Toni's bookshelf: 2022-read en-US Thu, 22 Dec 2022 07:46:36 -0800 60 Toni's bookshelf: 2022-read 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[A Constellation of Vital Phenomena]]> 18428067
In the final days of December 2004, in a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa hides in the woods when her father is abducted by Russian forces. Fearing for her life, she flees with their neighbor Akhmed—a failed physician—to the bombed-out hospital, where Sonja, the one remaining doctor, treats a steady stream of wounded rebels and refugees and mourns her missing sister. Over the course of five dramatic days, Akhmed and Sonja reach back into their pasts to unravel the intricate mystery of coincidence, betrayal, and forgiveness that unexpectedly binds them and decides their fate.

With The English Patient's dramatic sweep and The Tiger's Wife's expert sense of place, Marra gives us a searing debut about the transcendent power of love in wartime, and how it can cause us to become greater than we ever thought possible.]]> 416 Anthony Marra 0770436420 Toni 5 4.10 2013 A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
author: Anthony Marra
name: Toni
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/12/22
shelves: 2022-read, fiction, war-conflict
review:

]]> You Exist Too Much 41720140
Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East--from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine--Zaina Arafat's debut novel traces her protagonist's progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people.

Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as "love addiction." In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.

Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings: for love, and a place to call home.]]> 263 Zaina Arafat 1948226502 Toni 3 2022-read, fiction, lgbtq 3.62 2020 You Exist Too Much
author: Zaina Arafat
name: Toni
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2022/12/22
date added: 2022/12/22
shelves: 2022-read, fiction, lgbtq
review:

]]> Milk Blood Heat 43893870
A thirteen-year-old meditates on her sadness and the difference between herself and her white best friend when an unexpected tragedy occurs; a woman recovering from a miscarriage finds herself unable to let go of her daughter—whose body parts she sees throughout her daily life; a teenager resists her family’s church and is accused of courting the devil; servers at a supper club cater to the insatiable cravings of their wealthy clientele; and two estranged siblings take a road-trip with their father’s ashes and are forced to face the troubling reality of how he continues to shape them.

Wise and subversive, spiritual and seductive, Milk Blood Heat forms an ouroboros of stories that bewitch with their truth.]]> 208 Dantiel W. Moniz 0802158153 Toni 5 4.04 2021 Milk Blood Heat
author: Dantiel W. Moniz
name: Toni
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/14
date added: 2022/10/14
shelves: fiction, short-story-collections, 2022-read
review:

]]> The Vagabond 89842 ]]> 224 Colette Gauthier-Villars 0374528047 Toni 4 2022-read, classics, fiction 3.99 1910 The Vagabond
author: Colette Gauthier-Villars
name: Toni
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1910
rating: 4
read at: 2022/10/14
date added: 2022/10/14
shelves: 2022-read, classics, fiction
review:

]]> No Tomorrow (Killing Eve, #2) 39321542
Eve Polastri has discovered that a senior MI5 officer is in the pay of the Twelve, and is about to debrief him. As Eve interrogates her subject, desperately trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together, Villanelle moves in for the kill.

The duel between the two women intensifies, as does their mutual obsession, and when the action moves from the high passes of the Tyrol to the heart of Russia, Eve finally begins to unwrap the enigma of her adversary's true identity.]]> 258 Luke Jennings 1473676592 Toni 4 3.95 2018 No Tomorrow (Killing Eve, #2)
author: Luke Jennings
name: Toni
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2022/07/01
date added: 2022/07/01
shelves: 2022-read, fiction, mystery-thriller
review:

]]> Endgame (Killing Eve #3) 46008420 256 Luke Jennings 1529351510 Toni 3 3.45 2020 Endgame (Killing Eve #3)
author: Luke Jennings
name: Toni
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2022/07/01
date added: 2022/07/01
shelves: 2022-read, mystery-thriller, fiction
review:

]]> The Perfect Nanny 38330854 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 9780143132172.

