A Portable Magic – A Life In Books

September 30, 2026

A Month In The Life: September 2026

When you read this, I’ll be on an airplane for my family’s annual trip to Michigan! It’s been a good month, thankfully kicked off by a break in the summer heat…you never realize how good it is to be able to open up the door for some fresh air until it’s wayyyy too hot to even think about doing that. As a certified Fall Lover, I am here for the changing leaves!

In Books…

The Coldest Winter Ever: Teenage Winter Santiaga has almost never wanted anything she couldn’t have. The daughter of Ricky Santiaga, who’s been the big boss of the Brooklyn drug scene for years, she’s been spoiled ever since she was born with material things: jewelry, clothes, handbags, anything that can be bought. Watching her mother, who had her at only 14, she’s learned what she needs to be to live a life where the finer things are hers for the taking: beautiful, street-smart, proud. The only thing she can’t seem to have is Midnight, one of her father’s most trusted associates, who is unmoved by her repeated attempts to throw herself at him. She’s upset when her father decides that the family will leave their longtime home in the projects to move to a mansion on Long Island, which takes her away from the clique of friends who compete for her favor in the hopes of being able to pick up any scraps of her largesse that might fall from her hands. But the move is beginning of the end of the world as she knows it: first, her mother is shot in the face on a trip back to Brooklyn with her father, and then before she can have the plastic surgery that would restore her looks, Ricky is arrested for his crimes. The house, the cars, the clothes, everything is seized. Her three younger sisters are taken by the state, her mother descends rapidly into addiction, and despite her best attempts to hustle her way through being on her own with rapidly dwindling resources, she’s found by the state and put into transitional housing. She starts her own small-scale criminal enterprise there, using her sense of style to convince the other girls she lives with that they need the kinds of clothes she has, taking advantage of the shoplifting skills of her longtime friend Simone, now pregnant, to earn money by selling stolen merchandise. When Simone is caught, though, Winter is happy to drop her like a hot potato. She winds up in the home of Sister Souljah (yes, the author of the book), where she ignores every attempt to break through her materialistic shell and tries to figure out how to secure advantages from her new connection. Eventually, she reconnects with an old flame who may have played a role in her father’s downfall, and tries to turn the situation to her own advantage but power dynamics are ever shifting and her future may be in more danger than ever before. If I’d read this even ten years ago, I likely would have been so blinded by my anger at Winter and her choices that I would not have appreciated what Souljah was doing here. That Winter is so infuriating is a testament to her skill at characterization. Presented with opportunity after opportunity to change her trajectory, Winter steadfastly refuses. Why? Because she’s still a child, far too convinced that she’s actually a capable adult, prioritizing the things she’s learned her whole life to prioritize. Faced with imminent destitution, she constantly spends money on clothes, purses, or other luxury items, because she’s internalized that presenting the right appearance will lead her back towards security. It doesn’t make it any less frustrating to read along with, but having a mid-life perspective to look at how young she is, how difficult it would actually be for her make huge changes in her underlying value system, makes it at least explicable. Outside of the brilliance of the character study, though, the surrounding narrative was hit-or-miss for me. The author self-insert especially fell flat, though I certainly understand the urge to include a place for her own philosophy about how her community could make positive improvements in a story about a young woman whose has grown up hearing all the wrong messages about what’s important. Though she makes an effort to not portray herself as perfect (she’s hesitant to enter an AIDS section of a women’s prison, for example, and struggles to make romantic connections that ight compromise her ideals), it’s not hard to understand why Winter dismisses her as preachy. The narrative feels like it gets bogged down in that section, and I felt myself waiting for its inevitable end to see how Winter’s journey would continue. Given the emphasis placed on Winter’s connection with Midnight early in the book, I’d expected them to continue to interact, but his eventual re-emergence took place far later than I’d anticipated and felt underdeveloped. It’s a book with very strong character development and a thoughtfully-constructed, vivid voice, but there are definite flaws there. I’d recommend it, but I’m not sure how eager I am to dive into her other work.
Moon of the Crusted Snow: When the power goes out on the Anishnaabe reserve in northern Ontario where Evan Whitesky lives with his longtime partner Nicole and their two kids, Maiingan and Nangohns, it doesn’t feel like that big of a deal at first. Consistent electricity is a relatively recent introduction to the reserve, and there are diesel generators to tide things over. But when the power doesn’t come back within a day or two, there start to be some rumbles of worry. Phone lines, too, are down, and at a distance from Gibson, the nearest city, no one knows what’s going on. Tribal leadership tries to maintain calm, but their anxieties, too, are growing. It’s late autumn, and as the snow starts to fall, the community feels even more isolated than usual. While many residents hunt and gather to supplement their diets, just as many rely totally on the supermarket and its regular deliveries of food from the south. Alarm spikes when two young men, who had been going to school in Gibson, arrive back at the reserve on snowmobiles, recounting their narrow escape from a city that had fallen into chaos after the power disappeared. Shortly thereafter, another snowmobile arrives…this time driven by a very large white man, Justin Scott, toting a small arsenal of weapons but promising to help with the hunting the tribe will need more than ever to keep food on plates as they take stock of their relatively small cache of emergency supplies. Reluctantly, they agree to take him in, but he starts working to undermine the chief and council almost from the very start. Scott and his bravado attract a contingent of the community, growing to include another handful of white people who are taken in after Scott shoots their leader. As the long, cold winter goes on, the reserve is increasingly divided and in their new reality, taking the wrong path could lead to total destruction. This is an interesting spin on the well-worn structure of the post-apocalyptic novel. Setting the book far away from major population centers means that the social breakdown that so often forms the initial hook is absent. It lets the story develop at a slower pace, leaving the reader just as confused about what might be happening as Evan and his neighbors. Even the story brought back by the college students doesn’t shed much light on the situation. Was it “just” a massive power failure? What else might be happening out there? But those sort of questions are largely extraneous to the tale Waubgeshig Rice is looking to tell. Though the tribe writ large lives only a quasi-traditional lifestyle, they’re still in a much better position to survive than the largely white society around them. Once again, we see white people in the Americas arriving on the doorstep of the First Nations, asking for help. The echoes of history are a major theme here, with Scott obviously representational of colonialism: he arrives bearing quite a lot of firearms as well as alcohol, he actively works to subvert the native leadership structure, he cultivates a group of disaffected tribal members to sow discord, he steals. The obviousness, though, is indicative of what didn’t quite come together for me about this book. I was surprised, after I finished reading it, to discover that it was not Rice’s first novel, because its flaws largely feel like those of a debut. He doesn’t seem to have the confidence that he can lay out dots for his reader to connect, he not only does all the connecting but underlines his work. At one point early in the narrative, Evan and Nicole are having some drinks and playing cards with friends, and their ambivalence about drinking after the havoc alcohol has created in indigenous communities is an interesting note, but he goes on to spell out what might be behind the sadness that drives many of their neighbors into destructive patterns around booze: the loss of their ancestral homelands, the horrific legacy of boarding schools, etc. Maybe it’s that I’ve read a lot of Native American/First Nations stories this year, but this felt like it could have been implicit rather than explicit. Similarly, Evan and Nicole’s two children both have Anishinaabe names, in contrast to their parents and even grandparents. Rather than letting this detail make an unspoken point about the life that Evan and Nicole have chosen for themselves, in the back half of the book Rice specifically draws attention to it. There are also some elements that feel underdeveloped: Evan’s siblings and parents seem initially like they’ll be major players but recede quickly into the background. I feel like the tensions between the more and less traditional members of the tribe could have been explored more as well. It’s a bummer because despite this sort of clumsiness, I generally liked the book. I was invested in the Whitesky family and the survival of the community, the way that indigenous practices and values could change how events might progress in this sort of story. Rice does a great job creating a sense of place, the distance and isolation the tribe already experiences being heightened by the thick, ever-building snow, the starkness of the landscape. I’m curious enough to want to read the sequel, but I was lukewarm enough about this one itself to have a hard time affirmatively recommending it.
Indian Horse: Saul Indian Horse is the youngest of three children in an Ojibway family in Canada. The first, the only girl, was taken away to residential boarding school and never seen again. The second, Benjamin, was also taken but returned a few years later…with tuberculosis onboard. The parents, along with a grandmother, take Benjamin and Saul far away, to a small ancestral island, in the hopes of keeping themselves together. But the TB is too advanced, and when his parents take his brother’s body away for Christian burial, it’s the last time Saul sees them. When the snow starts to fall, his grandmother decides to set out for her brother’s house to regroup and figure out what’s next. She ends up sacrificing her life for him, freezing to death while holding him to keep him warm. All of that, and he’s found by the government and taking to boarding school at St. Jerome’s anyways. It’s a horrific experience: children are psychologically, physically, and sexually abused by the nuns and priests who run the school. They receive almost nothing in the way of education or nutrition. But one day, when he’s eight years old, a new father arrives, and brings with him hockey. Saul is at first intrigued, then obsessed. Too small to join the team initially, he’s given the task of clearing the rink for the players and begins to teach himself to skate and shoot in secret. Soon, he’s too good to be denied a spot on the team. He’s recruited for a low-level local team, but it’s there that he gets his first taste of the racism that the game can engender. Despite his talent and the team’s increased success rate, the white parents of the other kids are mad he’s taking playing time away from their sons. So he goes back to school, but not for long…he’s soon recruited for a reserve (reservation) squad that means he’ll leave the