This book is slightly curious for being one of those about a black girl, but her blackness is very much in the background of the story, not seemingly all that important to her life story at all. In fact, for...
People of my age might view the phenomenon of influencers with vague bewilderment. Who are these people, and why are they so famous? How do they make money? And why do people want to be influenced by them? Some, if...
I was warned not to bother reading this book, but having recently been rereading many of P.D James’ Adam Dalglish novels, and even a Cordelia Grey novel, and having been utterly thrilled anew by James’ artistry and craftsmanship, I threw...
In the aftermath of the Soviet invasion, an Afghan family moved to Pakistan as refugees. Years later in 1997, they migrated to Northern Virginia, arriving in the dead of winter, with no extended family to help. The small, tightly-knit Afghan...
Amy Chua is famous for Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a sort of memoir, as well as recommendations for bringing up children. She is a legal scholar and has written two other books, World on Fire, about ethnic hatred...
I expect many readers have heard of and/or read Ann Patchett, but how many have heard of Lucy Grealy? I had not. Grealy wrote a well-received memoir, Autobiography of a Face, but only one, and she died young, which is...
Maybe it is typical of a Ken Follett novel that characters tend to be villains or heroes, to be two dimensional and typecast, because he mostly uses his characters as props to move his plotline swiftly along. In this novel...
Here’s my hypothesis: ‘normal’ life right now is so stressful, traumatic and chaotic that authors are tilting towards gentler plots that avoid dealing with current events. There was Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake: a sweetly written story with no narrative tension...
This is maybe a novel for art lovers. The premise is interesting, that our protagonist is Mona, a precocious and charming 10 year old, quietly doing her math homework, suddenly loses her sight entirely. “She felt a dark shadow fall...
Kathryn Stockett’s first novel, The Help, set in 1950s Mississippi and focusing on the interactions between the black household help and their white employers, was a huge success. It was made into a film that was also hugely successful. The...
This novel provides a lively new angle of experience of the Filipino diaspora in California, and particularly, in Las Vegas. Filipinos have been arriving in California since the start of the 20th century, and currently actually, the American History Museum is...
Jane Austen wrote only six novels in her life. Each one was an exquisite microcosm of her society with all its faults and foibles. Many many authors have been so taken by her plots and descriptions that they’ve attempted to...
Why We Die is the third of the Oxford-Zoe Boehm series (which has 4 books so far), and while nowhere near as good reading as the Slough House-Slow Horses series, I have run out of that series and so have to...
Taylor Jenkins Reid has both fame and fortune, as the author of the bestselling The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and also Daisy Jones and the Six, which went on to become an Amazon Prime TV series. She is prolific,...
It seemed clear from the outset that although a large part of this book is supposedly set in Saigon, there was never going to be all that much local colour or Vietnamese culture depicted in this novel. It is very...
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