married Muslim man she meets under run-of-the-mill circumstances (some kind of trade show, I think?). As I said, that’s the very short story, and if I add too much more I’ll be editorializing rather than summarizing. So: here are a few things I thought while reading it or upon reflection… […]
when perfect isn’t enough
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS Hello! It’s hard for me to write about this one without giving away the whole plot, so I’m going to be oblique. Yejide and Akin are a young, happily married, childless couple, and their childlessness leads them both to some questionable and desperate decisions. Yejide’s life seems damned near impossible, while somehow simultaneously completely normal. Or maybe “normal,” but either way it seems impossible, but there she is, making it happen, in the way that so many women do. What she doesn’t […]
Left me cold
Happy New Year, ‘ballers! This was my third Michel Faber novel. Overall I’ve enjoyed the books and also marveled at his ability to tackle seemingly anything. But…this was pretty thin. The idea is fantastic, but the execution left me unmoved. This guy finds a fifth gospel (“fire gospel” is an inflammatory [<—see what I did there!?] title suggested by a critic after incidents inspired by the guy’s subsequent translation & book). It’s an interesting concept: a pretty cool way to think about the relationship, or […]
Happy New Year!
This book is loosely based on the life of Margaret Mead. So I hear; I don’t know enough about her to have recognized that on my own, so it wasn’t a distraction to me. It might be if your perspective is different. Also, there are (apparently — again, I didn’t catch them on my own) some pretty elementary factual errors. To me, whatever: what I didn’t know didn’t hurt me, and in some ways this story could have been set anywhere, provided that anywhere was […]
A perfect travel companion
I started this so long ago and am throwing it out there as a last-gasp, “I [kind of] did it!” Somehow I’m both proud of and disappointed in myself re this Cannonball. I hate and fear writing but love reading y’all’s, and thought this would be Good For Me (true), fun (sort of true), and a good way to get some recommendations (oh so true). I’m particularly pleased with the term ‘Ballers and will tell everyone about it forever. But enough about me. I really, […]
Yes. More like this, please.
This book was fantastic. The story, conveyed via five (or maybe six?) different narrators, is primarily about Max, a perfect-on-the-surface teenaged boy — attractive, intelligent, kind, well-mannered, popular, the whole nine yards — who is also intersex. Not only that, Max is also truly intersex; his “type” is literally not more one than the other*, so Max has physical characteristics of both a boy and a girl. Max’s parents clearly love him. Nothing they’ve done has been due to any motivation other than his well-being, […]
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