institution, live with a local native family, go to regular school. Initially skeptical of him, the team ultimately embraces him and his incredible skill. But it’s a double-edged sword, because white teams take notice and want to play against Saul’s team and that racism hasn’t gone anywhere. When a scout for the Maple Leafs’s minor league team offers him a tryout, it would seem like a dream come true but Saul is reluctant to leave the life that had become comfortable and familiar to him. When he’s convinced to go, the culture shock and loss of his support structure breaks the dam that had held back his anger at the anti-indigenous sentiment that continues to crop up. Once a fast finesse player, he becomes a brawler, and he’s benched. His attempt to go back home again fails, his rage burns too hot and his former teammates find him off-putting. He descends into alcoholism, drifting here and there, but he can’t outrun the secret he’s been holding back from himself and once it resurfaces, he has to decide what he’s going to do with himself for the rest of his life. This book should have a trigger warning for basically everything and even my own fondness for a bummer seemed like it was going to be tested. But surprisingly, it’s less unrelenting a downer than it might seem at first. There are moments of hope and light disbursed throughout: Saul’s discovery of his gift for the game, the joy he finds on the ice, his acceptance into his host family and hockey team when he leaves St. Jerome’s, a man who tries to help Saul dry out when he’s lost in an alcoholic spiral for no reason other than kindness, the counselor at the rehab he eventually enters that doesn’t give up on him. That being said, it’s still extremely heavy and often very upsetting. Richard Wagamese could have written Saul as drowning in self-pity, the life he leads would certainly deserve it. But even in his lowest moments, there’s a clear-eyed quality to his inner world. He’s not mad about the lost opportunity of success and wealth that his experience playing professional hockey resulted in, he’s mad about being robbed of the way he was able to lose himself in the game, the way it took him outside his own head. That Saul doesn’t wallow in his agony means the book doesn’t either, making it a much more compelling reading experience than the kind of misery porn it could have become. And it ends on an optimistic note, with old bonds being cautiously reformed and a possible opportunity to play a role in guiding the next generation, making his hardships not purely in vain. I thought Wagamese did a wonderful job balancing an at-times harrowing depiction of the tragedies wrought by the residential school system against a tentative hope that healing is possible and that generational cycles can be broken, without ever letting the tone become cloying or hackneyed. I ended up really loving this and definitely want to read more from him in the future, but with the incredible darkness of much of the subject matter it’s hard to recommend (if you think you can stomach it, though, it’s well-worth your time).
Family Life: Eight year-old Ajay Mishra is excited to move to the United States from India when his father sends for him, his mother, and his brother to join him once he’s gotten established in a government job. But Ajay finds the experience more difficult than he’d imagined…he struggles at school, he struggles to make friends. Not so for his older brother Birju. After only about a year in America, Birju starts studying for the entrance exam to an exclusive New York City high school, and he’s accepted. He starts dating a pretty girl in their neighborhood. But over the summer, when the brothers are visiting their aunt in Virginia, everything changes in a minute. Three minutes, actually. That’s how long Birju is underwater after he hits his head after diving into a pool. He survives, but he’s severely brain damaged. Gone is his bright future, gone are his family’s hopes for their new life in their new country. Instead, there’s litigation and fighting with insurance companies as Birju moves from the hospital to a nursing home, and once the family realizes they can’t afford a nursing home that will provide the care they want for him, into the house, where his mother cares for him with help from nurse aids. She devotes herself entirely to her son, entertaining every hope for a cure, even from obvious crackpots. Their father slides down the slippery slope into alcoholism, drinking first sometimes, then often, then constantly. And Ajay? He’s mostly left to his own devices. Seeking the attention he’s not getting at home, he concocts increasingly outlandish stories to draw the sympathy of his classmates, who turn against him when they realize what he’s saying isn’t true. He tries to replicate his brother’s path of academic success, bringing home the best grades in his class, but it earns him only minimal praise. As the years go on, things continue to get darker and Ajay has to decide what comes next for him and whether he can or should look for his own path or remain bound to his family. This is a very different kind of book about the Indian experience in the United States than what one might expect. Instead of professional parents in high-earning jobs smothering their children with both pressure to achieve and close bonds, the Mishra family experiences significant economic stress, with one government job expected to provide for four people, including one with complex medical needs. His parents, lost in their own sorrow over Birju’s situation, don’t spend nearly enough mental energy on Ajay to push him. Ajay’s response to his profound loneliness is often unsympathetic, but it feels deeply realistic as what a child experiencing trauma might actually do, which makes sense because this book is based heavily on Akhil Sharma’s own life story. He’s clearly spent a lot of time in self-reflection (indeed, he’s said it took him over a decade to write this book), because the most rewarding aspect of this novel was the psychological portrait it paints of its protagonist. It never felt like a stereotyped “acting out”, Ajay does not have a breakdown and tearfully plead with his parents to engage with him the way a Message Movie might depict, it’s just a clear-eyed, unapologetic portrayal of maladaptive behavior on everyone’s part. But that’s also the downside..it’s hard to want to get too engaged with a book this bleak. There’s not a lot of hope here, or even much in the way of dark humor to break up the sadness. There’s also not much plot structure, which makes it feel like a slog, and the pacing is uneven. Sharma is not without a talent for prose, there are some stunningly evocative phrases in this novel, but overall it was too depressing to really recommend.
Fifteen Dogs: Apollo and Hermes make a bet one day: if other animals had human intelligence, would they be as miserable as humans? To find out, they grant it to a group of fifteen dogs in a veterinary clinic in Toronto and wait to see what happens. The answer is, of course, complicated. Some dogs die quickly. Some dogs live long lives. Some glory in their newfound facility for complex thought, while others resent the loss of their previous, more instinctual state of being. After most of them escape the clinic, some go on to find new homes while others become long-term strays. But they are all forever changed. Early on in this book, as the dogs that leave the clinic find shelter in a local park and start to form a little society, I thought this might end up being something I found interesting as a thought experiment but didn’t really connect to. But Andre Alexis admirably balances the thinky elements of this novel (maybe more a novella as not even 200 pages) with a more rounded look at some of the dogs and their relationships: Atticus, who works to be an effective leader of the “dogs-should-stay-dogs” group, Benjy, a wily schemer always looking for the best possible angle for himself, Majnoun, who develops an intense bond with his new owners, and Prince, who not only embraces his new situation but wants to take it to its fullest extent, playing with language and composing poetry. It felt a little bit like reading the original versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey, with the Greek gods and their jealousies and quarrels playing an active role in the drama, working to protect their favorites and hinder the ones they like less. It’s lively and engaging to read, and given the previously mentioned page length, a fast read to boot. But there’s a lot to chew on here despite its brevity: social structures, language, loyalty, justice, fate. A very good book, and one I’d highly recommend.
Ply: It’s been a few generations since the world as we know it ceased to be, since consistent power became a luxury reserved for the wealthiest (a setup the power company works vigorously to protect). It’s been about one generation since the Suppression, where people like our unnamed heroine’s father, who owned a bookstore, disappeared in a crackdown on the kind of dissidents that used that space to organize. Regular people like her and her mother are usually able to barter for enough power, stored in batteries, for the very basics: charging for an e-bike, charging for a personal device that has photos on it. Her mother is skilled with her hands, teaches her daughter how to tinker with both mechanical parts as well as materials like wood. The mother’s talent is sufficient to keep her and her only child in food and clothes…until cancer comes for her and, wanting to provide for her daughter’s future, she takes her to live with one of her best clients. The girl lives there for a while, and then a new place, and then a new place after that, and by the time she’s a young woman she’s living on her own, making her living by “pinching”, drawing down small amounts of power from electrical lines to charge batteries that she works with a broker, Anton, to exchange for the currency or goods that she needs. She’s created a new battery that can hold significantly more power, and that creates interest from three entities: two crime lords, who want this new design for themselves in the hopes of being able to put the other out of business, and a mysterious figure who turns out to have a lot of ideas about how to improve what “the pincher”, as she’s referred to in the text, has already created in the hopes of putting that power to use for experiments in physics. These experiments implicate the very nature of space and time, and deciding whether and how to engage with them will forever change the trajectory of the pincher’s life. Having previously read and loved Hernan Diaz’s Trust, I was prepared for another novel that started slowly and was vaguely disorienting until it all come together in the book’s final portion. And this did seem to be following that pattern! About halfway through, theoretical physics started to be foregrounded in the narrative, and I was hopeful that my struggle to follow would be rewarded…but despite what seemed like it had potential to be a rally at the end, I was left feeling disappointed. I’m generally lukewarm on unnamed protagonists, it just almost never feels like it adds anything to a story for me, and here was no exception. Everyone else in the novel is named, which made the pincher’s lack of one feel gimmicky. It’s something I likely would have been willing to overlook if the story had done more for me, but the book lost me there too. The opening half of the book jumps around in time to tell the pincher’s story and build out her world, and despite some characters that seemed like they were going to be more important and went nowhere in a way I found perplexing, I was generally engaged with where it was going. It’s when the physics started in the back half that the issues started piling up for me. The explanations went above my head, and while I’m sure never having taken physics is why, this is a book marketed towards a non-specialist audience and I’m no dumber than average so I suspect many others will also find themselves confused. It also robs the book of forward momentum, slowing the narrative tension and making it feel like it’s getting bogged down. There’s growing non-romantic connections between characters that are done well enough on their own but don’t make up for the dragging pace. An episode that should have been very high-stakes and exciting is glossed over in a way that undercuts the energy it might have brought. The closing is mostly fairly strong, but for me, failed to deliver the true gut punch that would have been necessary for this book to rise higher in my estimation. I don’t tend to feel a strong affinity for the issues of identity and purpose and what it means on a fundamental level to be a person that the book seems to be interested in playing with, so maybe if those themes spoke to me as a reader more I would have been more satisfied with the journey it took me on. As is, though, I found it too bloated for even the strong prose to push it much above average and I can’t really recommend it.
