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Category Archives: Fiction – literary
A Review of Avi’s The Button War
Summer is here and I’m reading like a maniac. At least half of the books I’ve read this month are for kids, since I just finished my first year teaching elementary and middle school (after ten years at the high … Continue reading
A Review of Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot (by Jill)
I had a feeling this was going to be a weird book just based on the name. It was Indiespensible #57 from back in February of 2016, which means that I’m managing to stay less than two years behind … Continue reading
A Review of Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife
This review contains what the young people call “spoilers.” Read at your own risk. The second installment in this trilogy is my favorite, I think. In this book – which is also the shortest of the three – we learn … Continue reading
A Review of Lawrence Osborne’s The Forgiven
A month ago I could have written a fantastic review of this book – its tension, its creepiness, its unlikeable protagonist, the works. But for now, here are the basics. This is a novel about David Henniger and his wife … Continue reading
A Brief Review of Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine
This is one of those “quietly good” books I keep meaning to read more of. Though only 144 pages long, it tells a complex story from five distinct points of view: one chapter each from the third-person perspective of a … Continue reading
A Review of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot
When we were freshmen in college, Jill gave me a book of cartoons for Christmas called I Went to College… and it Was Okay. I looked for the book before I started writing this review, and I couldn’t find it. … Continue reading
A Review of Olivia Manning’s School for Love
This novel is about Felix, a British boy whose mother has just died. Felix and his mother lived in Baghdad back when Iraq was a British colony, so Felix, whose father is also deceased, has to make a long journey … Continue reading
A Review of Cecilia Ekbäck’s Wolf Winter (by Jill)
Wolf Winter has the odd distinction of being both the last book I started in 2016 and the first book I finished in 2017. It often annoys me if the last book/first book spends too much time on either … Continue reading
A Review of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad
The greatest trick Colson Whitehead ever pulled was convincing this bookblogger that he had written a realistic novel. Yes, yes, I know that the fact the railroad in this novel is a literal series of tracks running under the nineteenth-century … Continue reading
A Review of Andre Dubus’ The Lieutenant
My reading goal for 2017 is to read more of what I call “quietly good” fiction. By this I mean stories that are well told but in traditional ways. I’m taking a moratorium on shifting point of view for a … Continue reading
Postcards From Purgatory 