https://killingmykindle.com/2018/07/03/episode-1-25-the-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same/ Wherein I review: 94. Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters 95. Moonbreaker (Secret Histories #11) by Simon R. Green 96. Vanishing Games (Jack White #2) by Roger Hobbs 97. Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill Another white guy writes about the black experience, and I guess I’m becoming okay with it, because they’re doing a damn good job of it. Simon Green starts to bring the Droods into a crash landing in the Nightside. Roger Hobbs keeps his Ghostman going strong. And Jenny Offill […]
It Is What It Is
This novel is short and told in what I might call an impressionist manner, its form occasionally reminiscent of entries that you could find in Twitter or FaceBook updates. And yet in the end, it is a very rich story of a marriage and motherhood, with poetry, philosophy and some wry commentary on both institutions along the way. The narrator, who refers to herself as “the wife,” takes us through the highlights and lowlights of her adult life: dating, yoga, work, colic, bedbugs, infidelity, and […]
Portrait of an Art Monster Marriage
Dept. Of Speculation is 46 pithy chapters that take up only 180 pages, composed entirely of short, aphoristic paragraphs and quotes that vaguely tell the story of a woman’s journey through adulthood. The characters are nameless: the wife, the husband, the daughter. The narrator, the Wife, starts as an aspiring Art Monster, and changes as she falls in love, gets married, has a daughter. The wife waxes poetic (or, aphoristic) about life’s catastrophes, from having a colicky baby, to a cheating husband, to a battle with bedbugs, […]