Funny Boy: Arjie has been different from his brother and his boy cousins for as long as he can remember. On the days he spends with his large Tamil extended family in Sri Lanka as a little boy, he does not go outside and play sports…instead, he stays with his sister and other girl cousins, playing a game they call bride-bride, with Arjie in the starring role complete with glittering sari and make-up. He loves those days, until another girl cousin, returned from abroad with her family, becomes jealous. She brings it to the attention of the parents, including Arjie’s father. Like many men in cultures with rigidly enforced gender roles, he doesn’t want his son to be “funny” and tries to force Arjie away from dress-up and into physical activity…but while he succeeds in destroying the once-cherished game, he’s powerless to change who Arjie is. He’s also powerless to stop the ever-present and increasing tensions between Sri Lanka’s Sinhala majority population and its Tamil minority, preferring to stick his head in the sand for as long as possible. Arjie’s own trajectory, though, constantly exposes him to it: when his aunt recruits him to join her as a cast member in a play and forms a romantic connection with a Sinhalese neighbor that she’s pressured to break off, when his mother has an affair with a childhood friend when she’s taken Arjie out of town to recuperate from an illness and her lover’s work as a journalist reporting on the conflict puts him in danger, when his father’s own childhood friend’s son comes to work for the family without being entirely honest about his connections to the Tamil Tigers, and even as he ages into a high school with a mixed Sinhalese/Tamil student body. It’s at school that the difference between him and the other boys finally becomes clear to him, but can his first romance take off even as the Sri Lankan civil war threatens to begin in earnest? Shyam Selvadurai tells this coming-of-age story as a series of vignettes, proceeding chronologically but peering at only a short period of time in each section. To a certain extent, it works: we get a very close-up view of particular events, diving deeply into dynamics both familial and societal. But there’s a certain amount of cohesion lost in this type of structure…Arjie and his parents are foregrounded, but even his brother and sister, much less the side characters, are only sporadically present at best. It’s frustrating to explore particular relationships (Arjie and his mean cousin, Arjie and his aunt, Arjie’s mother and her sister) only to have those be largely if not entirely dropped from the narrative going forward. The title of the book had led me to expect that its focus was going to be on Arjie’s relationship with his sexuality, and while that’s certainly a significant part of it, it’s actually more focused on the conflict in Sri Lanka. A lot of books that try to illustrate a historical moment through showing its impact on a particular person/family/group of friends (something I love when it’s executed well!) end up with a lot of clunky exposition, so I appreciated how skillfully Selvadurai managed to weave in this sort of information organically, with few passages that felt like blatant info-dumps. It helps that he draws Arjie as a protagonist more passive than most…he’s a quiet boy whose ability to go along to get along means that adults in his life often use him as cover to get away with things they might not otherwise be able to, putting him in the position to listen to a lot of conversations he often understands fully only in retrospect. I understand why the story ended where it did, in his early teenage years, but it was a little disappointing to stop following his trajectory when he’d just started to come into his own…which is testament to the power of the characterization here, I was definitely invested in what would become of him. It’s a good book that was close to being very good, but definitely worth a read in any case!
Persepolis: Marjane Satrapi was born in the last years of Pahlavi control of Iran to parents that were already dissidents. While they protested against the regime, their hopes of revolution were more Leninist than religious. So when the revolution happened, their early hopes dissolved into continued concerns, heightened as their friends and associates were imprisoned and killed for being communists. Even as just a young girl, Marjane was steeped in the intellectual life of her family, reading comic books about dialectical materialism that displaced her early dreams of becoming an Islamic prophet. Marjane was torn between her desire to fit in with her classmates and her love and idealization of her own family and their values, and the Iran-Iraq war continued to complicate their situation. As her outspokenness (and the ongoing conflict) began to threaten her safety more directly, her parents made the impossible choice to send her abroad to continue her schooling in the hope that she would be able to grow and thrive away from her home. As a comic artist, I understand why a graphic novel was the medium in which Satrapi felt the most at ease telling her story. And it’s an incredibly interesting one! Her parents seem like fascinating people, and their daughter is no less compelling. The Islamic Revolution is one of the most consequential world events of the last 75 years, and getting an inside view of what it was like to grow up in that incredibly heady time, the constantly shifting understanding of what the rules were at any given moment, is valuable in and of itself. Satrapi’s art style is striking in its black-and-white starkness. But even so, I didn’t think the medium allowed for the kind of development of the main figures I found myself wanting. The family, including Marjane herself, feel more like rough outlines than actual people, which made it harder than it should have been to get really emotionally involved with their plight the way I almost certainly would have with a primarily-text rather than primarily-visual book…it’s not that I didn’t care about them at all, of course, but that I didn’t have a rich enough picture of their inner lives or even the dynamics of their relationships to get connected to them the way I tend to need to really get engaged with a book. That being said, I don’t know whether it would have improved the other main issue I had, which is the episodic structure of the narrative. It was hard to tell how much was meant to be passing in any given transition…some seemed to be no more than a matter of days, others were jumps of years, which contributed to a feeling of distance from the events being depicted. It’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination, it got both a sequel and a film adaptation and I understand why in both cases, but it ultimately just didn’t click for me in the way I’d hoped and I would hesitate to affirmatively recommend it.
The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford: Richard Milford had been notorious in Newville, a small, all-Black town outside of Tulsa, since he was a little boy. Orphaned in a fire, he and his sister Mae went to live with his wealthy uncle, resented by most of the town for living on the best land and wielding as much power as he could acquire. The uncle’s housekeeper, Alberta, was the closest thing he had to a mother for most of his life, but even she couldn’t control him. Being allegedly struck by lightning during his teenage years did nothing to improve his behavior. His uncle died, and as Richard took his place, bringing in money by moonshining and kicking back to the local sheriff, he decided he wanted to grow a family of his own. He came back from out of town with a first wife, Lally, and over several years three other young women began to reside in his house, and many children were born. The first time the town got a proper look at all the Milfords is when Richard died and the women and children came out from their home for the funeral. But he was far from an old man when he passed, so…what happened to him? The reader finds out through alternating chapters, each highlighting the perspective of a woman in his life and their relationship to him, interspersed by the voices of the townspeople at large. This is a very brief book, less than 200 pages, which works both to its benefit and to its detriment. It feels very tight and punchy to read, and Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s background as a short-story writer shows with her skill for evocative language without excess verbosity. She’s clearly used to cutting her work back to its most essential ideas, which makes this feel engaging and quick-moving but not sparse. Each of the women feels different from the others, their characters clear and distinct, and there’s a Greek-chorus-type feel to the chapters written from the perspective of the other residents of Newville as a whole. In the earliest chapters, we get their views of the women whose own narration we’ve just read, highlighting the differences in how those women feel about themselves from how they are perceived by others…something I wished had been maintained more, though the other women have had less direct contact with the outside so it makes logical sense. But the voices of the town at large turn towards the tales, tall or otherwise, that circulate about Richard himself, and this was one of my frustrations with the book. He’s written as odd-looking and temperamental, and even given his financial security it’s not always easy to understand what drew the women in Richard’s life to him and kept them there outside of desperation and lack of other options. He’s depicted as sexually active since his youth, with no trouble attracting girls, but he never seems all that compelling. I wanted to get a sense of some sort of magnetism or charm, but it never really came through for me. The book’s length also means that there are narrative threads that seemed like they might lead in promising directions but were never fleshed out. Richard’s sister Mae was sent away as a child by their uncle for a “nervous condition”, returning to her brother’s home after the uncle dies, and herself passes shortly before the story begins. What was going on with her as a child? How did she feel about her brother? How did she die? None of these questions are answered, it’s mostly relevant to the narrative that her passing has further destabilized Richard. There’s a childhood friendship with the son of a pastor that suddenly ends in their teenage years, the two men becoming estranged, but the rupture is never fully explained. And there are the women themselves! Two are better-developed than the rest, but I would have loved a second perspective chapter from each of them to round them out more, even just a short one. While like I said previously, I did respond to the feel of the book and understand how the abbreviated length contributed to that feeling, I felt like another 50 pages would have rendered it still far from flabby while letting it breathe a bit more. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading it and it was a promising debut from an already-well-regarded short story author, so I look forward to reading what she writes next and would recommend this one!

In Life…

Scheduling all the appointments: As a working mom, it can be easy to let my own needs fall down the priority list, but this month I scheduled my first-ever mammogram as well as my annual physical, my annual well woman visit, and my annual mole check. If you’re reading this and you’ve been putting off getting those appointments on the calendar, take this as a gentle reminder to just go ahead and do it.

September 22, 2026

Top Ten Tuesday: Books on My Fall 2026 To-Read List

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about the books we’re reading this fall, and once again I have quite a mix! I’ve got a graphic novel on here (the first one I’ll be reading that isn’t for my book club), an actual spooky season book, some nonfiction (memoir, biography, history), and fiction in a couple of different genres.

Funny Boy: I don’t know very much about the conflict in Sri Lanka with the Tamil Tigers, and this book is set during its peak era while also exploring the story of a gay boy coming of age in a conservative culture, so it seems like something I’ll like!

Persepolis: I’ve been wanting to read this memoir for a while and after a couple attempts at getting my book club to pick it have failed I’m just going to read it for myself.

Vampires of El Norte: I don’t tend to respond well to horror, but this promises an epic scope that just might be able to make it work for me!

Bibliophobia: As someone who also has noticed a connection between my mental health and my reading life, this memoir seems directly up my alley.

The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford: Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s story collection was well-regarded and her debut full-length novel seems like it chronicles character-based small town drama in a way I tend to really like.

Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary: I love Anita Anand on the Empire podcast, and what I’ve heard her say on there about the story of the daughter of the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire’s life made me feel like I want to read her whole book!

The Obelisk Gate: Almost unheard of for me to read two books by a single author in one year, but I wanted to read this sequel to The Fifth Season (which I read in January) before toooo much of the lore of the first book escaped from me.

To Paradise: I thought A Little Life was a great book that I never want to read again, but I am definitely interested in reading more of Hanya Yanagihara’s work so hopefully this is at least a little less harrowing.

From Splendor to Revolution: Russian history is fascinating to me so a chronicle of Romanov women is all but guaranteed to be something I’ll enjoy.

Sweet Pea: I am often wary of books that could be described as heartwarming because I shy away from sentimentality in my reading but this seems like it will be grounded in real feeling and I’m hopeful it won’t be too sweet.

September 14, 2026

Book Review: Without A Prayer

Sometimes the idea of someone to outsource thinking about the Big Decisions to seems like an appealing one. Not that I can imagine myself being someone who got involved in a cult, but it’s not totally inexplicable to me that people do. Charismatic people always draw an audience, and there are plenty of vulnerable people in the world who are susceptible to their sway. We live in a complicated, confusing world where bad things often happen for no apparent reason. If someone told you they had the answers, wouldn’t it be tempting to believe them?

Church is supposed to be a safe space. That it often isn’t is something we all became that much more aware of in the wake of the Catholic clergy sex abuse revelations. But still, when nineteen year-old Lucas Leonard walked into his church in upstate New York in October 2015, he almost certainly expected to walk back out again. He didn’t. Susan Ashline’s Without A Prayer tells the story of how the teenager came to be beaten to death by a group that included his own parents and half-sister, and that means exploring the larger narrative of the World of Life Christian Church. Never more than a small group that broke off from a larger Pentecostal congregation, the Church came to be led by the Irwin family (first father Jerry, then daughter Tiffanie after his death), who exerted increasingly tight control over their flock, demanding both money and unswerving loyalty.

Of course, the rules that applied to the rest didn’t apply to the Irwins. While parishioners sat through long sermons, where members who had broken rules were publicly shamed and all contact between members of the opposite sex (including within families) was more and more harshly condemned as “molestation”, the Irwins wandered in and out freely. The Irwins also worked to control the relationships of their congregants by requiring constant texting with leadership about violations committed by themselves and others, and trying to steer them towards pre-determined marriages. One that took was Bruce and Deborah Leonard, both of whom came in with children from previous marriages and then had more of their own, including Lucas. Growing tired of the domination of the Irwins, Bruce’s daughter Crystal broke away, and encouraged Lucas to do so as well. Shortly after he accompanied her to a different church, he was called in for a “counseling” session, where he was accused of molesting his nieces and viciously attacked by his own parents and half-sister, among others, only being taken to the hospital once he was already dead.

It’s a horrifying story. To not only suffer a deadly assault in a house of worship, but to have the perpetrators be your own family members, is just mind-bogglingly awful. Knowing where it’s going to end, reading along as the Irwins isolate the members of their church further and further not just from the outside world, but from each other, brings an increasing sense of dread. The behavior being described is truly bizarre, and that’s without even getting into the wild story around the death of Jerry Irwin, which has to be read to be believed. Ashline clearly has done deep research into the stories of the church in general and the Irwin and Leonard families in particular. She clearly cares about what happened to Lucas and wants to expose the circumstances that led to his untimely death.

Unfortunately, the book never quite comes together. Its primary issue is an excess of facts at the expense of any analysis. Ashline asserts in the subtitle that the church became a cult, she references the testimony of an expert in cult formation at the trial that landed the perpetrators in jail, but she never actually lays out how a cult can be identified or applies that framework to the details of the Word of Life situation. She’s a reporter, so the instinct to present facts to the reader without drawing a conclusion for them is understandable, but it undermines the effectiveness of her book. She also struggles to create a real narrative arc for her story, clearly wanting to include as much as what she uncovered as she can in a way that makes it feel bogged down and directionless in places. I appreciate the work that went into this, but I wish it had been better edited and organized, and there had been more analysis. There’s a great true crime book about Lucas Leonard’s death, but this one isn’t it.

August 31, 2026

A Month In The Life: August 2026

Although of course I know it’s still going to stay summery for a little while yet, September is tomorrow and my brain still thinks that means that it’s fall now. It’s hard to believe that we’re rounding into the last few months of the year, but before we get into that, let’s look back at the month that was.

