what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Penderwicks at Last by Jeanne BirdsallAlfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2018
I’ve been loving Jeanne Birdsall’s books about the Penderwick siblings since I read the first one back in 2008, and this finale to the series was as delightful as I had hoped it would be. In The Penderwicks at Last, the focus is mainly on Lydia, the youngest Penderwick, who is now eleven: this makes…
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The Game by Diana Wynne JonesHarperCollins Children’s Books, 2008(Originally Firebird, 2007)
I like Diana Wynne Jones a whole lot, in general: I feel like her books are a reliable blend of magic, inventiveness, well-developed characters, humor, heart, and satisfying plots. The Game, alas, feels lacking in terms of characters (and therefore heart), and the plot feels a little formulaic. But even though I feel like this…
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Calypso by David SedarisLittle, Brown and Company, 2018
I’d read some of the twenty-one pieces in Calypso before, since some of them appeared in The New Yorker, but that didn’t diminish my enjoyment of this book at all: I feel like a David Sedaris essay generally stands up to a re-read. A back cover blurb from Marion Winik at Newsday captures the appeal…
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Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) by Eileen MylesOR Books, 2010
(Note: though Eileen Myles used the pronoun “she” at the time this book was written, they now use the singular “they,” so that’s what I’m using here.) Near the end of Inferno (which is split into three sections, each one loosely corresponding to a section of Dante’s Divine Comedy), Eileen Myles writes that “poetry is…
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Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-BoseFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017
I found some of the fourteen essays in this collection more compelling than others, but, overall, I like Chew-Bose’s voice and the way she writes about memory/family/personal history and larger issues like race and the experience of being a first-generation North American. I liked “Summer Pictures,” about going to the movies in the summertime, a…
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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…