Author: Amy Casey

Book Review: Mosquitoland by David Arnold

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MosquitolandMosquitoland by David Arnold
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mosquitoland is one of the most solid, playful, surprising young adult novels I’ve read in a long time. David Arnold creates a Holden Caulfield for the 2010’s in the capricious Mim Malone, a narrator whose voice reminded me acutely of my own high school journals. As Mim rides a Greyhound Bus nearly a thousand miles north, she encounters oddball characters and situations that help her piece together her view of the world, and–allowing for the wholly unbelievable mostly because I’ve ridden a Greyhound bus and know what it’s like AND because romance deserves a shot–this book pretty close to perfect. This is such a new, refreshing story and will make you laugh and cheer for Mim Malone, who defines herself as “not okay,” but ends up being so much more.

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Book Review: History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund

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History of WolvesHistory of Wolves by Emily Fridlund
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund is an atmospheric, consuming thriller. The narrator’s perspective, mostly staying at age 14, also hovers down to childhood and sweeps back up to 20- and then 30-something, all while focusing on patterns that resonate with the crucial summer of her adolescence. Fridlund gives us a narrator that we believe but don’t trust, who sometimes seems as feral and predatory as the wolves that captivate her. At the same time, she also remains fragile and sympathetic as we watch her try to understand loneliness, desire, and jealousy within her wild but limited world. History of Wolves traverses uncomfortable psychological territory while staying tender, and tugs with a mature force of suspense that made me tear through the book in a few days. Dark need pulls the reader into this shadowy, disconcerting debut novel like a rip current.

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Book Review: You & a Bike & a Road by Eleanor Davis

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You & a Bike & a RoadYou & a Bike & a Road by Eleanor Davis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The fantastic graphic novel You & a Bike & a Road by Eleanor Davis is part travel journal, part sports memoir, part social criticism, and all parts wonder. The piece is comprised of the full collection of Davis’ of-the-moment impressions of the American landscape, road, and people she encounters as she pursues an epic solo bike tour from Tuscon, AZ to Athens, GA. The raw quality of the pencil-drawn images add to their beauty–it reminds us that Davis was creating these drawings as her muscles were throbbing, when she was laughing or crying about her monumental physical goal, in tents and hotels and McDonald’s. This piece is an important one about why we challenge our own limits, both physical and emotional, and what we do when we know we’ve exceeded them. It’s also a sensitive and telling portrait of the southern border of the United States as represented by its people, policing, and passageways. Highly recommended, especially for endurance athletes (and those who love them).

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Book Review: A Strange Bird by Jeff VanderMeer

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The Strange Bird: A Borne StoryThe Strange Bird: A Borne Story by Jeff VanderMeer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Those of us who loved Borne are blessed to have this companion novella from the same world, out of Jeff Vandermeer’s spectacular and strange imagination. The Strange Bird is a troubling, surreal, but ultimately delicate elegy to the world as it once was. The imagery here is, once again, insane. The strange bird is made of all of us. Just lovely.

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Book Review: Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yōko Tawada

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Memoirs of a Polar BearMemoirs of a Polar Bear by Yōko Tawada
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Memoirs of a Polar Bear travels to depths of weirdness that few books ever do, but it still manages to touch something primal and moving. Tawada’s prose is a whimsical dance that cartwheels from social commentary to absurdist humor to magical realism and probably eighteen other places that I missed along the way as I was puzzling over the blurred narrative boundaries that travel from bear brain to human soul, sometimes within the same creature, sometimes between two creatures of the same mind. Tawada’s message lands somewhere in the realm of commenting on our desire as humans to perform our lives for others, so as to have something to write down in the story of our lives. It also addresses the natural and unnatural bonds between humanity and animal kind. But it also includes things like a bear hallucinating the mentoring ghost of Michael Jackson in a broken computer monitor, so… either this book is totally brilliant, or Tawada just got away with writing whatever came into her brain and calling it a novel. Take it as you will.