In Books…

Gichigami Hearts: Misaabekong means “the place of the giants”, and that’s what the Ojibwe people who lived there called it in recognition of the large rock formations in the local landscape long before white people showed up and called it Duluth. Gichigami is, of course, the Ojibwe name for Lake Superior. I’d found myself becoming irritated by family histories a few months back, but either this was the exception that proves the rule or Linda LeGarde Grover is simply a better writer than the others. It’s not strictly a family history, though that and memoir are probably the most prominent threads of this slim book, under 150 pages in my edition. There are also a few poems, some traditional stories, a little bit of local history (including a legend about an Ojibwe man who emerged one day from the rocks and attempted, unsuccessfully, to communicate with the white people he found, eventually walking off never to return). I’ve never been to Duluth, my own love for the big lake is based in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and I worried in the beginning that I was going to have a hard time connecting with this book, so deeply rooted in place, because of that, but those fears turned out to be unfounded. LeGarde Grover’s voice drew me in and kept me engaged, even as the book flitted between genres. She touches on issues like the poisonous legacy of residential schools and the devastating effects of alcoholism on Native American families in a way that is deeply powerful for not feeling preachy…she simply talks about how the people in her own family were impacted by them, and even though they aren’t foregrounded in a way that makes it feel like she’s highlighting them for your attention, the message isn’t difficult to suss. The structure of the book, told in short segments/essays, helps it keep moving, but there’s enough common ground running throughout that it doesn’t feel disjointed. I was really impressed by how lovely I found her writing and I am very interested in reading her novels now! This will probably hit hardest for Great Lakes people, but I think anyone could enjoy reading it and I would recommend it.
Etna: A dog, still really a puppy, is taken from his home on a farm on the coast in a country where a war has recently started. He is given the name Etna, and the other dog he is traveling with is named Fuji. The dogs are dropped off at an American military camp, where they and many other dogs go through training, learning how to sniff out bombs. Etna is assigned a partner, Jason, who works closely with Fuji and her own partner. The war lasts for several years, and by the end, Jason and Fuji are gone. And so Etna, with nowhere else to go, decides he wants to go home. He sets out on a journey that takes him on trains, into a city, up in the mountains, across a river. He meets new dogs, other animals, and humans who may either hinder or help him. A seasoned veteran, he knows that what was once his home is almost certainly gone, but he goes on anyways. It’s apparently a very Odyssey summer, though not only am I sure that the Nolan movie also coming out a few weeks ago is pure coincidence, this has only a very loose connection with the Odyssey in that it tells the story of a soldier’s winding way home after a long war. Though it does have characters named Jason and Achilles, which feels like a wink to those who know Greek legends. It’s quite a short book, but packs no less of a punch for its brevity. “Told from the perspective of an animal” is a narrative technique that can go gimmicky but by and large I tend to enjoy, and this is a well-done example so it worked for me. I appreciated that Paul Yoon didn’t plunge whole hog into trying to flesh out a fully-realized worldview for animals but let the story stand on its own merits. With a straightforward plot and a sympathetic-but-not-especially-developed protagonist, the book rests on its themes: the arbitrariness of war and who survives it, the destruction it brings that reverberates throughout the natural world, the importance of remaining open to connection, and of course the impossibility of ever going home again. Is any of it particularly new or revelatory? Not really, but in a world where war continues to happen despite all the reasons we all know that it shouldn’t, a story that asks the reader to think about its true costs is as relevant as ever. Etna’s travels were rendered very compellingly, and I would recommend this book!
The Book of Salt: A boy, Binh, grows up as the youngest of four sons in Vietnam. His father, devoted to the Catholic Church, is violent and abusive to his wife and children. As he grows into a teenager, his older brother Minh, who works as the sous chef in the home of the Governor General of Indochina in Saigon, springs him from their father’s house by finding Binh a position with him. Things seem to be going well enough, Binh is learning some basic French…and then the new head chef arrives from France. He and Binh begin fooling around, and when the truth is of course eventually revealed, Binh is dismissed not only from his job but his home. With nowhere else to really go, he gets on a ship, and eventually, winds up in Paris. After some initial bumps, he ends up in a position where his still-terrible French is not much of a hindrance…as the cook at the home of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. There he meets a young American man who attends the salons the women host, with no way to know whether this love affair will end any more happily than the last. As a very character-focused reader, I have a high tolerance for books with no plot, but this one was outside the boundaries of even my patience. Very little actually happens, which isn’t a dealbreaker for me usually, but the way this is structured robs it of any sense of momentum. The narrative switches back constantly from Binh’s childhood, his early days in Paris, his days with Stein and Toklas, with little in the way of obvious reason. It made it very difficult for me to get connected with the book or with Binh as a character, who was curiously flat despite having the story told from his perspective. He’s emotionally closed-off and self-destructive, but not in a way that’s rendered as especially dynamic or interesting, just kind of nonsensical. It doesn’t make sense that a man who makes his living as a cook would deliberately cut himself on his hands. That’s a heedless, reckless kind of self destruction that doesn’t match up with the way he’s otherwise portrayed. But I got the sense that Monique Truong was less interested in plot and character and was trying more to draw attention to themes and her prose stylings. To start with the latter, there are some very lovely turns of phrase in this book. The problem is that there are arguably too many, so the flourishes don’t come off as masterstrokes but as the product of a writer who wasn’t interested in killing any of her darlings during editing. When there’s so much imagery, none of it makes the impact that it could. Thematically, I felt like the book was trying to make points about language and understanding, most of all, but also about colonialism, belonging, identity, the way being other can render one both hypervisible and invisible at the same time. But none of it was done particularly well. Binh’s lack of proficiency with French (or even the English spoken by his employers) is constantly referenced, but not only does it not make sense that he wouldn’t have picked up at least a modicum of functional French over the several years he lives in Paris, he’s also depicted as having a deep, sophisticated understanding of what’s being said around him. It doesn’t hang together. On the issue of race, it felt like I was supposed to take something away from the fact that Binh’s lover, Marcus, is himself of mixed race and passing as white. But nothing was actually developed. I was ultimately quite frustrated at the end of reading this book, it felt like there had been little glimpses of a much better one that could have been but it never materialized. If you have a particular fondness for a lush, almost flowery prose style, this might be something you’d enjoy but overall based on my own lack of enjoyment, I can’t recommend it.
The Last White Man: Anders is a fairly typical young man. He works at a gym. His relationship with his father is fond but not close, especially after the recent loss of his mother. He’s been hooking up relatively casually with a high school classmate, Oona, who recently left college and came back to her hometown, in part because of her brother’s death by overdose. And then, one day, he wakes up and finds himself transformed. Once white, he no longer is. He doesn’t seem to be himself, just with more melanin. His body and face are fundamentally different to himself and others. He’s not the only one…all across his unnamed country, people are changing in the same way Anders did, apparently at random. In a world where race is a significant component of social identity, this creates tension and unease, and eventually violence. Anders and Oona become nervous to be seen together as an interracial couple. Eventually, just existing places Anders at risk. But as more and more people change, the world around them has to, too…doesn’t it? I wanted to love this book so badly. I thought Mohsin Hamid’s previous book Exit West was a masterpiece, and this feels like it’s playing in similar thematic territory. What if race, like the country one lives in, could change in an instant? What if the people who didn’t want it to be that way panicked, and tried to resist that change with force? What would it mean to be a part of a group that enjoys a greater ease of existence just because of the way they were born, which then finds that their unearned privilege could be placed in jeopardy, and there’s nothing they can do about it? But while Exit West spun a short, powerful story around these issues (also centered on a pair of young lovers), The Last White Man fell flat for me. Neither book is doing anything all that special with character, the couples at the heart of each book are sympathetic but mostly intended as proxies through which the reader can enter the world…though it was interesting to me that while Exit West focused people who were doing the migrating, the less initially privileged group, this time around Hamid tells his story through people who start out white. Though there are few supporting characters here, it did also feel a bit odd that we never got a glimpse into how people who were always of color viewed the transformed white people. Were they pleased to see the new development, feeling some schadenfreude at watching white people struggle to acclimate? Unhappy that it brought additional negative attention to their communities? Both? Something else entirely? It was clear through the omission that he didn’t intend to explore that angle at all, but I still found myself unsatisfied by it remaining outside the narrative. The prose itself also felt less engaging than his previous work that I’ve read. As readers of this blog know, I love a run-on sentence, but it was taken to a point here that was distracting to me. I kept waiting for the story to build up to something more significant, to have something interesting or new to say about racial perception and society, but to me, it never felt like it did. He’s still an author I’m very interested in new work from, I’ll be very excited to see what he does next, but this one was a miss for me and I can’t recommend it to anyone else either.
Lakota Woman: Mary Brave Bird lived less than sixty years, but it was quite an interesting life. Born on the Rosebud Lakota reservation in South Dakota, she was raised in her early years mostly by her grandparents as her mother was studying and her father had left. It was a precarious existence from a financial/material comfort perspective, but she was loved and had no less than most of the other people she know, so barely understood that they were poor. Eventually, like so many Native American children, she was taken off to boarding school, where the standard of living was not much higher but she and her classmates were subjected to physical and attempted sexual abuse by the nuns and priests who ran the school. She and a friend published an underground newspaper to expose the staff’s misdeeds, which made her unpopular with them and she was routinely punished, including beatings, for minor infractions of the rules. She left without graduating at 15, getting into drunken shenanigans and engaging in petty crime with other teenagers, drawing the ire of the deeply racist local police, always happy to have an excuse to be violent even to the point of deadliness with Indians. Pregnant at 18, she entered the orbit of young activists in the American Indian Movement after meeting the medicine man Leonard Crow Dog and participated in the occupation of Wounded Knee while in the final stages of her pregnancy, eventually giving birth to her son Pedro there. Crow Dog, over ten years her senior, was drawn to her and repeatedly proposed marriage until Mary accepted. She moved in to his small house on his family’s land, becoming a stepmother to his three children as well as parenting her own son, constantly tending to not only their family but the endless guests who visited the already overstuffed residence. Leonard was prosecuted by the government for his activism, and after his conviction he was moved around constantly, with Mary trailing after in order to be able to visit him. After appeals, he was released, and resumed his position as a spiritual leader in his community with Mary by his side. This felt like an odd sort of memoir, not because Mary’s life wasn’t sufficiently remarkable, but in its style and presentation. She’s very matter of fact in her prose, which creates an impact when she casually relates acts of violence and cruelty (like her sister’s unconsented-to hysterectomy when she went to the hospital to give birth), but also makes for an a narrative without emotional peaks and valleys. Heightening the emotional flatness is her apparent disinclination to really talk about her feelings in the book…it must have been quite frightening to be heavily pregnant during Wounded Knee but she never really gets into it, or for that matter any of her feelings about being young and pregnant. Her devotion to her husband once they marry is clear, she follows him as he’s transferred between prisons and works hard to help secure his release, but his three proposals are not related with any sense of romantic pleasure. I don’t feel inherently entitled to anyone’s innermost thoughts and feelings, but it’s unusual for a memoir to offer so little psychological insight. She seems the most engaged when she talks about religious rituals, like eating peyote and the Lakota sun dance, but though they’re clearly meaningful to her it’s hard to convey that sort of spiritual experience in words. She doesn’t seem particularly interested in trying to convey the American Indian Movement in any way outside her own involvement/experience, I wish I’d learned a little more about how it all worked. It’s a valuable collection of insights from a woman who experienced firsthand Indian boarding schools, reservation life in the Dakotas, the American Indian Movement’s time at Wounded Knee and what it was like to be married to a prominent AIM leader, but as a reading experience it leaves a lot to be desired. If you’re interested in what she has to say, it’s worth reading, but don’t expect anything polished. Otherwise, it’s a miss.
Untold Night and Day: The summer in Seoul is punishingly hot. A woman, Ayami, who used to be an actress, works at an odd community theater, where she sells tickets to and introduces audio recordings of plays. The theater is about to close, and Ayami isn’t sure what she’s going to do for work next. She’s been taking German lessons from a woman her boss knows called Yeoni, who asks her to pick up a European poet from the airport and accompany him as his translator as he visits the city. After they close the theater, she and her boss go to dinner in a restaurant that is completely dark. Then they decide to go see Yeoni, coming across a very odd scene in their travels to find her in which a bus drives in circles, around and around. But then again, maybe that’s not true at all. Maybe Ayami is older, a poet herself. Maybe she’s adopted and never meets her real mother. Maybe she’s the daughter of a pharmacist, taken away when her father flees justice after murdering his wife and storing her body in the attic. Maybe she was actually named Yeoni by her birth family and is reunited with them on a television talk show. Maybe she’s in her late 20s. Maybe she’s significantly older. It’s very difficult to provide any sort of plot overview of this book, because an incoherent plot is sort of the point. There’s a jumble of images and motifs: a woman with a pockmarked face, being immersed in total darkness, a poet, etc, and they are constantly being remixed and recycled over the course of the four alternate stories the book presents about Ayami. As a very literal reader, I don’t tend to respond to books that are deliberately exaggerated or overly symbolic, so the surrealist atmosphere of this book was never going to be for me. But I can usually tell what a book is going for even if I don’t personally get on board with it, and that just wasn’t at all the case here. I have no idea what the book was trying to communicate, what story (if any) it was trying to tell. The best thing about it was that it was short. This was an extreme mismatch of book and reader, I just don’t think I was the right audience for whatever it was trying to do, but obviously I can’t recommend it because I did not at all like it!
The Hummingbird’s Daughter: Teresa Urrea was not born into auspicious circumstances. Her indigenous mother, Cayetana, called The Hummingbird, was just 13 or 14 when she was knocked up by Tomas Urrea, the philandering owner of the ranch where she and her family lived and worked. When Teresa (or as she’s usually called, Teresita) was still very small, Cayetana dropped the child off with her sister and never came back. The girl, unloved by her aunt, sleeps wherever she can, including sometimes with the pig. Her life changes, though, when she comes to the attention of the ranch’s native healer/medicine woman, Huila, who takes the child under her wing and begins to teach her what she knows. As she grows into a teenager, not only does Teresita become increasingly skilled at her work, her position as one of Tomas’s several illegitimate children becomes known…first to her, and then to everyone else. But even though things start to seem to be looking up (Tomas acknowledges her and brings her into his home, her talents are admired and utilized by the ranch’s laborers, she has warm and close friendships with other young women), trouble is brewing. Tomas’s already unsteady relationship with Porfirio Diaz’s regime in Mexico City becomes even more strained, and then Teresita herself is brutally assaulted by a man and left for dead. She lingers for a few days after being discovered, but her life slips away and her funeral is imminent. And then she wakes up, at first seeming little like herself, taking in almost no sustenance. It’s not long before she comes back to herself, but she’s fundamentally changed. Where she once was a gifted healer, she’s now performing miracles, which she as a faithful Christian believes are worked by God through her hands. She quickly becomes a local legend, dubbed “Santa Teresita”, with people coming to Tomas’s ranch from hundreds of miles away in the hopes of having their pains eased. She speaks to the gathered people about their inherent rights and dignity, making her dangerous to the government and it is only a matter of time before she’s forced to flee. It feels like been a long time since I’ve really sunk my teeth into a long book, and reading this one made me realize how much I’ve missed them. Luis Alberto Urrea tells this story, about members of his own family (Teresa was his great-aunt, I believe) with an epic scope, taking his time to create a richly-realized world and fully develop many of the people within it. I am often critical of books that pad their page counts by indulging in overly flowery writing or side plots that don’t matter, but even some of the sections that felt a bit draggy when I was reading them (like the moving of Tomas’s operations from one ranch to another and the journey of the laborers and livestock to get there) turned out to enhance the scope and depth of the story he’s telling. The character work is fantastic, we read along with years and years of Teresita’s life, Tomas’s life, Huila’s life and I got emotionally invested in all of them even though I found the portrayal of Tomas to be dated (his predation on often very young women in his employ is treated as a sympathetic character flaw, fixed by the love of a good woman young enough to be his daughter, rather than as a disturbing decades-long pattern of sexual assault). I am seldom very interested in magical realism, but it’s harmless enough here, and I appreciated that along with awe about the magic, the reader is asked to consider the political implications of a woman performing miracles and encouraging the underclasses to think of themselves as full people with rights in an authoritarian state. This book is high-quality storytelling, and I’ll be seeking out the sequel along with more of Urrea’s work because I really enjoyed reading it and would recommend it!

