During this last post-election month, I feel like my emotions are out of control and too close to the surface. Case in point, I was doing a first listen of my copy of the Hamilton Mix-Tape the other morning while making breakfast and basically was misty eyed during the whole first half. Songs about immigrants and rising up and writing your way out of bad circumstances hit close to home (and I’m a middle-aged white lady so I can only imagine how this CD resonates […]
Fate is a Funny Thing
This latest novel by Jennifer Weiner was thoroughly readable and engaging as long as I squashed my inner cynic into a small ball and buried it deep in a drawer. It tells the story of Rachel Blum and Andy Landis, who first meet when they are 8 years old. Rachel is in a Florida hospital being treated for a heart condition that she has struggled with since birth. Andy ends up in the E.R. of the same hospital with a broken arm. The accident happened […]
You are entering the Red Zone. Proceed at own risk. When in doubt, run.
I consider myself very lucky that I discovered Justin Cronin’s “The Passage” series only last summer, so the wait for City of Mirrors was much less painful and dramatic than it would have been if I’d been reading in real time: The Passage was published in 2010 and The Twelve in 2012. City of Mirrors came out four weeks ago. That’s not on a George R. R. Martin level, but still could have been a brutal wait for me. Whew! I love this series. I […]
A Little Pilot-Light-Sized Flame
This issue of Granta explored the theme of fate in all of its beautiful, terrible glory. The introduction warns that the selections to follow “are concerned with fate in its most serious manifestations: love, sexuality, identity, death, illness, religion and war.” The issue included beautiful images of Mexico’s retablos or exvotos, painted on pieces of metal or wood, “which are offerings of gratitude to a Catholic divinity, usually placed in a sanctuary shrine or altar, that condense a charged moment in somebody’s life, perhaps of anguish or even terror, usually […]