Tag: book review
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Book Review – Girl in the Making by Anna Fitzgerald
Jean is a gentle young girl growing up in 1970s and 1980s Dublin, living with her authoritarian and volatile father, her mother and siblings. She has a loving relationship with her mother until a new pregnancy leaves her exhausted. Jean’s solace at home is in her baby brother John and kind but meek Aunty Ida,…
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Book Review – The Divorcées by Rowan Beaird
It’s 1950s America and Lois, in her 20s, is making her way west. Stuck in a loveless marriage, Nevada’s laws will allow her a quick, clean divorce. All she has to do is be resident there for six weeks. So she spends her weeks at the Golden Yarrow, one of the more upmarket ‘divorce ranches’…
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Book Review – Memory Piece by Lisa Ko
Memory Piece is the story of three Asian American women, Giselle, Jackie and Ellen, whose lives collide in a small moment of rebellion when they are teenage girls searching for more from life, and they continue to go in and out of each other’s lives, in person and digitally, for over half a century. From…
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Book Review – On the Savage Side by Tiffany McDaniel
We’re like the women before us, Arc. We carry great terrors on our backs. We take them to bed with us the same demons. Twins Arc and Daffy live in the industrial town of Chillicothe, Ohio. Living with their mother and aunt in the shadow of addiction, poverty and prostitution, the girls cling to each…
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Book Review – Blessings by Chukwuebuka Ibeh
When Obiefuna’s father sees a brief, intimate moment between his teenage son and a boy apprenticed to the family, Obiefuna is sent away to a strict religious boarding school. Torn from his mother Uzoamaka’s side, with whom he has a close and loving relationship, and cast into a world of tough boys, each trying to…
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Book Review – Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro
Signal Fires is a poignant, moving and beautifully written portrait of two families living on Division Street; a suburban American street where the families live quietly side by side and where everyone still has their secrets, crossing paths only occasionally but at the most pivotal times in their lives. Ben and Mimi Wilf, and their…
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Book Review – Jaded by Ela Lee
On paper, Jade has it all: a successful law career, the daughter who has made her parents proud, a great boyfriend from an affluent family, and a small but solid circle of girlfriends. Then one work night out throws everything into a downward spiral as she wakes up with no idea how she got home,…
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Fourteen Days – ed. by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston
Fourteen days: the period over which our novel unfolds, as the tenants of one run-down New York apartment block gather (with social distancing!) each evening on the rooftop, in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, to cheer on the frontline workers and then share, and listen to, stories drawn from their own experience. We…
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Book Review – Stealing by Margaret Verble
9-year-old Kit Crockett lives in rural 1950s America with her father, with whom she is close, but both are dealing with the grief of her mother’s death and somehow unable to comfort each other. Passing her spare time fishing and reading books, Kit lives a quiet life until a mysterious and beautiful woman moves into…
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Book Review – Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Kambili and Jaja live a strict, regimented life within the walls of their affluent estate, under the iron rule of their highly religious father. A prominent and benevolent figure within the community, he is in many ways a force for good; but behind closed doors he wields a force of a different kind. When a…
The Resting Willow 