In Life…

C started pre-K: Nevada doesn’t have state pre-K for the majority of kids, so we’re still at the same place he started in the spring, but now he’s learning things to get him ready to go to real school next year, which is mind-blowing to me. I feel like he was just a little baby but he’s growing so much!
I went to Chicago for a show: Bebel Gilberto’s Tanto Tempo was perhaps the most defining album of my years in law school, I listened to it endlessly as I studied, learning the words to the songs phonetically. So when I found out she was doing a small tour for the 25th anniversary of the album, I dragged my friend Crystal to Chicago to go with me, since it’s not a very long train ride from Michigan to get there. It was really cool to get to see the album performed live, and especially to get an extra day with my bestie to toot around a very fun city.

August 25, 2026

Book Review: Followers

I remember signing up for Facebook. It was the second semester of my freshman year of college. Michigan was on the first or second round of colleges it was released to outside of the Ivy League. We all felt very smug because we got it before Michigan State. I can’t remember if we even had profile pictures, at first. I think it was just your name. Status updates had the prompt “[Name] is…”. It was 2004. I’ve been on Facebook for over 20 years.

There was a time when social media felt innocent. But those days are long gone. We have influencers now. This phenomenon is at the heart of Megan Angelo’s debut novel, Followers. The book follows two separate storylines: in one, set just a few years ago from the present day, Orla is a wannabe writer who moved to New York City to chase her dream…and ended up writing posts for a celebrity gossip blog. Feeling stagnant, she finds herself receptive to a proposal made by her pretty new roommate and aspiring reality star, Floss: to cover her on the blog, raising her profile towards at least the D-list. It pays off when Floss starts dating a former child star, Aston, and Orla becomes a bit character on the reality show that films in their apartment. She’s no closer to her professional dreams, but her association with fame brings a long-held personal dream suddenly within grasp…her high school crush, Danny, wants to reconnect, changing her world in ways she never could have imagined.

In the second storyline, taking place in the 2050s, Marlow lives in a real-life version of The Truman Show: she and the fellow residents of her town, Constellation, are on-screen 23 hours per day and live as government-appointed, network-controlled full-time influencers. After a violent incident in her childhood, Marlow is sponsored by the mood-stabilizing drug Hysteryl, which keeps her numbly content with her life of constant surveillance. But when she and her husband, Ellis, decide to have a baby, she goes off the drug in preparation for pregnancy and finds herself deeply unhappy. Unhappy enough to make a run for it into an outside world she’s never really known, where the consequences of a cataclysmic event called The Spill several decades prior have rendered it very different than we might have thought.

The world is definitely ready for novels that try to reckon with the damage that has been and could be wrought by the rise of the internet and the proliferation of social media, so I’d been excited to read this book. It does some things very well: both Orla and Marlow are rich, interesting characters. Neither are particularly sympathetic, but they feel real in their struggles, especially Orla. But Floss never develops with any similar level of care despite some early promise, and the decisions that Orla makes sometimes feel more like plot contrivances than anything organic. This problem becomes bigger as the stakes are raised later in the narrative. The book as a whole is paced well, I found it compelling enough to keep turning the pages and invested in where the story would go next. Angelo has good prose styling, neglecting neither humor nor pathos.

It’s fairly evident, however, that it’s a debut. The dual timeline structure loses balance every so often, and it was just usually as one part really started to cruise along that it would switch to the other, stopping the momentum of the story. Failing to really dig into developing Floss hinders the book, as she appears throughout both timelines and her decisions often steer the course of events. And most of all, I found myself at the end unsure of exactly what it was that Angelo was trying to say. There’s clearly a message that more privacy, and less screen time, is preferable to the alternative. But that’s pretty wishy-washy, and there’s no real strength behind it. There is very much potential here, so it’s frustrating that it never really comes together. I do look forward to seeing what Angelo does in the future, but can’t recommend this book for more than a plane/beach read.

August 11, 2026

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Was Reading On This Day Over the Last Ten Years

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is super fun, we’re looking back at the books we were reading on this day over the past ten years! This is definitely a time when being very dedicated to logging my reading came in handy, I have records dating back to about 2013, I think. These are all over the map, just like my reading writ large!

2025: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Ah, this one. It read like the first half of a two-part techno-thriller…only it wasn’t very good so as far as I know, the second half never got published. I did not like it then and it has not risen in my estimation since.

2024: Deathless

I enjoyed this take on the Russian fairytale of Kaschei the Deathless quite a bit at the time, and I remember it being engaging, but honestly I don’t think I’ve thought about it once in the two years since I read it.

2023: The King Who Had To Go

This nonfiction recounting of how the abdication of Edward VIII actually happened was interesting and reasonably well-written, I liked it then and still think well of it.

2022: Intimacies

I marked this as being one of my better books of the year, but looking back now I remember most being frustrated by it, it was something I should have really liked on paper that did not deliver quite the way I wanted it to, but I think I was trying to convince myself my brain wasn’t permanently broken after giving birth so probably rated higher than I really should have.

2021: The Walls Around Us

I remember very clearly reading large portions of this on an airplane, where the vibey atmospherics it was going for never really came together over the hum of engines and clatter of the drink cart. I can barely remember its plot or characters.

2020: Ivanhoe

I love to try classics, but I also have read enough of them at this point to not feel weird about not clicking with one…it doesn’t mean you’re dumb or bad at reading, it just means that particular book didn’t work for you! This one did not work for me.