When Myriam, a French-Moroccan lawyer, decides to return to work after having children, she and her husband look for the perfect nanny for their two young children. They never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite, devoted woman who sings to the children, cleans the family's chic apartment in Paris's upscale tenth arrondissement, stays late without complaint, and hosts enviable kiddie parties. But as the couple and the nanny become more dependent on one another, jealousy, resentment, and suspicions mount, shattering the idyllic tableau.]]> 228 LeĂŻla Slimani Toni 4 2022-read, fiction 3.24 2016 The Perfect Nanny
author: LeĂŻla Slimani
name: Toni
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/27
date added: 2022/06/27
shelves: 2022-read, fiction
review:
An intense and unsettling novel that unfolds like an investigatory manner. Slimani's spare and dispassionate voice adds to the unusual tension around this story of a nanny who murders her two young charges. There is so much subtext and Slimani purposely leaves much of it steeped in ambiguity. I found parts of it riveting.
]]> The Turner House 22749750 341 Angela Flournoy 0544303164 Toni 4 2022-read, fiction Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do.

The thirteen Turner kids all grew up in the house on Yarrow Street in east Detroit. The house may or may not have a ghost (a haint) that only Cha-Cha, the eldest of the Turner brood, can see. Or, maybe, it has a host of them - the ghosts of generations of love, pain, disappointment, joy, etc. All the messy things that make up a family. Flourney mines so much of the ordinary and extraordinary moments in the life of the huge Turner family and turns it into a beautifully layered story of familial pain and redemption. At times it did feel like there was A LOT to hold on to, but all in all a deeply affecting and wonderfully told story. ]]> 3.61 2015 The Turner House
author: Angela Flournoy
name: Toni
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/16
date added: 2022/06/16
shelves: 2022-read, fiction
review:
Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do.

The thirteen Turner kids all grew up in the house on Yarrow Street in east Detroit. The house may or may not have a ghost (a haint) that only Cha-Cha, the eldest of the Turner brood, can see. Or, maybe, it has a host of them - the ghosts of generations of love, pain, disappointment, joy, etc. All the messy things that make up a family. Flourney mines so much of the ordinary and extraordinary moments in the life of the huge Turner family and turns it into a beautifully layered story of familial pain and redemption. At times it did feel like there was A LOT to hold on to, but all in all a deeply affecting and wonderfully told story.
]]> Breasts and Eggs 53286098
Eight years later, we meet Natsuko again. She is now a writer and find herself on a journey back to her native city, returning to memories of that summer and her family’s past as she faces her own uncertain future.

In Breasts and Eggs Mieko Kawakami paints a radical and intimate portrait of contemporary working class womanhood in Japan, recounting the heartbreaking journeys of three women in a society where the odds are stacked against them. This is an unforgettable English language debut from a major new international talent.]]> 430 Mieko Kawakami 1529054222 Toni 4 fiction, 2022-read 3.85 2008 Breasts and Eggs
author: Mieko Kawakami
name: Toni
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/30
date added: 2022/05/30
shelves: fiction, 2022-read
review:
I was enraptured by the first part of the book. The second part didn't quite sing as much for me, but as many have said, Kawakami does an extraordinary job of capturing the unsettling coercive influences over the female body.
]]> Our Wives Under the Sea 58659343
Moving through something that only resembles normal life, Miri comes to realize that the life that they had before might be gone. Though Leah is still there, Miri can feel the woman she loves slipping from her grasp.

Our Wives Under The Sea is the debut novel from Julia Armfield, the critically acclaimed author of Salt Slow. It’s a story of falling in love, loss, grief, and what life there is in the deep deep sea.]]> 240 Julia Armfield 152901722X Toni 3 fiction, lgbtq, 2022-read 3.75 2022 Our Wives Under the Sea
author: Julia Armfield
name: Toni
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/05/08
date added: 2022/05/08
shelves: fiction, lgbtq, 2022-read
review:
The opening of the novel drew me in. I thought the central idea was intriguing. However, it didn't quite sustain throughout. Well written but wears a bit thin by the end.
]]> <![CDATA[In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss]]> 58065372 This powerful memoir by New York Times bestselling author Amy Bloom is an illuminating story of two people whose love leads them to find a courageous way to part--and of a woman's struggle to go forward in the face of loss.

Amy Bloom began to notice changes in her husband, Brian: He retired early from a new job he loved; he withdrew from close friendships; he talked mostly about the past. Suddenly, it seemed there was a glass wall between them, and their long walks and talks stopped. Their world was altered forever when an MRI confirmed what they could no longer ignore: Brian had Alzheimer's disease.

Forced to confront the truth of the diagnosis and its impact on the future he had envisioned, Brian was determined to die on his feet, not live on his knees. Supporting each other in their last journey together, Brian and Amy made the unimaginably difficult and painful decision to go to Dignitas, an organization based in Switzerland that empowers a person to end their own life with dignity and peace.

