Cuisine. Culture. Commentary.
Once thing I’ve learned about India through my literary endeavors is the vast disparity between the lower and middle classes. In Thrity Umrigar’s novel, these two groups are placed in direct contrast, as seen through the eyes of two women. Bhima lives in a Bombay slum. She is illiterate and missing two teeth. She cares for…
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Quinn is a 20-something still trying to get her life together. She hates her job but doesn’t know what else to do, she’s still getting drunk and bringing home strange men, and she subsists on frozen pizza because she doesn’t know how to cook a proper meal. But when her roommate and best friend, Esther, is…
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BJ Novak is goofy. Each of the short stories in this book elicits a chuckle. “How does he come up with this stuff?!” is something I bemused after almost every story. Novak chooses a different, random situation for each story. There’s the one about a woman on a date with a warlord, the roast of Nelsen…
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After reading The Secret Place, I was down to read another Tana French thriller. I really enjoyed it but was frustrated by the number of loose ends left at the end. Detectives Ryan and Maddox are summoned to work on the case of a young girl who was murdered in the woods of a Dublin…
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I can not handle how talented Marina Keegan is. At age 22 she is an INCREDIBLE writer. That’s why it is devastating to learn that at age 22, just five days after graduating magna cum laude from Yale, Keegan died in a car crash. It’s so cheesy to call someone a bright star, but that’s…
Read MoreLindsay Hunter’s debut novel is a look at the tragic trajectory of trailer trash. (Apologies for that serious alliteration.) Perry and Baby Girl are best friends, not because they like each other all that much, but because they offer a distraction. They’re not staying up all night giggling on the phone about boys and other…
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Clay is a nerd with lots of nerd friends. But even nerds need jobs so when he loses his in the recession, he takes the first thing he can get. That’s how Clay finds himself working the night shift (10 PM – 6 AM) at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. The store has only a few…
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I had never heard of Tana French, but the author endorsements on the book itself were from some of my favorite crime/suspense authors so I gave it a shot. Aaaand now I want to read all her other novels. The action in “The Secret Place” takes place at an Irish boarding school, where detectives have…
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This book begins with a shooting that leaves one woman dead in a saloon on the outskirts of town and her friend left to figure out what happened. As we flashback to the weeks leading up to the shooting, we learn that an unbearable heat and a smallpox epidemic has been ravaging San Francisco in…
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It’s not stated explicitly, but this is essentially a fictionalized account of Laura Bush’s life. Though names and locations have been changed, the similarities are striking: Alice (the Laura Bush character) grows up a quiet and proper only child in a small town, naive to the ways of the world. After a tragic accident in…
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Peaches to Apples 