Four fifteen-year-old girls, life-long best friends, are about to spend their first summer apart. On the night before three of them go away, they discover a pair of second-hand jeans that Carmen, the original owner, was planning on getting rid of. They discover that despite their varying heights and body types, the jeans look awesome and super flattering on all four of them, and decide to use the jeans as a device to keep in contact throughout the summer. They make a pact that they […]
You Should Be So Lucky to Have a Woman as a Friend
Published in 1973, Toni Morrison’s second novel Sula is a short but incredibly rich story about friendship and community, and about the ways that fear and hatred can bring people together and tear them apart. Morrison’s characters can be enticing and alluring, powerful and defiant in the face of poverty, prejudice, disappointment, and death. The title character Sula is a rebel amongst her community in Medallion, Ohio. As a black woman in the 1920s and ’30s, she refused to be confined by the limits society […]
20th Century Dalloways
This short novel, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award, deals with a circle of women who married and had children in the ’50s somewhere in New England. Much of their story is told in flashbacks from a point in the 1990s, when they have aged and have lost many of those who had been close. As a result, we get nothing like a linear narrative, and that’s not terribly important. The relationships that these women form, the choices they have made, and how […]
Grief and family and friendship and a ghostly alligator. Also – Cannonball!
Disclaimer! I got a free ARC of this through NetGalley. I have not been promised anything in return for this review, although if people wanted to start bribing me to read their books, that would be ok too. Kate Pheris has been a widow for a year, and has been sleep-walking through her life since her husband Matt died. Now her house has been sold, her and her daughter’s things are all packed and they’re all set to move in with her mother-in-law, who has all […]
A prayer for Owen is a prayer for us all
In a similar vein as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I was on the fence about John Irving, though swayed a bit more in his favor. The World According to Garp is one of my favorite books of all time, but I have tried to read Ciderhouse Rules three or four times and just couldn’t get in to it. I had heard amazing things bout “A Prayer for Owen Meany” and was pushed to tackle it after a friend a few states away said she was starting […]
The Happiest Dog in Town
Because of Winn-Dixie is an amazing book about a girl named Opal who moves to Florida with her father and finds a dog in a supermarket. She names him after the store and claims he is hers. She immediately falls in love with him because of his toothy grin and his fun-loving nature. She brings him home and introduces him to the preacher, her father. His father is unsure about Winn-Dixie at first but Opal talks him into keeping him. He has bald spots, smells […]