In this heartbreaking and surprising memoir, Bloom sheds light on a part of life we so often shy away from discussing--its ending. Written in Bloom's captivating, insightful voice and with her trademark wit and candor, In Love is an unforgettable portrait of a beautiful marriage, and a boundary-defying love.]]> 240 Amy Bloom 0593243943 Toni 5 4.22 2022 In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss
author: Amy Bloom
name: Toni
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/08
date added: 2022/05/08
shelves: 2022-read, memoir, non-fiction
review:
The beauty of this memoir lies in the lack of sentimentality that Bloom employs to tackle the subject. No easy feat when dealing with the death of a beloved spouse to early-onset Alzheimers. Bloom's humor and wit are at their finest here, recounting the harrowing (and, at times, hilarious) steps toward realizing that her husband is "losing his mind," and their mutual understanding to support his decision to go to Switzerland to die on his own terms rather than wait for disease to gut the person that he is. It's a hard book to get through at times, not necessarily because of the disease, but because Bloom so expertly captures those daily moments of shared ordinariness and extraordinariness that make up a life together and the feelings she has at the imminent loss of those moments. Honest and funny and wrenching.
]]> First Love And Other Stories 843719 304 Ivan Turgenev 1857151917 Toni 5 First love is exactly like a revolution: the regular and established order of life is in an instant smashed to fragments; youth stands at the barricade, its bright banner raised high in the air, and sends its ecstatic greetings to the future, whatever it may hold - death or a new life, no matter.

I am amazed what Turgenev was able to pack in these slim stories. Was I reading a mystery, a nostalgic view of love and loss, a cautionary tale of the duplicities of the heart? Whatever....each page had me in thrall. A masterful set of works. ]]> 4.18 1881 First Love And Other Stories
author: Ivan Turgenev
name: Toni
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1881
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/08
date added: 2022/05/08
shelves: fiction, short-story-collections, classics, 2022-read
review:
First love is exactly like a revolution: the regular and established order of life is in an instant smashed to fragments; youth stands at the barricade, its bright banner raised high in the air, and sends its ecstatic greetings to the future, whatever it may hold - death or a new life, no matter.

