Penny Dreadful won’t be back until next summer, and the end of the season left me with a hangover. No worries, though, there’s a plethora of novels and book series in the same vein that can give me the same fix Penny Dreadful does. Season of Mists, by Jen Corkill, is the first book in […]
Eva Leigh begins with a promising start to her new Wicked Quills of London series with its first installment, Forever Your Earl. Leigh takes us from the finest houses to the poorest slums of Regency London in this delectable treat of a book.
In Sonja Yoerg’s novel The Middle of Somewhere, Liz Kroft is about to turn thirty, but for someone so young, she has a lot of emotional baggage she needs to work through. The opportunity presents itself when she decides to take a solitary hike on the John Muir Trail in the Yosemite Valley. When her boyfriend Dante […]
I’m very interested in exposing the ways that women are discouraged from taking an interest in STEM fields, so Eileen Pollack’s The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club was an automatic add to my to-read list. While it wasn’t quite what I expected, it’s still a valuable resource for women […]
Filled with photos and personal stories, The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide has not only direct quotes, but tattoos that involve portraiture, illustrations and even simple punctuation marks. It’s a beautiful tribute to the written word.
When I was ten years old, I decided I would no longer eat pork. Partly brought on by the appreciation for the animal itself, I realized that I’d never much liked pork to begin with. Rather than say to people something like, “Well, I hate pork chops, but sometimes I end up eating sausage when […]
Part Revenge, part Pretty Little Liars, Daughter of Deep Silence by Carrie Ryan is an absolute summer treat. In this delightful melange of suspense and romance, Ryan keeps you on the edge of your seat guessing until the very end.
All her life, Agnieszka has known two things: that she must stay away from the Wood at all costs, and that every ten years, the Dragon emerges from his tower to select a girl to serve him for the next ten years. (He’s not the fire-breathing sort of dragon, but rather the wizard tasked with […]
Friends, I’m on a fact-finding mission. Or to be more specific, I’m interested in the different ways people write about facts. Biographies can vary in style — journalistic, salacious, or massive in scope — and I want to know what biographies you all have enjoyed.
When Electric Literature was no longer releasing their print volumes with five stories each, and were instead focusing on their Recommended Reading project, I had two issues left in my paid subscription. They were kind enough to send me numbers 2 and 3, which I did not yet have. I wanted to make sure I had […]
There are some novels that use mediocre words to tell a compelling story and novels that use poetic language to tell an average story. Jill Alexander Essbaum’s debut novel, Hausfrau, is neither of these. Essbaum finds middle ground by telling the story of Anna Benz, an American housewife living in the suburbs of Zurich, in […]
I had a dream about this review. Not the actual writing of it — watching myself with a notebook or laptop would be too dull to note — but instead the thematic turmoil involved.
How do I even begin to tell you how wonderful Life on Mars is? Tracy K. Smith’s poetry fills me with peace and such joy, even when she writes about how inhuman we can be.
In the mood for some new adult sci-fi with a brilliant ass-kicking heroine? Of course you are! Kimberly P. Chase’s The Apollo Academy is the first book of a promising new series about Aurora Titon, an heiress who’s training to be a shuttle pilot for lunar missions. She may, in fact, be the best pilot the Academy has […]
Though a carefully plotted romance, thriller, or mystery can accurately capture women’s lives, the more difficult to define genre of literary fiction is often where meaning is sussed out from the everyday. Day-to-day life and fantastical journeys are not in competition — one is not necessarily “better” than the other — but it depends on […]