Leaving Coy’s Hill by Katherine A. Sherbrooke With incredible elegance and insight, Leaving Coy’s Hill strikes a perfect balance between historical setting and a rendering of the inner woman. I delighted in Lucy’s character, her quirks, ambition, loves, as well as her friendships and connectedness to important figures of the time. While the novel illuminates the timeless […]
Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth Okay, so a haunted girls boarding school set in Little Compton, Rhode Island… Plain Bad Heroines had me at hello. Emily Danforth has such a punchy and quick-witted use of language that there were always several layers of entertainment going on for me, and I was taken by her […]
White Ivy by Susie Yang This review originally appeared in the New York Journal of Books. White Ivy is a suspenseful novel with a protagonist who is intentionally portrayed as an anti-heroine. It begins “Ivy Lin was a thief but you would never know it to look at her.” In classic anti-heroism style, Ivy has few […]
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson To write a memoir in prose, to distill each experience into just the right words, to leave enough white space on the page for a reader to jump in and participate with the language, that is the work of a master. Reader, you already know you are in masterful […]
This essay was originally published on Medium.com. For many women of my generation, kitchens are command central, the headquarters from which the multi-tasking happens. And as much as we love the warmth and nurturing sentiment the kitchen represents, let’s be honest: the work required to maintain the hearth can start to feel like a chore. […]
Anxious People by Fredrik Backman With an equal measure of humor and philosophy, Backman’s latest work examines the intricacies of family and home and the anxiety we feel over getting it right. The novel’s structure engaged me from the very beginning with its omniscient voice moving two steps forward and then one step backward, telling […]
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang A highly entertaining read, especially for an author with interactions in the publishing industry! A scathing review of what goes on, how darlings are chosen, and what passes for diverse representation. I don’t know if a reader without publishing experience would enjoy it as much as I did. Still, an inventive […]
The Book of V by Anna Solomon I loved this book’s ambition. Any modern retelling of a biblical character has me hooked as well. The braiding of the three point-of-view characters’ stories in The Book of V was masterful and the reveal about two-thirds of the way through around how their lives were even more […]
Jacobo’s Rainbow by David Hirshberg May 2021 Although set in the nineteen sixties, David Hirshberg’s Jacobo’s Rainbow is infused with prescient relevance today. This hero’s journey shines a light on activism and protest on a college campus as well as the idea of patriotism and serving in the army. Most profoundly, it depicts a search […]
Cassandra Speaks is Lesser’s musing on how it might be different if women told our civilization’s earliest stories, how it might be different if our society valued attributes found predominantly in women as opposed to those found predominantly in men. Layers and layers of patriarchy are hard to strip off, however, as both women and […]
