what I’ve been reading lately:
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Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. TaylorDial Books for Young Readers, 2016 (Originally 1976)
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is one of those very famous kids’ books (it won the Newbery Medal in 1977) that I somehow never read as a child: I’m curious as to how it would have affected me, and I wish I had been exposed to more diverse books when I was younger, but,
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Dragon’s Green by Scarlett ThomasSimon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2017
I’ve read and quite liked four of Scarlett Thomas’s novels for grown-ups, so when I found out she was writing a middle-grade fantasy novel, I knew I was going to want to read it, and I’m glad I did. Dragon’s Green gets off to something of a slow start (world-building and getting our characters into
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More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory by Franklin Veaux and Eve RickertThorntree Press, 2014
More Than Two is, as its subtitle says, “a practical guide”: there’s a lot in this book about navigating particular kinds of relationship circumstances/scenarios/difficulties specific to polyamorous relationships, a lot of which didn’t feel super-applicable to me (like: being polyamorous and having kids, or coming out to your family as non-monogamous when you’ve historically been
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The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson BurnettPuffin Books, 2015 (Originally 1911)
The Secret Garden is one of those books I definitely read as a child, but that I guess I didn’t love: re-reading it as an adult, I found that I remembered the beginning very vividly, those first two chapters where the reader is introduced to Mary Lennox, an English girl who was born in India
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Pétronille by Amélie Nothomb, translated by Alison AndersonEuropa Books, 2015
Pétronille, which was originally published in French in 2014, is the second book in a row that I’ve read that features a narrator who is a writer/shares a name with the author, which I hadn’t really thought about it when I picked it up but which was funny once I realized it. According to this
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Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen by Fay WeldonCarroll & Graf, 1990 (Originally Taplinger Publishing Company, 1984)
This epistolary novel is made up of sixteen letters from our narrator (Fay—who, yes, apparently shares some similarities with the book’s author) to her niece, Alice, who is eighteen and studying literature and feeling grumpy about having to read Jane Austen. Fay’s letters endeavor to explain why Austen is still relevant, and to give Alice
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Anastasia’s Chosen Career by Lois LowryHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016 (Originally 1987)
This is the seventh of nine books in the Anastasia Krupnik series, and I think I’m going to be a little sad when I’ve read them all: they’re such fun middle-grade/early YA reads, and this one, while not my favorite, was still pleasing. Anastasia is thirteen and is bummed that she doesn’t get to go
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Duck, Death and the Tulip by Wolf ErlbruchTranslated by Catherine ChidgeyGecko Press, 2008
I originally read this picture book (which was originally published in German in 2007) back in April, when I was visiting a dear friend in New Zealand. I was in the middle of a break-up and was feeling pretty overwhelmingly sad, and she had this book checked out from the library and left it outside
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How to Murder Your Life by Cat MarnellSimon & Schuster, 2017
When I started reading How to Murder Your Life, Cat Marnell’s addiction memoir, I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy it: her style is heavy on exclamation points and felt, at first, a bit dumbed-down. But as I kept reading, I found myself liking it a whole lot: the (dark) humor and vividness of
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All Our Pretty Songs by Sarah McCarrySt. Martin’s Griffin, 2013
All Our Pretty Songs is a lush YA retelling of the Orpheus myth (but different), set in the Pacific Northwest, written in a way that is pleasantly reminiscent of Francesca Lia Block. It starts with our unnamed narrator on summer vacation before her senior year of high school, introducing us to herself and her best