For the next while, I am not going to write and post book reviews. I have written at least a little bit about at least a subset of the books I’ve read, at some points just for my own eyes and at others for public consumption in different ways, for more than 25 years. For …
YA contemporary. Hani and Ishu are Bengali-Irish teens living in Dublin. They are among the only desi girls in their school, are very different people, and are not friends. But when Hani is trying to figure out how to stop her white Irish friends from their quite aggressive refusal to accept her identification as bi, …
By a professor of history and African American studies at Yale, this book examines the history of urban rebellions – often called ‘riots’ by official sources – in US cities from the mid-1960s to the present day. Though today we most often remember only the highly publicized uprisings in the largest cities in the mid-to-late …
A collection of writings by Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah. He first became known beyond Egypt for his role in the revolution of 2011, but he was active well before that and he comes from a longstanding leftist family – his father had been a political prisoner in his youth and went on to become …
Literary fiction. Follows a semi-pro wrestler in Nebraska whose life is, relatively speaking, good – he is pretty sure he’s about to hit the big time, he is in a solid long-term relationship, he has a decent day job as a school janitor, and he knows who he is and what he wants. This book …
I have read several books by this author before, all middle-grade, and really, really liked them, so there was no way I wasn’t going to read this one, her first book aimed at adults. The titular Delilah, a big-city photographer who doesn’t do relationships, goes back to the small town where she grew up to …
Sci-fi thriller. Set in a ship that has been sent by the monopolistic corporation that claims all non-Earth space to explore a world for possible settlement. The main character is a psychologist of sorts, but one that specializes not in talk therapy but in observing people’s secret tells to figure out what they won’t talk …
Sci-fi. A scientist who has developed sophisticated human cloning technology that works but that has not yet been broadly commercialized finds out that her husband is somehow having an affair with a clone of her. Told in a first-person voice that wonderfully conveys (particularly in the audiobook) the suffer-no-fools, brilliant, not really very nice, damaged, …
Middle grade/YA. Contemporary fantasy, I suppose. Follows a teen Lipan Apache girl on not-quite-our-Earth and a cottonmouth snake animal person in the world of animal people that is a sort of reflection of Earth, an alternate dimension with which it was once wholly joined but which is now only connected through a small number of …
Speculative short stories. I’ve known Link’s name and reputation for years but never read anything by her before…well, I should say I have never read any entire books by her before, because I realized part way through listening to this one that I had encountered one of the stories somewhere else, though I don’t remember …