what I’ve been reading lately:
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Concluding by Henry GreenNew Directions, 2017 (Originally Hogarth Press, 1948)
I don’t know what to say about Concluding other than that I agree with the quote from Deborah Eisenberg on the cover of the edition I read: “Uncanny, gorgeous, enigmatic.” Concluding takes place over the course of a single day at an all-girls boarding school for future state servants, somewhere in England, in a vague
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The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen WangFirst Second: 2018
At the start of The Prince and the Dressmaker, which is a charming middle-grade/YA graphic novel, everyone’s preparing for the Paris event of the summer: there’s a ball being thrown in honor of Prince Sebastian, who is sixteen, and whose parents want to match him up with a princess from some other royal family so
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Kat and Meg Conquer the World by Anna PriemazaHarperTeen, 2017
At the start of Kat and Meg Conquer the World, it’s near the start of the school year and Kat, who’s in tenth grade, has recently moved from Ottawa, where she grew up, to Edmonton, where she and her parents are now living with her grandfather, who’s frailer than he used to be after a
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The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera GarzaTranslated by Sarah BookerThe Feminist Press at CUNY, 2017
In an author’s note at the start of the book, The Iliac Crest is described as “a novel delving into the fluid nature of gender dis/identifications,” “set in a time in which disappearance has become a plague,” and a book in which “borders are a subtle but pervasive force” (vii). That all sounded pretty exciting
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Home by Nightfall by Charles FinchMinotaur Books, 2015
I find Charles Finch’s mysteries to be a reliable pleasure, and Home by Nightfall lived up to my expectations. It’s set in the fall/winter of 1876, in London and in Sussex. Detective Charles Lenox finds himself investigating a pair of (unrelated) crimes: one in the city, and the other in the country village where he
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Talking It Over by Julian BarnesVintage Books, 1992 (Originally Jonathan Cape Limited, 1991)
Formally/stylistically, Talking It Over is a whole lot of fun. In each chapter, we get alternating first-person narratives—mostly from the three main characters (Gillian, Oliver, and Stuart), but from others as well (Gillian’s mother, Oliver’s landlady, et cetera). Each character has a distinct voice, and we often hear about the same events from different characters’
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An East End Murder by Charles FinchMinotaur Books, 2011
This Kindle-edition short story fits, chronologically, between A Stranger in Mayfair and A Burial at Sea in the Charles Lenox mystery series by Charles Finch, and is probably really only worth reading if you’re already into the series and a completist. It’s not that this is bad, it’s just that the full-length novels in this
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The Westing Game by Ellen RaskinPuffin Books, 1997 (Originally E.P. Dutton, 1978)
The Westing Game (which I read and loved as a kid) opens with an intriguing set-up: there’s a new five-story apartment building on Lake Michigan, and its 6 apartments (and 3 business/retail spots) are rented to a list of pre-selected tenants. The building has a view of a mansion, the Westing house, which is said
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Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuireTor.com/Tom Doherty Associates, 2018
I like the worlds and characters of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series a whole lot, and I like McGuire’s writing style: I mean, at one point in this book she describes how a skeleton “floated like a bath toy for the world’s most morbid child” (78). That said, this book was my least favorite of
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Draft No. 4 by John McPheeFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017
The eight essays in Draft No. 4 were all originally published in The New Yorker (albeit in slightly different form), so I think I’ve read them all before. I remembered some of them more vividly than others, though, and they were all satisfying to read in book form. They’re all, as the book’s subtitle puts