From Nothing to Big Things, I think. From No One to Someone. It’s a whole wide world out there. – from You Are My Only – Emmy Rane is a mother – first and foremost. She is young, married to a man who is a bully, and has a beautiful baby who is her whole [...]
Posts under ‘Five-Ten Star Books’
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters – Book Review
Of course a writer rearranges life, shortens time intervals, sharpens events, and devises beginnings, middles and ends and this is arbitrary because there are no beginning nor any ends. We do have curtains – in a day, morning, noon and night, in a man’s birth, growth and death. These are curtain rise and curtain fall, [...]
The Long Song – Book Review
Kitty turned to face her master. ‘Come along, Caroline. Hurry. We need to get out of the sun.’ ‘Can I take her?’ she asked. Kitty tried to seize air enough to breathe. ‘Yes, if she’ll amuse you. She would be taken soon enough anyway. It will encourage her to have another. They are dreadful mothers, [...]
Everything Beautiful Began After – Book Review
On the way back home through the dusk, she’s going to ask her father for the story of how he met her mother. All she knows is that someone fell, and that everything beautiful began after. – from Everything Beautiful Began After, Prologue – Three people’s lives intersect in Athens, Greece one summer. Athens has [...]
The Tiger’s Wife – Book Review
My grandfather never refers to the tiger’s wife by name. His arm is around me and my feet are on the handrail, and my grandfather might say, “I once knew a girl who loved tigers so much she almost became one herself.” Because I am little, and my love of tigers comes directly from him, [...]
The Boy in the Moon – Book Review
The hardest part is trying to answer the questions Walker raises in my mind every time I pick him up. What is the value of a life like his – a life lived in the twilight, and often in pain? What is the cost of his life to those around him? “We spend a million [...]
Unbroken – Book Review
All he could see, in every direction, was water. It was June 23, 1943. Somewhere on the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Army Air Forces bombardier and Olympic runner Louie Zamperini lay across a small raft, drifting westward. – from Unbroken, preface – Louie Zamperini grew up in Torrence, California. He was an intrepid [...]
Armchair BEA Day 2: Best of 2011
Welcome to Day 2 of The Armchair BEA. Today there are giveaways galore being offered on individual blogs – check out this post to get links. I’m giving away books through the official Armchair BEA blog (ongoing), so today I decided to accept the prompt to write about my favorite books so far in 2011. [...]
The Paperbark Shoe – Book Review
The sky over Wyalkatchem is hotter and bluer than any other place, and the winds are stronger, the thermals rising tens of thousands of feet straight up, lifting the litter of the desert in its embrace: shards of quartz and shale and flakes of limestone, spinifex, the lost tails of geckoes, scraps of paperbark, the [...]
Benrali Art Books – Review Of Manni AND The Turtle’s Dream and Keys
All was quiet that night on Shell Beach, All but the turtles rushing to sea. That night the full moon spoke to me, “You will leave the forest of palm trees.” – from Manni – Manni, From A World Beyond Stars is written and illustrated by Aman Waseem Ben Ali (writing under the pen name [...]
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