The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry review: Finding family between the shelves Some novels announce their intentions with a dramatic opening. Others slip quietly into your life and make themselves at home. Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry belongs to the latter kind. It begins with an irritable bookseller on a Read more…
Remarkably Bright Creatures Book Review: Grief, Belonging and One Very Clever Octopus An elderly cleaner and a captive octopus hardly sound like the likeliest pair around which to build a novel. Yet that unusual friendship is precisely what gives Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt its charm. What begins as a gently eccentric story Read more…
A Man by Keiichiro Hirano: Can We Ever Escape Who We Were? What would you do if you discovered that the person you loved had died under someone else’s name? Would the life you shared become a lie, or would your memories remain untouched by the deception? That unsettling question opens A Man by Keiichiro Read more…
No One Is Talking About This Book Review There is a temptation, when talking about No One Is Talking About This, to call it a novel about social media and leave it at that. The book certainly invites that description. Its protagonist spends much of her life online. She scrolls endlessly, follows arguments she barely Read more…
Time Is a Mother Book Review: Grief, Memory, and the Strange Work of Living On Grief doesn’t arrive politely. It barges in, moves things around, and stays long after you’ve run out of energy to fight it. As a book, Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong lives inside that aftershock. It doesn’t try to Read more…
Night Sky with Exit Wounds — A Review Entering a World Built from Fracture and Light Some poetry books gently open a window. Night Sky with Exit Wounds opens a wound. Reading this Night Sky with Exit Wounds poem sequence, you immediately sense that you’re entering a space where language has been reassembled with trembling Read more…
