White Smoke by Tiffany D. Jackson is fun book that ties in a lot of topical issues like prisons, blended interracial families, poorly treated mental illness, veganism, peanut allergies, predatory televangelists, drug use and gentrification into a spooky ghost/horror story. The ending was incredibly abrupt. Bizarrely so. I got it from the library and truly … Continue reading
Oh my. I have so many thoughts on this book. I must have requested it a while back because it popped up on publication day in the Libby app to download. I didn’t really remember what it was about but it had a cool cover, it said the woman’s novel was a NYT bestseller and … Continue reading
I really enjoyed Mikita Brottman’s previous book about teaching in a men’s prison and I was not surprised to see that she dipped back into prison life for Couple Found Slain: After a Family Murder. She is local to me so I am familiar with some of the places and cases she talks about which … Continue reading
Interesting story but the meandering style was off putting. He repeated some things multiple times and didn’t really delve into others. The sexual misconduct allegations were dealt with strangely, he brings them up many times but never really examines them or what they mean. It was a very surface level book and I think any … Continue reading
I had some high hopes and mixed feelings about The Temple House Vanishing by Rachel Donohue. On the surface it ticked all of my “summer reading” boxes: A book set the late 1990s where a sixteen-year-old girl and her teacher disappeared from a remote Catholic girls’ boarding-school housed in a cliffside old mansion in Ireland? … Continue reading
Eep! This is a tricky review to write. I was so excited to read this book and was overjoyed when I was contacted to see if I wanted to be part of a book tour. A memoir about a woman who lived her childhood on the lam with her parents crisscrossing the globe? Yes, please! … Continue reading
I was really excited about Mergers and Acquisitions: Or, Everything I Know About Love I Learned on the Wedding Pages by Cate Doty because the NYT wedding pages both seem like a dinosaur and a fascinating peek into what we apparently value as a society. I was disappointed not so much by the peek into … Continue reading
I really don’t know how I came across this book. It was on my reserves from library so at some point I must have suggested they purchase it. I vaguely remember reading an earlier book of hers and enjoying it well enough. Sometimes the lag between reading about a book and it actually coming out … Continue reading
I heard about Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America by Kate Washington because she is a (former?) food writer and recipe developer and we must at least share some twitter friends. I was also interested because I ended up being the person in charge of my mother’s health care and then quickly, end of … Continue reading
With the push towards memoir, biographies almost seem quaint in 2021. I feel like I used to read lot more them years ago. As biographies go, this one had an impressive amount of citation and the level of work that went into must be staggering. That said, I felt like it was a little flat. … Continue reading
