by Barbara the Bibliophage | Aug 8, 2022 | RELAX: Memoir
Rebecca Woolf creates a complex yet vulnerable tale in All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire. How do these two topics intertwine, you ask? And Woolf answers this question in spades. Her marriage was far from perfect, but they stayed together. Then doctors diagnose...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Aug 6, 2022 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
Kali Fajardo-Anstine delivers a portrait of womanhood in Colorado in her debut novel, Woman of Light. She tells the story of multiple women across three generations of an indigenous and mixed-race family. Moving back and forth across time, Fajardo-Anstine connects the...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Aug 4, 2022 | LEARN: Everything Else
Donna Jackson Nakazawa does it again with her upcoming book, Girls on the Brink: Helping Our Daughters Thrive in an Era of Increased Anxiety, Depression, and Social Media. She blends real-life situations with scientific knowledge and analysis. And concluding the book...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jul 27, 2022 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
Dandelion Wine is a masterwork in the art of connected stories or vignettes. In the hands of Ray Bradbury, small-town America in the summer of 1928 comes alive. Kids run free and adults sip glasses of dandelion wine on their porches. But there’s also an unsettling...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jul 26, 2022 | RELAX: Memoir
Melissa Gilbert and I were born the same year—1964. So I relate to every pop culture reference in her books. We have similar perspectives about the world, despite our vastly different lives. She was a child actor on the long-running TV series Little House on the...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jul 24, 2022 | RELAX: Memoir, RESIST: Politics
Congressman Jamie Raskin bares his soul in Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy. This combination of memoir and political history covers topics related to the health of this country. One is the crisis of mental illness in this country,...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jul 22, 2022 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
Naomi Hirahara offers historical fiction and intrigue in her 2021 book Clark and Division. The time is the middle 1940s, which means that the story begins in Manzanar, one of the many World War II Japanese internment camps. As the Ito family considers leaving the camp...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jul 18, 2022 | RELAX: Mystery-Thriller
Ruth Ware set her mystery, The Woman in Cabin 10, primarily aboard a small luxury cruise ship traveling into the fjords of Norway. Our main character is Lo Blacklock, a socially awkward London-based journalist. She scored a trip on the ship’s inaugural journey from...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jul 14, 2022 | LEARN: Chronic Illness, RELAX: Historical Fiction
Larry Kramer created seminal works of gay rights and AIDS epidemic history in his deeply personal plays, The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me. Both plays revolve around Ned Weeks, a gay man living and working in New York City in the 1980s. They are heartbreaking and...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jul 11, 2022 | RESIST: Politics
Malcolm Nance presents a compelling case in his new book, They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency. And it couldn’t be more timely, with the January 6th hearings currently ongoing. Nance is a former US Navy...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jul 5, 2022 | RELAX: Memoir
Gloria Vanderbilt grew up with every financial advantage a child in the early 20th century could want. Yet she didn’t have loving parents—one was dead and the other distant. Perhaps, as a result, having a close relationship with her youngest son, Anderson Cooper,...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jul 3, 2022 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
Octavia Butler creates a fantastical story in Wild Seed, the first book of her Patternist series. The main characters are two immortals, living in Africa and America during the years leading up to the Civil War. Doro is a body-snatching, shape shifter who believes he...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jul 2, 2022 | RELAX: Mystery-Thriller
Upgrade is Blake Crouch’s latest thriller and it focuses on using genetics for good or evil. Main character Logan Ramsay experiences both in the course of the story. As the son of a famous geneticist, he was a tangential part of an apocalyptic genetic failure. As a...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jun 30, 2022 | LEARN: Everything Else
Adam Grant engaged my intellect and curiosity in his 2021 book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. Plus, I immediately told friends and acquaintances about it. In fact, I didn’t wait until I finished the book. It’s timely and relevant to people’s...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jun 26, 2022 | RELAX: Mystery-Thriller
Sometimes mysteries are whodunit stories—relatively straightforward missing person or homicide with some thrilling moments and twisty endings. But I read two mysteries lately with just a little more. In both cases, the authors included relevant issues from our...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jun 24, 2022 | RELAX: Memoir
Elizabeth Alexander crafts an elegiac memoir and tribute to her late husband, Ficre Ghebreyesus, in The Light of the World. In many ways their marriage was typical. First, they had a meet-cute, then some dating and relocating, then wedding and kids. Still, the...
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