Just enough time to slip a review in under the wire! This is a book club book for me and I was looking forward to reading it. I liked it, but didn’t love it, which was a surprise given all of the great reviews it received. It took me a while to read, but really shouldn’t have. It’s not a long or complicated book. I’m not sure if that was because I was fitting it in around holiday goings on or if it wasn’t engaging […]
Book Roundup
I have a few books I’ve been putting off reviewing simply because I don’t have much to say about them. That isn’t necessarily because I didn’t like them, I just can’t come up with a lot of words for them. So, I’m going to do a bit of a “at a loss for words round up” and get these in the bank. I’ll put the link to my favorite in the Amazon link box. Little Fires Everywhere (4 Stars) by Celeste Ng Pearl and Maya […]
“Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over”
The book begins with a house burning down and then goes back to how we got there, following the lives of a group of people who become intertwined through their children and siblings. Mia Warren and her teenager daughter, Pearl, move into a rented house in Shaker Heights, Ohio. It’s a city that has been planned to perfection and run by specific rules, down to what colour you can paint your house. It’s safe and predictable and the opposite of what Mia and Pearl have […]
Better than I gave it credit for
I’ve been trying to suss out how to describe my taste in books and the best I can do so far is to say that I prefer plot-driven to people-driven. You know those books about ordinary folks in small town and the life that unfolds around them? Not my bag, generally speaking. Celeste Ng is really the big exception. I read her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, last year and loved it. So much. A mother and daughter and the life they stumble into in small […]
Little Boxes on the hillside, Little Boxes all the same
I meant to read Everything I Never Told You ages ago but I think I had read too many novels about family secrets and suburbia at the time and kept putting it off for later. I always meant to get around to it, but with the whole Reese Witherspoon book club and optioning of Little Fires Everywhere, I decided to start with Ng’s follow up. The novel, set in 1998, begins in early summer in suburban Shaker Heights, outside Cleveland, Ohio. Ng hints at previous […]
Drama in the suburbs
I read Everything I Never Told You a couple of years ago, and I was surprisingly impressed by the writing and the characters in the novel. So when I saw that Celeste Ng had a new book out, Little Fires Everywhere, and it was on NPR’s Best Books of 2017 List, I immediately put it on my to-read list. The blurb on the book made me think that this book was only about the adoption of a young Chinese baby by a white couple. In reality, the book has […]