what I’ve been reading lately:
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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
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Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle TeaMcSweeney’s McMullens, 2013
In his blurb for Mermaid in Chelsea Creek, Daniel Handler says it has “the grit and the wit and the girls in trouble loving each other fierce and true” of Michelle Tea’s work in general (which totally makes me want to read more by Michelle Tea) and also “all the juice of a terrific fantasy
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Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuireTor/Tom Doherty Associates, 2017
Gothic/horror is not my usual genre, but so far I’m enjoying Seanan McGuire’s “Wayward Children” series, of which this is the second, though it also could work as a standalone because time-wise, it’s a prequel to the first book, Every Heart a Doorway. The dark-fairy-tale tone of this book is similar to the first, though
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An Arrangement of Skin by Anna JourneyCounterpoint, 2017
The fact that An Arrangement of Skin has cover blurbs from Mark Doty and Maggie Nelson, both of whom I really like, probably helped convince me to check this book out from the library, even though I wasn’t actually sure I was in the mood for a book of essays. As it turns out, I