2019: Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams

I really enjoyed this nonfiction exploration of Black Hollywood in the Classic Hollywood era, so much so that I’ve bought two of the author’s other books because I found his way of writing about movies and movie stars very accessible.

2018: The Informant

More nonfiction, this was about an unstable informant in a white-collar crime case and was really trying to lean into the humor of it…but that sort of humor doesn’t really do it for me. Didn’t like it, still don’t think highly of it, not surprised it got a movie treatment.

2017: The Sense of an Ending

I remember the major beats of this story shockingly well considering it’s been nearly a decade since I read it and my memory for plot is not especially strong, a testament to how well-written it is. Still, I appreciated its craft more than loved it (which holds true today as well), so I understand why I didn’t rate it among my top reads for that year.

2016: The Lords of Discipline

I thought this was an excellent book at the time and continue to think so, it’s very much in my character-rich wheelhouse. This is one I very much want to read again one of these days.

July 31, 2026

A Month In The Life: July 2026

We’re in the full dog days of summer! It has been hot, but fortunately mostly not too smoky (yet). We’re mostly trying to stay cool and wondering which one of our appliances is going to break next!

In Books…

James: Jim is a slave in Hannibal, Missouri. He is owned by Miss Watson, who also serves as a guardian to young Huckleberry Finn, a local errant youth. When Jim learns that she intends to sell him, he runs away to a small island in the Mississippi River, intending to return shortly for his family so they can all escape together. Instead, the next morning, he discovers Huck on the island, having faked his own death after his violent, alcoholic father attacked him. Realizing that it will be assumed that he killed Huck and fled, the two head off on the river so that Jim can escape to freedom in the north and regroup. Their path does not go smoothly. They have a series of “adventures”, though perhaps travails would be a more accurate word. Jim finds himself separated from Huck, sold twice over, escaping for his life once again. He’s reunited with Huck and the two return to Hannibal to try to free Jim’s family, but discover that their journey is not yet over. I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in high school, but it was definitely in the second semester of my senior year, which means I was not like, especially attentive to it. I mostly remember not really liking it. I do remember that I found the portrayal of Jim very uncomfortable, even as someone who grew up in an area where the racial politics were not great. The idea of a book that retold the story from his perspective, giving him dignity and agency, was very appealing, and of course this book has won or been shortlisted for many, many prizes. So my expectations were very high, but ultimately this was a book I found more admirable than one I actually connected with. It does a reasonable job with character development, but it’s much more focused on its sometimes-frenetic plot than it is on its characters. Which meant for me that a crucial late-plot revelation didn’t quite land. It didn’t feel like it got the room to develop, or breathe. But even more than plot, this is a book that wants the reader to pay attention to its themes, particularly around the construction of identity. In Percival Everett’s telling, the reason that Jim speaks in stereotyped, offensive dialect is that slaves have developed that method of speech to hide their real voices from whites, to protect themselves by allowing whites to feel superior. There are at least two characters who pass, one knowingly and one unknowingly. Jim at one point joins a company of minstrel singers, where his comparatively light complexion is made up to fit the caricature the audience expects to see. And, of course, when Jim does achieve his freedom at the end (in a different way than he does in Mark Twain’s original), he claims his full name. Given the opportunity to decide what he wants to be called, it’s “James”. We are who others see to some extent, but we are also who we decide to be. So while I was disappointed that I found it hard to get really engaged with, it’s a rich, well-told story that mines new depths of meaning out of a familiar tale. It won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, it’s very good and I would happily recommend it to anyone (especially those who love plot-forward books).
The Devoted: Eunha lives every mother’s worst nightmare. Her three year-old son, Minsuk, pulls free from her hand in a crowd in the harbor near where they live in Hong Kong. One second she still sees him, the next he’s gone. While her in-laws insist on calling the police, Eunha makes a much more useful call…to her brother, Solomon, a high-ranking member of the Triads. While he has connections in the underworld that lead to Minsuk’s return, suspicion that those same connections led to the boy’s abduction in the first place drive her husband to formalize their de facto separation and her sister-in-law to remove the boy from his mother’s apartment for protection. She feels she has no choice but to accept these developments, because she’s not just the sister of a gangster, but the daughter of one too, and she knows that the legal system will not be inclined to look at her favorably. Adrift without her son, she comes across a room salon, where men come to drink and entertain themselves in the company of pretty, engaging women. Eunha starts to find community there, becoming friendly with Jing, one of her co-workers, when someone walks in from her childhood and turns this newly established world upside down. Kaito was the nephew of her father’s right-hand man, about the same age as Solomon, and was the only other child they saw on anything resembling a regular basis as the siblings grew up with their grandmother, their mother having suffered a nervous breakdown after being kidnapped herself when Eunha was very small and their father wanting to keep them safely outside the grasp of his foes. He, too, has joined the Triads, and as she’s drawn back into his orbit, Eunha has to decide whether she wants the safe life her father had tried to arrange for her before his own death or if she should throw in her lot with the underworld she’s always been around the edges of. This is a book that sits at a bit of an uneasy genre intersection. There are strong mystery/thriller elements here, but it’s slow-paced and a significant portion of the narrative consists of Eunha’s childhood memories, building her character as well as Solomon’s and Kaito’s. For me, this was very effective, because I really enjoy character-oriented stories and the tension of the plot kept me turning the pages to find out how the story developed. People who really enjoy thrillers, though, will likely feel like it drags. Maybe not, though, because Catherine Cho structures the book to have several mini-mysteries. The initial suspense of what might happen to Minsuk is (thankfully for mothers of small boys) relatively quickly resolved. But then more dominoes fall: there’s a murder, there’s the question of how/if Eunha will get her son back, there are the suitcases that Eunha notices Jing bringing to the salon and leaving without, and then there’s the narrative-long development of what happened between Eunha, Solomon, and Kaito over the course of their childhoods and how it reverberates into their adult lives. The plot does feel a little unbalanced, with the end picking up speed significantly in a way that feels a bit dizzying. The plot is also put together too neatly at points, and some connections are telegraphed too obviously (I guessed a couple twists myself and I am terrible at that sort of thing). I mostly found it engaging and interesting, and I appreciated the character work. For a reader who, like me, likes something a bit more leisurely, this will be an enjoyable summer read and I’d recommend it. For the true thriller heads, though, look elsewhere.
The Girls of 17 Swann Street: Anna Roux weighs 88 pounds. Once a ballerina living in Paris, now she’s at 17 Swann Street, an eating disorder recovery group home in Saint Louis, Missouri. Somewhere between a career-derailing injury, her move with her husband Matthias to the United States for a better job for him, not being able to find work she actually likes for herself, and struggling to find community in her new home, a habit of restricting her food intake spiraled into something much darker. As she makes tentative connections with the other women in the group, like longtime resident Emm, shy and sweet Valerie, and high-spirited Julia, Anna is faced with a stark choice: either she wants to live, which means she has to eat, or she can completely surrender to the pain and fear behind her disorder and watch her body become unable to support her continued existence. Anyone who has lived with an eating disorder will immediately clock that Yara Zghaib is writing this novel from a perspective of having lived it herself, and that insider’s perspective goes a long way to keep this book from feeling like an after school special. It is very much an Issue Book, there are definitely some info-drops about anorexia that occasionally feel a little clunky. But it’s rooted in tremendous empathy for those who deal with eating disorders, the deadliest mental illnesses. The plot, to be honest, is a bit on the formulaic side…from the moment it begins and Anna starts meeting the other girls, it’s obvious that someone is going to die, someone else is going to get kicked out. It’s also pretty obvious that Anna herself will make it out alive. Her relationship with Matthias, who comes to visit her daily, is warm and vital, and her memories of happiness with him form a central component of the narrative. But figuring out how and when she will turn the corner provided enough forward momentum for me, at least. I was invested in her as a character and her journey towards reclaiming life. The book has quick, short chapters that keep it going, so despite what is often heavy subject matter it doesn’t feel ponderous or wallow-y. It’s a hard book to affirmatively recommend because of what it’s about, but if you’re inclined towards it I think it’s very much worth the time, I found it touching.
