Summary: N.K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate is the middle book in her Broken Earth trilogy. Jemisin invites us deeper into the Stillness, continuing the story of Essun and some familiar supporting characters from the first novel (see my review of The Fifth Season for an overview). In The Obelisk Gate, we learn more about the history of the Stillness, including the mythology of [...]
Summary: N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season is the first installment of The Broken Earth, a fantasy trilogy set on a vast continent called the Stillness, “which is not still even on a good day” (7). The inhabitants of the Stillness experience frequent seismic events and other natural disasters, including brutal “Fifth Seasons”––long winters lasting six months or more that [...]
I. Grabbing the Wheel It’s like, we’ve been in a car with a brick on the gas pedal and no one at the wheel, careening down the road, running over people and crashing into things. We’re still in the car. We can’t get out of the car. But someone could at least grab the [...]
Summary: Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides is the story of the Wingos, a family from South Carolina’s Lowcountry. The main characters are three siblings who are born at the beginning of the American postwar period: Tom and Savannah (twins), and their older brother Luke. Tom, our narrator, has spent most of his adult life ignoring the [...]
Summary: Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land is a stunning and elegant work of modern fiction. Taking inspiration from an ancient novel by Antonius Diogenes that survives merely as “a few papyrus fragments” and a “ninth-century plot summary” (Author’s Note), Doerr weaves together three narrative arcs from different eras in humanity’s past, present, and future. One takes place during [...]
Summary: Amor Towels’s The Lincoln Highway is a coming-of-age novel set in 1950s America. It follows a group of young men––and one delightfully-feisty young woman––through an improbable but not entirely unbelievable series of (mis)adventures that take place over ten days. Each character is seeking some version of their personal American Dream; sometimes these visions fit nicely together, [...]
Summary: Richard Powers’s Bewilderment is a novel narrated by single father, Theo, who is trying to care for his young son, Robin. Theo is an academic astrobiologist who constructs computer models of how life could evolve on distant exoplanets; he is also a widower whose wife died in a tragic accident. Robin is a troubled child with [...]
Summary: Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is a fantasy book in which the titular character attempts to understand the fundamental nature of the “House” he inhabits. The House is a seemingly-endless chain of statue-filled Halls rising out of an ocean. As Piranesi learns more about the House and encounters other characters within its labyrinthine structure, he becomes increasingly skeptical [...]
Summary: Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise is an exquisitely-crafted and emotionally-gripping novel that covers a huge swath of thematic, historical, and futuristic ground. The story is told in three Books, each of which is loosely connected through the recurrence of certain character names and relationship dynamics that inhabit a single home in Washington Square, New York City. Book [...]
Summary: Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch is a work of magical realism about a woman who develops the bizarre habit of transforming into a dog and leaving her house to hunt small animals at night. Frustrated with the challenges of mothering her young son and the lack of support from her amiable but largely-absent husband, the “mother” (or MM––we [...]