Jessie Burton’s debut novel The Miniaturist packs a lot of plot and history into its 537 pages. The action takes place in Amsterdam over the course of 3 months, from October 1686 into January 1687, and focuses on the oppressive social and religious restrictions that operated within a booming and expanding economy during the Dutch Golden Age. Eighteen-year-old Nella Oortman, whose family name is old and respected but whose fortunes have faltered, has made a fine match with Johannes Brandt, a successful businessman some 20 […]
On “Significance,” Asimov’s Zeroth Law, and R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Book 3 of Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series, featuring corpse soldier (ancillary) Breq, sort-of/kind-of/not completely concludes the tale of Breq’s quest for justice. In Book 1, Leckie sets up her Radch Empire and Breq’s background — how she went from being the artificial intelligence of an imperial ship, serving her captain and able to see and know all through her ancillaries, to being an isolated and separate individual with the formidable strength of an ancillary and a powerful desire for revenge. In Book 2, the […]
All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.
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 […]
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