Sister of My Heart: Anju and Sudha are cousins, but they feel more like sisters. Born on the same day, their fathers (themselves cousins) having been killed at the same time, they’re raised by both mothers, as well as a widowed aunt, in Anju’s family home. Beautiful Sudha dreams big but mostly follows the rules, while Anju is a bold risk-taker. As a pre-teen, Sudha learns a secret about her family that makes her feel an even greater sense of responsibility towards Anju. So when she falls in love with a man her mother won’t consider for her husband and plans to elope, but learns that the parents of the man Anju has fallen for will put a stop to her upcoming marriage if they catch even a whiff of scandal, she has to decide whether she should follow her heart or sacrifice her own happiness for her cousin’s. Anju and Sudha’s lives take different directions, with one moving to America while the other remains in India, and their closeness waxes and wanes, but there’s too much history between them for their bond to ever truly be severed, even as their lives take unexpected paths. This book felt like it lives pretty squarely in a genre that has come to feel a bit retro: women’s fiction. Not chick lit, chick lit is more lighthearted and comedic, but women’s fiction. It’s not pure melodrama, but definitely leans that way: there are long-suppressed family lies, falling in love with the wrong person, sudden heart disease, a love triangle, controlling in-laws, a desperate quest for a baby, people who are not who they seem. But to pull off a story with the dramatic plot twists and turns that this one takes, I needed to feel more connected with the characters. The novel is told through alternating chapters from either woman’s perspective, which would seem to be a natural way to balance out the character development, but I found Sudha to be more fully realized than Anju. Their bond and the way it shifts over time is rendered convincingly enough, it was what I found most enjoyable about it overall. The portrait the reader gets of Sudha, though, is of a person whose motives hang together and make sense as a way to approach the world, while Anju felt more like an idea of a person, it was hard to imagine what she might have been up to between segments. Something she finds deeply wounding happens about midway through the book, but near the end she realizes she’s forgotten about it in a way that didn’t seem particularly realistic, even considering that something devastating has happened in between. When the really bad thing happens, I felt hard-hearted for not finding it all that affecting, but I just hadn’t been given enough reason to really emotionally invest in her. It ends with what feels like a cliffhanger for a sequel, which was indeed written, but I am not nearly curious enough about what might happen to read it. If you’re in the mood for an emotion-forward story about family and particularly like books set in India, this might appeal to you. It’s far from bad, but I can’t honestly recommend a book that I was never able to get really hooked into.
Open Season: The deck is stacked against anyone who isn’t a white man in the United States. If you don’t understand quite how, Ben Crump’s book, published just about a year before the Black Lives Matter movement took off, lays out the case. He examines the ways those lives, most especially those of people of color, are placed in peril: from very straightforward, obvious ways like police brutality to more subtle, insidious ones like educational opportunities and environmental racism. That Crump is a lawyer, specifically a courtroom litigator was very obvious to me, someone who was also a lawyer for a time, in reading this book. It reads, at least for the first half or so (which focuses on the criminal justice system), very much like an opening statement. He makes a lot of bold claims, including the one that makes up the subtitle of this book: that the way people of color are treated in this country is akin to a genocide. He highlights many specific, flagrant examples of injustice to illustrate his points. When it gets into the back half, into the larger systemic factors like education, the school-to-prison pipeline, and environmental pollution in close proximity to communities of color, it becomes more research focused, still providing real-life examples but rooted in empirical data. For me, the back half was much more successful than the front. There’s no denying the power of the true, awful stories, particularly around police misconduct but also stand-your-ground laws, but a few dozen examples from a nation of many millions of people does not make the strongest logical argument. The assertion about genocide seems to be more rhetorical than earnest, and while he has a lot of serious information to share it doesn’t really fully support that claim so I was pleased that it didn’t form a more significant through-line. Despite the power of the moral clarity of his argument, the book isn’t quite as successful as it could be. He sometimes argues both sides of an issue like mandatory minimum sentences, decrying both overly broad judicial discretion as having allowed for conscious and unconscious biases to be weaponized against people of color but also that mandatory minimums make it too difficult for judges to consider the totality of circumstances. Those two options are either end of a continuum, but it seems he thinks both are too flawed for wide-scale implementation without much in the way of ideas about alternatives. He sometimes wants courts to be more small-c conservative on following precedent, but then sometimes wants them to engage in “bold” interpretations of statutory or constitutional language. Many of his broad-scale facets of racism, like lack of educational opportunity, are more directly connected to poverty than to race. Besides a handful of concrete suggestions in the epilogue of the book, it’s a bit unclear what solutions are really being advocated. I was expecting and hoping for something more akin to a legal brief, designed to appeal to my head, but what he clearly intended to write was much more a call to emotion and righteous anger. This would serve as an effective introduction to the major arguments around the way racism manifests for someone already inclined to be sympathetic but isn’t well-informed. It’s too much of a polemic for a fence-sitter and too basic for anyone who already has a fundamental grasp on the issues.
A Pale View of Hills: Etsuko is an older Japanese woman living in England, being visited by her younger daughter, Niki, after her older daughter, Keiko, recently committed suicide. While Niki’s father was the British man Etsuko was married to in England, Keiko was a product of Etsuko’s previous life in Japan and had always struggled to adjust to her changed circumstances. Niki’s visit coincides with Etsuko’s remembrance of Sachiko, a woman she once knew when she lived in Nagasaki. Sachiko and her small daughter Mariko entered Etsuko’s life when the latter was pregnant, moving into a cottage close to the apartment building Etsuko resided in with her husband, Jiro. Like everyone else, including Etsuko, Sachiko’s existence was turned upside down by the war, her once-comfortable circumstances having changed drastically. She’s met an American serviceman, Frank, and is determined to get herself and her daughter overseas to new and better opportunities. Despite her stated concern for her child’s future, though, Sachiko is often almost frighteningly indifferent to her. Mariko is frequently left home alone despite being very young, and even when her mother is home, she disappears outside with little apparently concern from Sachiko. As the story of the women’s acquaintance progresses to its conclusion, though, inconsistencies start to arise that call into question Etsuko’s remembrances. Kazuo Ishiguro has come to be one of my very favorite authors, and this was his debut novel. The themes that have preoccupied him in much of his writing (at least the ones that I’ve read), like memory, loss, and the ways people avoid knowing the things that it would undermine their self-concept to understand, are very much present here. So too is a prose style characterized by elegance and restraint. It’s remarkably sophisticated for a debut, but coming from the perspective of having read his later work, it’s also obvious how much room he had to grow from here. He places an important plot/character development literally in the last ten pages of the book, not giving it the room to breathe and be as effective as it might have. There are questions left unanswered, some of which are fine to leave hanging, some of which feel like they could and should have been resolved. Ishiguro’s characters often feel at a remove, but especially so here. I found the way the book dealt with the war to be interesting, especially in light of where it takes place. There are glancing, oblique references to the tragedy that took place in Nagasaki itself, while the aftermath of the war is largely explored through the breakdown of previously-existing social structures, including Etsuko’s father-in-law’s reaction to an article criticizing the way he and other teachers instructed their students, as well as Sachiko’s displacement from her previous life and family. It’s overall a very solid book, made the more gratifying to read by knowing that the promise it hints at would in fact be realized. A must-read for Ishiguro heads, and worth your time for everyone else!
The Chosen and the Beautiful: One book that comes up pretty much anytime there’s a discussion of the mythical Great American Novel (and, to be honest, what I would probably argue for if pressed) is The Great Gatsby. It’s 100 years old and still speaks to some of the most salient issues in American life, particularly those related to money. Nghi Vo’s retelling adds race and sexuality to the mix by taking side character Jordan Baker and making her a queer Vietnamese woman, adopted as a very small child into the upper-crust Louisville that includes a young Daisy. But that’s not the only element Vo changes around the narrative. She also incorporates magic into this world, making it a place where souls can literally be sold to the devil, demon liquors give strange power to their drinkers, and Jordan herself possesses the ability to cut paper into shapes which she can bring to life. In this version, Gatsby has bargained away his essence for the wealth and power to woo Daisy, but his love for her does not impede his exploration of life’s other pleasures, including an affair with Nick and a flirtation with Jordan, who are involved with each other as well. It makes for a love rhombus of a sort. The story, while including new material centered around Jordan and her experiences, proceeds down the path we’ve all come to know, leaving Jordan’s life forever changed. It’s a bold move to make your debut novel a retelling of one of America’s most consistently celebrated books, and Nghi Vo manages to in large part pull it off, at least for me. I suspect how much a reader likes this book will be directly related to their appreciation for Vo’s prose style, because it’s very distinctive and quite different than Fitzgerald’s original. It’s very vivid, lots of simile and metaphor, heavy on imagery. While I can appreciate elegant and delicate writing, at heart I have always enjoyed rhetorical flourish, so it worked well for me. Indeed, it’s the writing that elevated the book in my estimation, because I don’t think it was entirely successful on a plot level. While I loved the introduction of outright queerness into the narrative, along with the racial angles introduced in changing Jordan’s ethnicity, the new fantastical/magical realism elements felt like Vo was trying to do a bit too much. Jordan’s paper-cutting powers are underdeveloped, and the introduction of a Gatsby-employed troupe of Vietnamese magicians for his parties who share her skill raised questions that the narrative never even attempts to answer. As Jordan was taken from her home well before the age she would have been explicitly instructed in such a thing, are we meant to believe her talent is inborn and shared by all Vietnamese people? All Asians? Are manifestations of magic segregated by race? Vo doesn’t address these questions, or several others that popped into my head around demons and the selling of souls, which makes most of the magical elements of the story feel like vibe-y set dressing. The vibes are great, the atmosphere Vo creates is glamorously sordid, but I found myself wishing more than once that the magic had just been left out. I think the story is strong enough without it, though I will say that I thought a late-occurring plot revelation didn’t quite land. On the whole, though, it bites off a lot and did manage to chew most of it, mostly on the power of its prose. I had a good time reading it! I would recommend it, but it’s one of those where if you’re not bought into its style within 20 pages or so, it’s going to be a rough read.

In Life…

More home repair: In the last six months, we’ve replaced our fridge, our HVAC system, and our sewer drain pipe. And this month we added our dishwasher to the list! Pretty sure the only appliance left from when we bought only five years ago is the oven, so fingers crossed it holds out for a bit longer because we’re kind of tapped out on things that aren’t working right.

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