Hill Women is a memoir about life in and around Appalachia, especially focused on the author, Cassie Chambers, and her mother and grandmother. Her memoir compares the lives of her grandmother (with very little education, who met her 30-something-year-old husband when she was a young teenager,) to her mother (who fought for a local college education while married and raising a baby,) to Cassie herself (an Ivy League graduate and Harvard lawyer.) The author emphasizes … Read More “Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains by Cassie Chambers” »
I had high hopes for a book described as being a collection of “stories that swing a wrecking ball at our assumptions about women.” However, either my assumptions about women (as someone who identifies as a woman) are vastly different than the assumptions the rest of the general population makes or this is yet another book about the commodification of women. As short stories, some were interesting and had a Roald Dahl-esque quality. However, the … Read More “Women on Top by Michelle Miller” »
My first book of 2020, and if it this is what books are like this year, it’s going to be a good one. Charlotte and Philip have a (somewhat stereotypical) meet cute on an airplane while sitting in economy, and start a romantic relationship that will alter both of their lives. She moves with him to the Florida Keys, although Philip seems to be on the road more than he’s with her. She’s lonely … Read More “This is Not How it Ends by Rochelle B. Weinstein” »
A father — President Abraham Lincoln — mourns his son, Willie — who has died of typhoid fever — as thousands of parents mourn their own sons — who have died in the first year of the American Civil War. This book takes place over one night (along with several flashbacks) in a crypt where “sick-forms” stay near their “sick-boxes” waiting to get well. They are unaware of the years and decades passing them, unaware … Read More “Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders” »
I really enjoyed reading this book, and I finished it wishing it was longer. Tom Hazard has been alive for over 400 years, although because of a rare medical condition he looks like a regular man his in his early forties. He has acted with Shakespeare, sailed with Captain Cook, and drank with F. Scott Fitzgerald. But he just wants a normal life. Unfortunately, he lives under the rules of The Albatross Society, a secret … Read More “How to Stop Time by Matt Haig” »