Purely by coincidence, I read Solar Storms during the week that included Columbus Day — a holiday that made me uncomfortable for some time and now makes me sick. Solar Storms is set amongst Native Americans living in northern Minnesota in 1972-73 as their lands are being overtaken for development. Author Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw writer, uses her gifts for language and character development to tell a spellbinding story of connectivity, brokenness, environmentalism, and spirituality with a focus on four incredibly strong and thoughtful women […]
Are you non-compliant?
Are you non-compliant? Do you fit in your box? Are you too fat, too thin, too loud, too shy, too religious, too secular, too prudish, too sexual, too queer, too black, too brown, too whatever-it-is-they’ll-judge-you-for-today? You may just belong on Bitch Planet When you get a load of Kelly Sue DeConnick’s dystopian world — earth as run by a patriarchy called “the Fathers”– you might prefer to be on the Auxilliary Compliance Outpost, also known as “Bitch Planet.” In a not-too-distant future, for reasons that […]
An Unexpected View of WWII Berlin
Underground in Berlin is an unusual memoir of a Jewish woman in WWII Germany. Marie Jalowicz Simon avoided the concentration camps by going into hiding in Berlin. With the help of both Jews and Germans, Communists and even Nazis she managed to find shelter and meager food from 1941, when she became “illegal”, until the end of the war. Given that many memoirs by Jews from this period deal with the Resistance and/or survival of the camps, Jalowicz Simon’s memoir is quite remarkable — a […]
Beware the Sea Anemone
Pretty Baby is a dark, suspenseful drama featuring a do-gooder, her career-obsessed spouse and a runaway teen with a baby. Kubica keeps the reader guessing not only about her characters’ motives, but also about the crime that seems to have been committed, and whether or not any of our three narrators are telling the whole truth. The novel starts from Heidi’s point of view. It’s a rainy, dreary early spring day in Chicago and Heidi is on her way to work where she runs a […]
The Truth Will Set You Free
The only thing at once more precious and more fragile than a true story is a free life. A Pulitzer finalist and long-listed for the Man Booker Prizer, The Moor’s Account is a work of fiction based on real historical events and people. Through the eyes of our narrator Mustafa, aka Estebanico, a Muslim from Morocco, the reader experiences the life of a successful merchant in Portuguese controlled North Africa, enslavement, and an ill-fated Spanish quest for gold in La Florida. Lalami’s inspiration came from […]
Has everyone been reading Nalo Hopkinson without me?
Sometimes, when one is introduced to a gifted writer who has been crafting fine works for going on two decades, one feels both excited to have found such a trove and yet irritated to have not known about her sooner. This is how I feel after reading Nalo Hopkinson’s first novel Brown Girl in the Ring, published in 1998. The novel won several awards and was nominated for a Philip K. Dick Award. It is an absolutely fascinating combination of dystopian future, Caribbean folk tale, […]
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