Category: Fiction

  • Cecilia

    (by K-Ming Chang) What if you hadn’t seen your childhood friend/crush/obsession for ten years, since you were fourteen, and then you unexpectedly ran into her at your workplace? What if she was waiting for you at the bus stop the next day? What if you rode next to each other until the last stop? That’s…

  • Banal Nightmare

    (by Halle Butler) Banal Nightmare is a darkly funny novel about midlife millennial midwestern angst, and I simultaneously enjoyed it and found myself having to take breaks from it, because it’s kind of a lot of cynicism and malaise. At the start of the book, one character, Moddie, has recently broken up with her boyfriend…

  • Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other

    (by Danielle Dutton) In “Writing Advice,” a short piece toward the end of this book that reads like nonfiction until it suddenly doesn’t, one writer tells another to “write something with a real story and get it over two hundred pages” as opposed to “writing little books that nobody reads.” I, for one, quite like…

  • Vladivostok Circus

    (by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins) This probably would have been a better winter read than a summer one, but the fact that it transported me to chilly Russian landscapes in the middle of July in New York City is a testament to how atmospheric this short novel is. Like Winter in…

  • Boy of Chaotic Making

    (by Charlie N. Holmberg) The Whimbrel House books (of which this is the third) are reliably fun/quick comfort reads for me: the kind of book with a lot of action that I can happily devour over the course of a few days. They’re set in a version of the 1800s where magic is a thing;…

  • All Fours

    (by Miranda July) The unnamed narrator of All Fours is an artist in her mid-forties who, when the book opens, is about to take a trip to New York – a birthday gift to herself where she’s going to stay at the Carlyle and see friends and do things by herself while her husband, Harris,…

  • Inverno

    (by Cynthia Zarin) I wanted to love this book because I’ve loved Cynthia Zarin’s nonfiction, but this was a slow read for me and I didn’t find it quite as compelling as I wanted to. That said, I didn’t hate it, and it might be a good book for me to reread in winter, when…

  • The Idea of You

    (by Robinne Lee) I have, yet again, finished last month’s romance book club read a little late—thanks to the movie adaptation of this one, I had to wait a while for my hold to come in at the library. The plot: a divorced mom takes her daughter (who is twelve when the book opens) and…

  • Bird Life

    (by Anna Smaill) When I read The Chimes by Anna Smaill in 2017, it was a 5-star read for me, and while the details of the plot didn’t stick with me, I remembered loving Smaill’s writing. So when I saw Bird Life at the library I immediately grabbed it. The magical realism of this one…

  • All the Feels

    (by Olivia Dade) I’d been a little curious about Olivia Dade’s writing since I read Jenny’s post on Reading the End about Spoiler Alert back in 2020, but I never got around to actually reading anything by her until now. I’ve never really been into fan fic (though I guess I did read a few…