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Book Review: An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

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An Unkindness of GhostsAn Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rivers Solomon tears onto the sci-fi scene with this assured, gutsy debut. The best thing about An Unkindness of Ghosts is how its characters transcend labels and tell their own stories. Their varied experiences, representing a much wider cross-section of actual human experience than is typical in a science fiction adventure, are told through their own voices with authenticity and an aggressive lack of apology. The novel, setting the social structure and generational trauma of the antebellum South aboard a far-future nation ship bound for a new world, takes the lurking shadows of American history and gives them the whole of space for a haunting ground. The pace is really interesting–slow and fast at the same time. I think it will take a while before all my impressions of this unique novel solidify, but I know I haven’t seen a heroine like Aster before. Solomon breaks new ground with An Unkindness of Ghosts.

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Book Review: The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan

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The Sport of Kings: A NovelThe Sport of Kings: A Novel by C.E. Morgan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Sport of Kings was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017, and it has a horse on the cover. These two things compelled me to purchase and read it immediately. However, I had no idea what I was in for. This novel is simply torrential. After finishing the last page, I sat there stupefied on my couch and then sobbed for a full twenty minutes. The story is layered with generations of shame, filled with imprisonment both physical and mental, and a study in the exploitation that comes with corrupted understandings of parenthood, race, gender, nature, and self. The story is terrible and gorgeous as a tyrant. I am in absolute awe of C. E. Morgan, even though her indelible writing obliterated my heart.

This review is inadequate, but luckily Jaimy Gordon wrote a far better one for The New York Times for your consideration.

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Book Review: My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult

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My Sister's KeeperMy Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My Sister’s Keeper is melodrama done well, with a side of interesting ethical quandaries. The premise itself is the book’s biggest strength–should a young woman who was born for the purpose of being a blood and organ donor to her leukemia-stricken sister be allowed medical emancipation from her parents, even if it’s at the cost of her sister’s life? It’s fascinating and emotionally taxing territory to ponder. This is the chess board upon which Jodi Picoult plays her pieces: characters who have exaggerated, caricature-like personalities but also moving, true inner dialogues that almost make up for it. Some of the plot conveniences are certainly too convenient to be believed, but they create a resulting environment of heightened emotion that sets Picoult up to spike her best moments right into reader’s hearts. While elements of the story itself were overwrought, certain truths about parenthood, sisterhood, and human rights get explored along the way, and make this novel worth the quick read.

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Book Review: Radium Girls by Kate Moore

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The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining WomenThe Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kate Moore’s monumental dedication in researching the lives of the radium dial painters makes this incredible book what it is. She writes their stories with sensitivity and fidelity, imbued always with the deep admiration that compelled her to take on the project of writing Radium Girls. Detailing the obscene negligence of the radium companies of the 1920s and the carnage that followed in its wake, this book is a battle cry from the past that’s long overdue. I was transfixed and educated in the process of reading–Moore leaves no small detail unturned. The dial painting women are resurrected in these pages, and the reader learns about their everyday moments and concerns as much as about the unbelievable physical torments that they underwent. “Lip, dip, paint” becomes a chilling refrain as Moore shines a harsh light on a moment in history that birthed many of the workers’ protections that our country now provides. This is a stunning piece of non-fiction that pays a loving tribute to its subjects, making them completely impossible to forget.

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Book Review: The Encyclopedia of Early Earth by Isabel Greenberg

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The Encyclopedia of Early EarthThe Encyclopedia of Early Earth by Isabel Greenberg
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Do you remember being a kid, somewhere around 10 years old, and just getting lost in your own imagination for hours–inventing islands, monsters, and great journeys? Taking themes from stories or movies and re-casting yourself in the hero’s role? That feeling is exactly what reading this delightful graphic novel feels like. Isabel Greenberg’s The Encyclopedia of Early Earth is filled with the warmest cold weather tales you’ll ever witness. That warmth comes equally from her hilarious subtle humor, illustrations that are somehow gorgeous and adorable at once, and the rich well of myth that she pulls her source material from. This is not a story that makes sense… not really. It’s more about the role of storytelling itself in culture and in our lives. The power to save our lives and make people fall in love lies within Greenberg’s mischievous, ambitious pages. I can’t imagine a more wonderful thing to read.

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