I am amazed what Turgenev was able to pack in these slim stories. Was I reading a mystery, a nostalgic view of love and loss, a cautionary tale of the duplicities of the heart? Whatever....each page had me in thrall. A masterful set of works.
]]> <![CDATA[Codename Villanelle (Killing Eve, #1)]]> 36546651 Eve Polastri (not a codename) is a former MI6 operative hired by the national security services for a singular task: to find and capture or kill the assassin responsible, and those who have aided her. Eve, whose quiet and otherwise unextraordinary life belies her quick wit and keen intellect, accepts the mission.
The ensuing chase will lead them on a trail around the world, intersecting with corrupt governments and powerful criminal organizations, all leading towards a final confrontation from which neither will emerge unscathed. Codename Villanelle is a sleek, fast-paced international thriller from an exciting new voice in fiction.]]> 220 Luke Jennings 0316512524 Toni 3 3.44 2017 Codename Villanelle (Killing Eve, #1)
author: Luke Jennings
name: Toni
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2022/05/08
date added: 2022/05/08
shelves: 2022-read, fiction, mystery-thriller
review:
Hit the spot as the beach read I needed while spending some time by the sea
]]> A Land More Kind Than Home 12769663 309 Wiley Cash 0062088238 Toni 4 fiction, 2022-read 3.91 2012 A Land More Kind Than Home
author: Wiley Cash
name: Toni
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2022/04/28
date added: 2022/04/28
shelves: fiction, 2022-read
review:
A beautiful addition to the pantheon of southern gothic tales of families torn apart by demons and ghosts. Cash creates memorable characters with style and voice that feels interred in the North Carolina land. Aching and honest.
]]> <![CDATA[East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity"]]> 27068666
East West Street looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men who simultaneously originated the ideas of “genocide� and “crimes against humanity,� both of whom, not knowing the other, studied at the same university with the same professors, in a city little known today that was a major cultural center of Europe, “the little Paris of Ukraine,� a city variously called Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, or Lviv. It begins in 2010 and moves backward and forward in time, from the present day to twentieth-century Poland, France, Germany, England, and America, ending in the courtroom of the Palace of Justice at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945. The book opens with the author being invited to give a lecture on genocide and crimes against humanity at Lviv University, welcomed as the first international law academic to give a lecture there on such subjects in fifty years. Sands accepted the invitation with the intent of learning about the extraordinary city with its rich cultural and intellectual life, home to his maternal grandfather, a Galician Jew who had been born there a century before and who’d moved to Vienna at the outbreak of the First World War, married, had a child (the author’s mother), and who then had moved to Paris after the German annexation of Austria in 1938. It was a life that had been shrouded in secrecy, with many questions not to be asked and fewer answers offered if they were. As the author uncovered, clue by clue, the deliberately obscured story of his grandfather’s mysterious life and of his flight first to Vienna and then to Paris, and of his mother’s journey as a child surviving Nazi occupation, Sands searched further into the history of the city of Lemberg and realized that his own field of humanitarian law had been forged by two men—Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht—each of whom had studied law at Lviv University in the city of his grandfather’s birth, each of whom had come to be considered the finest international legal mind of the twentieth century, each considered to be the father of the modern human rights movement, and each, at parallel times, forging diametrically opposite, revolutionary concepts of humanitarian law that had changed the world. In this extraordinary and resonant book, Sands looks at who these two very private men were, and at how and why, coming from similar Jewish backgrounds and the same city, studying at the same university, each developed the theory he did, showing how each man dedicated this period of his life to having his legal concept—“genocide� and “crimes against humanity”—as a centerpiece for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. And the author writes of a third man, Hans Frank, Hitler’s personal lawyer, a Nazi from the earliest days who had destroyed so many lives, friend of Richard Strauss, collector of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. Frank oversaw the ghetto in Lemberg in Poland in August 1942, in which the entire large Jewish population of the area had been confined on penalty of death. Frank, who was instrumental in the construction of concentration camps nearby and, weeks after becoming governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland, ordered the transfer of 133,000 men, women, and children to the death camps. Sands brilliantly writes of how all three men came together, in October 1945 in Nuremberg—Rafael Lemkin; Hersch Lauterpacht; and in the dock at the Palace of Justice, with the twenty other defendants of the Nazi high command, prisoner number 7, Hans Frank, who had overseen the extermination of more than a million Jews of Galicia and Lemberg, among them, the families of the author’s grandfather as well as those of Lemkin and Lauterpacht. A book that changes the way we look at the world, at our understanding of history and how civilization has tried to cope with mass murder. Powerful; moving; tender; a revelation.]]> 448 Philippe Sands 0385350716 Toni 5
Sands weaves a tapestry involving the personal history (and mystery) of his family and the impact of WII and the holocaust that reverberated throughout the generations with the lives of three figures who had a hand in shaping the legacy of the holocaust: Hersch Lauterpact, the men credited with getting crimes against humanity at the center of the Nuremberg trials; Raphael Lemkin, the man who established the legal concept of genocide; and Hans Frank, Hitler's former lawyer who was sentenced to death at Nuremberg for his role as the head of the General Government in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Do not beware of the dive into the legal concepts of war, crimes against humanity, and genocide - this book is nowhere near dry. It is informative, interesting, emotional, heartwrenching... Sands is a wonderful writer and his personal connection to this story adds an incredible depth to the history that unfolds across the pages. ]]> 4.46 2016 East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity"
author: Philippe Sands
name: Toni
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/25
date added: 2022/04/25
shelves: history, legal, war-conflict, foreign-affairs, politics, 2022-read, non-fiction
review:
An extraordinary book that felt all the more prescient due to the fact that the "beginning" of this journey through the legal genesis of crimes against humanity and genocide begins in the city of Lviv, Ukraine.

Sands weaves a tapestry involving the personal history (and mystery) of his family and the impact of WII and the holocaust that reverberated throughout the generations with the lives of three figures who had a hand in shaping the legacy of the holocaust: Hersch Lauterpact, the men credited with getting crimes against humanity at the center of the Nuremberg trials; Raphael Lemkin, the man who established the legal concept of genocide; and Hans Frank, Hitler's former lawyer who was sentenced to death at Nuremberg for his role as the head of the General Government in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Do not beware of the dive into the legal concepts of war, crimes against humanity, and genocide - this book is nowhere near dry. It is informative, interesting, emotional, heartwrenching... Sands is a wonderful writer and his personal connection to this story adds an incredible depth to the history that unfolds across the pages.
]]> <![CDATA[Never Let Me Go: With GCSE and A Level study guide (Faber Educational Editions)]]> 32490561 Never Let Me Go with a comprehensive study guide. Intended for individual study as well as class use, Geoff Barton's guide:

- clearly introduces the context of the novel and its author;
- examines in detail its themes, characters and structure;
- looks at the novel in the author's own words, and at different critical receptions;
- provides glossaries and test questions to prompt deeper thinking.

