You Think It, I’ll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld
a bookclique pick by Vanessa Kroll Bennett Curtis Sittenfeld’s book of short stories, You Think It, I’ll Say it, is composed of the everyday stories of white, educated, middle-class women’s lives . The homogeneity of the various narrators and the ordinariness of the settings of the stories, in cities like Houston, St. Louis, Minneapolis, allow the reader to become immersed in small, personal narratives. As … Continue reading You Think It, I’ll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld
Circe by Madeline Miller
a bookclique pick by Jessica Flaxman A hero on a long journey home to his kingdom, wife and child is delayed again and again by mythical creatures and arduous traps. Through cleverness and creativity, along with the patronage of the goddess Athena, Odysseus defeats the Cyclops, escapes the Sirens, and visits the land of the dead. Why it was not so easy for him to … Continue reading Circe by Madeline Miller
Bookclique’s Best – 2nd Quarter Round-Up
bookclique presents the Top 10 reviews from March to June, 2018. Titles are hyperlinked. Fiction – John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down Fiction -Hanya Yanagahara’s A Little Life Fiction – Jennifer Joukhadar’s The Map of Salt and Stars Fiction – Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling Memoir – Tara Westover’s Educated Memoir – Maggie O’Farrell’s I am, I am, I am Poetry – Erin Fornoff’s … Continue reading Bookclique’s Best – 2nd Quarter Round-Up
An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn
a bookclique pick by Rhoda Flaxman If you loved The Odyssey in school — and even if you didn’t — this book is a winner. Offering a trip through Homer’s epic text, Classics professor Daniel Mendelsohn interweaves the story of a son, Telemachus, and a father, Odysseus, with another son/father pair — Daniel and his father, Jay. When Jay, an eighty-two-year-old man with tremendous intellectual curiosity, asks to sit … Continue reading An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn
My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent
a bookclique pick by Lindsey Mead My Absolute Darling is a fever dream of a novel, as difficult to read as it is impossible to put down. I read it in two days, a couple of long, breathless gulps, and since I finished I haven’t been able to stop thinking of the world Gabriel Tallent created. My Absolute Darling traces the maturation and growth of a scrappy, formidable protagonist, 14 … Continue reading My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
a bookclique pick by Katrina Smith There’s nothing more likely to make an English major’s heart flip flop than a novel with an important social message twisted delicately into gorgeous language that cannot help but compel. I felt that flip flop reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, and I experienced that same feeling again now reading Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater. The parallels between the … Continue reading Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich
a bookclique pick by Cricket Mikheev “I write not about war, but about human beings in war. I write not the history of a war, but the history of feelings. I am a historian of the soul.” So writes Svetlana Alexievich, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” This … Continue reading The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich
The Map of Salt and Stars by Jennifer Joukhadar
a bookclique pick from Katie Noah Gibson I’ve always loved maps. Since I was a child sitting in the backseat of my parents’ car, tracing our summer road-trip routes on the pages of my dad’s United States atlas, I’ve been fascinated by those collections of lines and space. They help us navigate the physical world, but they tell us so much more than where we’ve … Continue reading The Map of Salt and Stars by Jennifer Joukhadar
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
a bookclique pick from Vicky Waldthausen Reading a book once doesn’t usually result in a character sticking with me, no matter how much I enjoy the story. Slowly the names fade, the descriptions become generic, and soon the characters are defined more by the plot of the book than anything else. There are anomalies, of course — characters who stay with me even though I … Continue reading A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline
a bookclique pick by Tanya Boteju The most striking element of Cherie Dimaline’s young adult book, The Marrow Thieves, is perhaps its premise: the earth has been ravaged by global warming. While most humans have lost the ability to dream, the indigenous people of North America have not. As a result, they are hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, their ability to dream laced … Continue reading The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline
