This was an absolutely perfect book to read last Saturday when I was home alone all day and got to curl up under a blanket and forget about the rest of the world. Basically everything is perfectly executed in Big Little Lies: — The mystery is compelling and surprising, concealing not only the killer but the deceased. — The characters and the world they inhabit are easy fodder for stereotypes and dismissal as frivolity, but Moriarty humanizes them and gives them dimension. I found myself […]
“Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably”
Beatrice “Trixie” Watson has two goals for her senior year. She wants to save enough money to buy the collectible Doctor Who figurines at the local comics shop and she intends to knock her nemesis, Benedict “Ben” West down to fourth place in their fancy prep school ranking. The two have always had a tense and antagonistic relationship, going all the way back to when Ben caused Trixie to break her arm on the monkey bars during first grade. This year, she is determined to […]
Cerebral and unapologetically feminist.
Taking myself as a reader out of the “ratings game” for a moment, The Blazing World deserves five stars for its ambition, passion, ferocity, and intelligence. It’s a complex book about a complex woman who is consistently undermined and undervalued (probably because she is a woman, and certainly because she’s an older one), and who vows to expose to the world the bias and hypocrisy of those who do so. It’s told after her death through a series of her journal entries, along with written […]
“Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.”
I read this book when it was first published and I was recently out of high school. It appealed, very much, to the dramatic teenager in me, who thought there was nothing more romantic than the tragic love of Moulin Rouge and whose own high school relationship was characterized by high highs and low lows. It’s not that The History of Love is, itself, histrionic, but Nicole Krauss does employ a very dreamy, lyrical style of prose that expresses romance intrinsically, bursting out from the […]
“I do not want to be anyone’s model for becoming a better person.”
I don’t want to sound overly dramatic when I say this, but I’m gonna go for it nonetheless: rape, or the possibility of rape, is such constant, persistent background noise in the life of most women that we forget the extent to which we negotiate around the threat. Even women who don’t consciously think of themselves as having ever explicitly feared rape or changed their behavior to avoid it will answer in the affirmative when you ask them more specific questions: do you and your […]
“I like flaws. I think they make things interesting.”
This is a fairly uninformed opinion, but as a casual reader of YA I feel like there has been a dearth, of late, of straightfoward, non- high concept/fantasy YA. Sarah Dessen seems like she hails from a class of YA authors from the mid to late aughts that mine realistic, if unusual, situations to examine the poignant emotional minutiae of the teen experience. The Truth About Forever is the sensitive and quietly resonant story of Macy Queen, who had been the first person of her […]
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