When starting a series, first impressions are key. Introducing a sympathetic or relatable protagonist – preferably flawed in some way – is crucial so the first book provides traction for character development in future installments. In Best Laid Plans, Gwen Florio's heroine Nora Best has...
Read ReviewOvercoming Arkoudaphobia: The Rarity of Bear Attacks in North America
Bears terrify a lot of people. So much so that 'arkoudaphobia' — the fear of bears — is a common phenomenon. However, the danger bears pose to people in North America is massively embellished in the public's collective psyche. Fantastical representations of bears in literature, ...
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Last Night at the Telegraph Club
Author Malinda Lo takes readers to Chinatown, San Francisco in 1954, where 17-year-old Lily Hu is looking to her future amidst the Red Scare, cultural pressures and discovering who she is – and who she loves – in Last Night at the Telegraph Club. The young adult novel follows ...
Read ReviewAnti-Chinese Sentiment Past and Present
In Last Night at the Telegraph Club, some of the pressure that Lily faces in her family life is related to their precarious situation as immigrants, specifically as Chinese immigrants in the aftermath of the anti-communist hysteria of McCarthyism. Chinese immigrants have a long, often obscured ...
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If anyone knows the ins and outs of living online, it's Patricia Lockwood. Before her stellar memoir Priestdaddy, Lockwood was well known for "Rape Joke," a 2013 self-referential poem that was published on the website The Awl and soon went viral; she's also pushed the boundaries of social media ...
Read ReviewMidway through Patricia Lockwood's novel No One Is Talking About This, the unnamed protagonist learns that her sister's baby has been diagnosed with Proteus syndrome. You might recognize this as the condition believed to have affected Joseph Merrick, the so-called Elephant Man, whose late-19th-...
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Recent years have seen a trend in reinventions of Greek myths and legends, some from the perspectives of women. Novels like Madeline Miller's Circe and Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls have done wonders for fleshing out and adding dimension to the library of stories from ancient Greece that we ...
Read ReviewThe Truth Behind Helen of Troy and the Trojan War
The story of the Trojan War, fought between the Greeks and the people of Troy, has been told and retold for thousands of years. This is in large part thanks to the efforts of Homer, the ancient Greek poet who penned the Iliad and Odyssey, recordings of epic stories set during and after the war. ...
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In Zorrie, Laird Hunt takes readers through decades of his main character's struggles, joys and dreams — both realized and sacrificed. Orphaned in early 20th-century Indiana, when both her parents succumbed to diphtheria, Zorrie was left to be cared for by an aunt who her father had described ...
Read ReviewIn Laird Hunt's book Zorrie, the title character takes a job painting watch dials with illuminating radium in Ottawa, Illinois. The women employed by the company think it's great fun to glow all night after their shifts, and even smuggle extra vials of glow-in-the-dark paint home to create ...
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In 2012, Oregonian Julie Keith finally got around to opening a box of Halloween decorations purchased at Kmart a few years earlier. In addition to the inexpensive faux tombstones advertised on its exterior, she found the box contained a note claiming to be from someone in China imprisoned in the ...
Read ReviewThe Laogai Research Foundation
In her debut book, Made in China, Amelia Pang cites the Laogai Research Foundation (LRF) as a source for much of the information she presents about China's Laogai system (pronounced like loud-guy but without the 'd'). The organization's website explains: 'The Laogai system is the Chinese network ...
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Black Widows
by Cate Quinn
A brilliant joyride in the company of three sister-wives with nothing in common except their dead husband.
The Narrowboat Summer
by Anne Youngson
From the author of Meet Me at the Museum, a charming novel of second chances, about three women, one dog, and the narrowboat that brings them together.
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"A crackling portrayal of everyday American heroines…A triumph."
— Fiona Davis
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BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
