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Tag: love

SNQ: Naomi Novik’s “The Golden Enclaves”

Summary: Naomi Novik’s The Golden Enclaves is the third and final book in her Scholomance trilogy. Still reeling from the chaos of graduation day, Galadriel and her companions are tossed into a complex tangle of international conflicts threatening to disrupt the lives of magic users everywhere. Through providing aid to compromised enclaves across several continents, they learn [...]

SNQ: Naomi Novik’s “The Last Graduate”

Summary: Naomi Novik’s The Last Graduate is the second book in her Scholomance trilogy. Now in their senior year at the Scholomance, Galadriel and her classmates are generating every bit of mana they can muster and practicing to take on the horde of maleficaria that awaits them on graduation day. As the end of their final term approaches, [...]

SNQ: Naomi Novik’s “A Deadly Education”

Summary: Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education is the first book in her Scholomance trilogy. The book drops readers into a grim fantasy world in which magicians are constantly threatened by “maleficaria,” a ravenous horde of magical monsters eager to devour the mana that each magician carries inside them. Adolescent magicians have a particularly high mortality rate, so [...]

SNQ: Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Memory”

Summary: Children of Memory is the third volume in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time” series. Tchaikovsky continues to build on the evolutionary concepts and thought experiments from the previous two books, this time taking the story in a mysterious and surprising new direction. When an eclectic crew of interstellar adventurers discovers Imir––a partially-terraformed planet colonized by refugees [...]

SNQ: Charlie Jane Anders’s “All the Birds in the Sky”

Summary: Charlie Jane Anders’s All the Birds in the Sky is a fantasy novel about Laurence and Patricia, two protagonists who meet first as children and then reconnect as young adults. Laurence has a gift for inventing advanced technology, and Patricia is a witch who excels at communing with nature and channeling its power. As they struggle [...]

SNQ: Gabrielle Zevin’s “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow”

Summary: Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a poignant and powerful piece of modern literature. The novel tells the story of Sam and Sadie, two adolescents who strike up an unlikely friendship based on a shared love of video games. As young adults, Sam and Sadie both become video game designers and discover a knack [...]

SNQ: Lauren Groff’s “Matrix”

Summary: Lauren Groff’s Matrix is a work of historical fiction loosely based on the life of Marie de France, a poet from the 12th century. Groff depicts Marie as an unusually large and willful woman who, at the young age of seventeen, is forced to join an impoverished abbey of nuns somewhere in England. Matrix tells the story of [...]

SNQ: Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”

Summary: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a fictional mélange of philosophy, history, romance, and political commentary.  Set in Prague during the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the novel recounts the story of two couples struggling to find peace and connection in turbulent times. In a world where time flows forward and everything happens [...]

SNQ: Scott Barry Kaufman and Jordyn H. Feingold’s “Choose Growth”

Summary: Scott Barry Kaufman and Jordyn H. Feingold’s Choose Growth is a direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In an effort to transform our collective trauma into an opportunity for reflection and posttraumatic growth, Kaufman teamed up with Feingold to expand and operationalize the research from his previous book, Transcend, which upgraded Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs using a [...]

SNQ: Elaine N. Aron’s “The Highly Sensitive Person”

Summary: Elaine N. Aron’s The Highly Sensitive Person presents Aron’s theory and research on ”highly sensitive persons” (HSPs). Aron claims that HSPs comprise about 15-20% of the general population, with roughly another 20% being “moderately” sensitive. HSPs tend to “pick up on the subtleties that others miss” and “arrive quickly at the level of arousal past which [they] are [...]