What I’m Reading… – Page 14

Get in Trouble: Stories by Kelly Link

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Oh, this collection is so insane. And delightfully so. Kelly Link is a high profile player in a group of contemporary voices who have taken the traditional literary scorn of genre fiction and turned it into a dare. This kind of no-rules, dark, and playful prose is thrilling and fresh. Link’s tongue stays firmly in-cheek throughout this journey of weird, but it’s captivating, bold, and beautifully unrepentant.

My favorites in this collection:
The Summer People
The New Boyfriend
*Two Houses

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Book Review: The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery

by Amy Casey

January 22, 2021January 22, 2021

The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book at my cousin’s recommendation during the 2020 U.S. election–a stressful week-plus of national tension that required pure escapist fantasy. L. M. Montgomery (of Anne of Green Gables fame) was a master of such tales, and this one is as dramatic, witty, romantic, and treacly as they come. This novel does what every Hallmark movie is forever trying to equal, and it did it first. I came to be swept away and was! May we all have such happy endings and affirmations of our truest selves.

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Book Review: Passing for Human by Liana Finck

by Amy Casey

November 14, 2020

Passing for Human: A Graphic Memoir by Liana Finck

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Liana Finck’s distinctive style of drawing makes her graphic memoir feel as if it’s being told to you from the other end of the couch, while sharing a kettle of tea. The story is gently carried on the back of metaphors that allow her images to range free. It’s a beautiful memoir. Reading it feels like meeting someone for the first time, and knowing that they’re going to become important to you. Hard to describe. But you’ll know it when you see it.

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Book Review: Whiskey When We’re Dry by John Larison

by Amy Casey

November 14, 2020

Whiskey When We’re Dry by John Larison

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

John Larison breathes new life into the Western with Whiskey When We’re Dry, a book with a new edge on the genre that smells like gunsmoke and lets us fully into the body of an American person who represents so many of us, past, present, and future. Jesse’s voice explores so much–what we do or don’t owe our family, our gender, our employers, our friends, our lovers. A remarkable, whip-smart read that feels vintage and fresh at the same time.

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Book Review: The Grace Year by Kim Liggett

by Amy Casey

October 20, 2020

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

by Amy Casey

October 20, 2020

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

by Amy Casey

October 20, 2020

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

by Amy Casey

October 4, 2020

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

by Amy Casey

October 4, 2020

Follow Me to Ground by Sue Rainsford

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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Book Review: Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins

by Amy Casey

September 18, 2020September 18, 2020

Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Claire Vaye Watkins has established herself as a writer to watch with her novel debut Gold Fame Citrus. I read this book as extreme devastation was ravishing California with wildfire, which feels dangerously close to the future Watkins offers here–the novel is set in a California scorched by extreme drought, fire, and an encroaching sea of sand. The writing is extraordinarily bold, and I admired it for that–it’s very free and very incisive all at once, and there are so many scenes that are just razor sharp. The social criticism here is definitely on point, though it’s truly devoid of hope. The more imperiled the environment becomes in Gold Fame Citrus, the more morally bankrupt its people, the more willing to believe in lies to preserve their own sense of comfort. This book, at its most basic level–even for all of Watkins’ play–is terrifying.

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