Two Sentence Summary: What would happen if the story from the famous opera, Butterfly’s Child were real? A three-year-old boy — the product of an affair between an American lieutenant and a Japanese geisha — is adopted by his father and new wife, Kate, and transplanted to a family farm in rural Illinois.
One Sentence Review: Butterfly’s Child is hard to put down, but an almost-too-clever mid-book revelation and general feeling of quickness in the storu left me wondering whether this is a book that will stay with me in the long-term.
Book Review
One Sentence Summary: After years of being beaten down working as a foreign correspondent, journalist Anthony Shadid returned to rebuild himself as he rebuilt his ancestor’s ancestral home in war-torn Lebanon.
One Sentence Review: House of Stone is a melancholy and undeniably beautiful book about history, home, and family that I wanted to re-read the moment I turned the last page.
When Cheryl Strayed was 22-years-old, she lost her mother to a remarkably aggressive form of lung cancer; 49 days after the initial diagnosis, Strayed’s mother was gone. In the few years after, Strayed’s life slowly unraveled. She began sleeping around, cheating on her loving and devoted husband. She got pregnant and had an abortion. She fled her home in Minnesota to loaf around in Portland, where she started experimenting with heroin.
One Sentence Summary: Accident reconstructionist Nick Arvin uses science to solve the mysteries of physics at accident sites, and, eventually, has to grapple with the accident that sent his life down this path.
One Sentence Review: Nick Arvin’s characters are smart, funny, and human, even when the situations they find themselves in threaten to veer entirely into chaos.
When Akash Kapur was a child growing up in India, the East Coast Road — the main artery through the countryside of southern India — was a potholed tar road with views of the ocean. When Kapur returned to his native India in 2003 after more than 10 years living in the United States, the East Coast Road had been transformed into a modern, paved highway that Indian politicians look to as an example of what modern India can be. But instead of ocean views the East Coast Road is now flanked by tourist developments and, closer to the city, urban crowding and a growing technology corridor.
In 1951, just before he should have been preparing to argue arguably the most important civil rights case of the decade, Brown v. Board of Education, NAACP laywer Thurgood Marshall found himself in a perilous situation — riding a train into the deep South to defend one of four young African American citrus pickers that had been accused of raping a white girl in Groveland, Florida.
Methland is an almost perfect example of the kind of narrative nonfiction that I love to read. In fact, if I ever have someone come up and ask me, “What is narrative nonfiction?” I’m probably just going to shove Methland into their hands and refuse to discuss the topic further until they take the time to read the book. Watch out, people.
I have to admit, part of the reason I wanted to Raised Right by Alisa Harris this book was a sort of voyeurism. As a person not raised going to church or even ascribing to a particular religious philosophy (other than my mom’s constant advice to “Do unto others and you would have them do unto you”), I have a really hard time understanding where religious, right-wing politicians are coming from when they so deeply connect religion and politics. In fact, it rubs me the wrong way so much that it’s almost impossible for me to take a candidate from the Religious Right seriously.
Last May, the publicity team at BenBella Books offered me a copy of a collection of critical essays about Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series, The Girl Who Was on Fire. In celebration of The Hunger Games movie, BenBella Books has released an updated, movie tie-in edition of the book with three new essays and, if you buy the ebook edition, bonus movie content a week after the film is released. According to a press release they sent out with the book,
On March 23, 2012, the film The Hunger Games, starring Jennifer Lawrence, hits theaters—and one week later, Smart Pop will provide e-book buyers with those YA authors’ thoughts about the film.
And finally, the last two books that were part of the nonfiction list for the Indie Lit Awards this year! These last two books — Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckhoff and In the Garden of Beasts by Eric Larson — were rereads for me. Rather than write two new reviews, I thought I’d link back to my original thoughts and share some impressions I had of the books in the process of reading and thinking about them again.
