Book Review: The Grace Year by Kim Liggett

The Grace Year

The Grace Year by Kim Liggett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Grace Year is powered by plot. This is a delightfully twisty and genuinely frightening plot for a YA title, and that makes it a rapid, careening ride. The character development and motivation is definitely a little more on the two-dimensional side, but for the younger reader who is looking for a thrill, this novel will deliver with its high-voltage mix of survival narrative, romance, mean girl comeuppance, and minor gore. This book would make a great stepping stone to The Handmaid’s Tale.



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Book Review: The Rain in the Trees by W.S. Merwin

Rain in the Trees

Rain in the Trees by W.S. Merwin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Merwin was an absolute master and is one of my favorite poets. This collection from 1988 is not as transcendent and timeless as some of his others for me, being very much of its own moment.

Still some gems, though:
– “After School”
– “Empty Water”
– “Waking to the Rain”
– “Anniversary on the Island”
– “The Solstice”
– “Travelling Together”
– “The Rose Beetle”



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Book Review: The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

The Mercies

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s sea-soaked novel The Mercies is as unflinching as it is intimate. Told through the perspectives of two women brought together by circumstance and hardship, it is as much a love story as it is an impeccably researched account of what it might have felt like to live as a woman at the northern edge of the world during a time when the smallest deviance could become a witchery death sentence. Hargrave’s book is moving, menacing, and marvelous.



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Book Review: The Poetry of Strangers by Brian Sonia-Wallace

The Poetry of Strangers by Brian Sonia-Wallace

The Poetry of Strangers: What I Learned Traveling America by Brian Sonia-Wallace

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Brian Sonia-Wallace’s meandering memoir stops off at unexpected destinations as he explores what it means to make a living as a busking poet in today’s America. Through the lens of his spontaneous poetry that is born of conversations with whomever approaches his typewriter and table, he contemplates all different kinds of desires, legacies, and wishes for the future that define the lives of the strangers that he begins to know. From the shiny temple to commercialism that is the Mall of America to a van that fortune tellers call home in the middle of the desert, these stories show a portrait of a nation and offer poetry as a possible prescription to mend the divisions of its people.



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Book Review: Follow Me to Ground by Sue Rainsford

Follow Me to Ground by Sue Rainsford

Follow Me to Ground



My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Sue Rainsford’s style in Follow Me to Ground is sensational, quietly bizarre. It achieves a very difficult feat–making magic feel real, personal, and everyday. The book is captivating, with mysteries and grisly heat around every turn. The way Ada’s narrative is interspersed with short interviews from the townspeople adds another dimension to the strong culture that Rainsford creates, and it’s all very bewitching. This would have been five stars for me but for my feminist uneasiness at how the heroine’s desire, while all-consuming, is portrayed as her undoing, and how the men in her life seem to have ownership over her immense power, whether applied with love, cruelty, or both.



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