MY MONTICELLOBOOK REVIEW Jocelyn Johnson’s novella, My Monticello, is a soul-nourishing story that begins on a spring night in the near-future after the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in 2017. White nationalists have returned to town. They are burning down houses and brutally attacking people of color. Da’ Naisha Love, a descendant of Thomas […]
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LILY’S PROMISEBOOK REVIEW Lily’s Promise is a great read on so many levels. The book’s namesake, Lily, has just lost her beloved father to an illness that taxed family’s resources. She and her mother, an immigration lawyer, move to a smaller house in a different neighborhood. Lily had been home schooled, taught by her father.
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A MOST PECULIAR BOOKBOOK REVIEW As a child, when I thought about the origins of the Bible, I pictured an old, white-robed, balding guy sitting at a long wooden table with scrolls piled up around him. He is surrounded by fluffy clouds and a few helpful cherubs. His look is pensive. His quill pen is
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THE COLLAPSIBLE MANNEQUINBOOK REVIEW Written by Charlotte Matthews, The Collapsible Mannequin is a delightfully quirky novel. The chapters alternate between Clarence, a twelve-year-old child, and his mother, Sarah. They live over the Gateway Rent-to-Own Store in Rolla, Missouri. Clarence desperately wants to know the identity and location of his father. Sarah recoils the few times
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THE WRONG KIND OF WOMANBOOK REVIEW Sarah McCraw Crow’s novel transports the reader to the 1970’s at a fictional college similar to Dartmouth. The era is turbulent, both culturally and politically, much like America today. The parallels between now and then are uncanny: a sharply divided nation experiencing a tsunami of discord. Some people push
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HALFBOOK REVIEW I read Sharon Harrigan’s novel, HALF, in two sittings. It was that good. HALF is a story about identical twins named Artis and Paula, named for Zeus’s twins, Artemis and Apollo. They live with a father who is a monster and a mother who enables him. Told in the first-person plural, Harrigan credibly
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EVERYONE BRAVE IS FORGIVEN Everyone Brave is Forgivenis a book you should read if you would like to nourish your brain. Just about every sentence is deliciously well written. The novel is set in London and Malta during World War II and addresses the themes of class, race, and the morality of war. Eighteen-year-old Mary,
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A WOMAN IS NO MANBOOK REVIEW “I was born without a voice, one cold overcast day in Brooklyn, New York. No one ever spoke of my condition. I did not know I was mute until years later, when I opened my mouth to ask for what I wanted and realized no one could her me.
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THE STORY OF ARTHUR TRULUVBOOK REVIEW Are you looking for a pleasant summer read? Consider The Story of Arthur Truluvby Elizabeth Berg. Each day, eighty-five-year old Arthur Moses eats his lunch by the graveside of his wife, Nola, who died six months before. As he walks into the cemetery and passes other headstones, he vividly
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VIRGIL WANDERBOOK REVIEW I have the attention span of a fruit fly. Whether in a movie or book, pacing is important to me. When a movie is slow, I’ve been known to hit fast forward, then read the subtitles as I zoom to the end. Virgil Wanderstarts slowly, but I hung in through the first
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