I can’t remember the last epistolary novel I read though one of my claims to fame (if you can call it that) is having plowed through to the end of the unabridged edition of Clarissa in my undergraduate 18th century novel class—something I don’t recommend. That particular novel of letters resembled a phone book, so in contrast, Dear Committee Members is refreshingly brief—almost too brief. I would have happily read more. Though readers from any occupation might find this book funny, I think it will […]
Rising Above the Cliches or The Wrong Book Worked Out
So here’s the thing. I accidentally read the wrong Jojo Moyes for my book club; you can’t blame me because the covers all look really similar. My book club had chosen The Girl You Left Behind but somehow I ended up reading the eBook version of Me Before You from my local library. And I enjoyed it. The story of Louisa “Lou” Clark, a girl from a small town in England with a seemingly “small” life, who takes on the job of caring for quadriplegic […]
Foster Care and Flowers
When my book club chose this as our March selection, I was worried that it would be overly twee—I just knew it had something to do with the Victorian language of flowers and a damaged young woman. Luckily, this first novel by Vanessa Diffenbaugh is a bit grittier (even though there is a small bit of magical realism) and I found it quite engaging. The novel alternates between two stories: what happens when Victoria Jones turns 18, leaves the group home she’s been living in […]
The Advantages of Disadvantages (and the Disadvantages of Advantages)
What do the following have in common: An inexperienced girls basketball team coached by a software developer originally from Mumbai, a cancer researcher with a Dickens-like childhood of loss and neglect who goes on to develop the most effective treatment for childhood leukemia, a Civil Rights activist/strategist who worked with Martin Luther King in Birmingham, and a small mountain village in France that stood up to the Nazi occupation. These are just some of the many stories that Malcolm Gladwell relates to the famous story […]