In one of the most memorable novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at a seemingly idyllic school, Hailsham, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.]]> 368 Kazuo Ishiguro 0571335772 Toni 5 fiction, 2022-read 3.91 2005 Never Let Me Go: With GCSE and A Level study guide (Faber Educational Editions)
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Toni
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/17
date added: 2022/04/25
shelves: fiction, 2022-read
review:
The thing about Ishiguro is how deftly he inhabits such a wide array of genres, voices, etc. Never Let Me Go is a chilling dystopian tale, but so achingly told with every beat so expertly penned. The unraveling of the knowledge of what truly is happening to Kathy, Tommy, Ruth and their classmates at Hailsham is harrowing at its heart. I loved this book the first time I read it years ago, I loved it even more this time around.
]]> The Mercies 46138193 After a storm has killed off all the island's men, two women in a 1600s Norwegian coastal village struggle to survive against both natural forces and the men who have been sent to rid the community of alleged witchcraft.

Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Magnusdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the sea break into a sudden and reckless storm. Forty fishermen, including her brother and father, are drowned and left broken on the rocks below. With the menfolk wiped out, the women of the tiny Northern town of Vardø must fend for themselves.

Three years later, a sinister figure arrives. Absalom Cornet comes from Scotland, where he burned witches in the northern isles. He brings with him his young Norwegian wife, Ursa, who is both heady with her husband's authority and terrified by it. In Vardø, and in Maren, Ursa sees something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place untouched by God and flooded with a mighty evil.

As Maren and Ursa are pushed together and are drawn to one another in ways that surprise them both, the island begins to close in on them with Absalom's iron rule threatening Vardø's very existence.

Inspired by the real events of the Vardø storm and the 1620 witch trials, The Mercies is a feminist story of love, evil, and obsession, set at the edge of civilization.]]> 345 Kiran Millwood Hargrave 0316529257 Toni 4 3.99 2020 The Mercies
author: Kiran Millwood Hargrave
name: Toni
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2022/04/21
date added: 2022/04/21
shelves: 2022-read, fiction, lgbtq, gender-feminism
review:
A beautifully written book with one of the most intriguing openings I have read in a while. In 1617 and the women of Vardø - the easternmost town in Norway - are left to fend for themselves after a freak storm kills the majority of the townsmen while they were working the fishing boats. I was immediately brought into the lives of these women - Maren, Kirsten, etc. - and their survival in the aftermath of tragedy. The arrival of the new Commissioner, Absalom Cornet, and his wife, Ursa, however, changes the tenor of the story. At this point, the hopelessness of the women (who were fending quite well for themselves thus far) begins to congeal all around them. Cornet's mission to root out witchcraft, and the zeal with which he carries out his mission, is a death knell for the women. I found it harder to get through the latter parts of the book with the same avidity I held at the beginning of the book due to the unrelenting hopelessness and abuse of the women. I get it ... this wasn't exactly a forgiving time for women - and no time under religious zealotry is a forgiving one for any woman, for that matter. Still, I felt that such a bold opening could maybe, possibly, merit a bolder end. Nevertheless, it is an affecting story with beautifully wrought moments throughout.
]]> <![CDATA[I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem]]> 89526
As history and fantasy merge, Maryse Condé, acclaimed author of Tree of Life and Segu, creates the richly imagined life of a fascinating woman.]]> 225 Maryse Condé 0345384202 Toni 5 fiction, history, 2022-read 4.03 1986 I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
author: Maryse Condé
name: Toni
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1986
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/02
date added: 2022/04/02
shelves: fiction, history, 2022-read
review:
Extraordinary book. Just read it.
]]> <![CDATA[Sonnets from the Portuguese and Other Poems]]> 752825 In the very heart and center of our modern world of the nineteenth century there was enacted and immortally sung one of the most exquisite love-histories of which the world has knowledge. The marriage of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett has been well named "the most perfect example of wedded happiness in the history of literature - perfect in the inner life and perfect in its poetical expression."]]> 55 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 0486270521 Toni 4 classics, poetry, 2022-read 4.03 1954 Sonnets from the Portuguese and Other Poems
author: Elizabeth Barrett Browning
name: Toni
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1954
rating: 4
read at: 2022/04/02
date added: 2022/04/02
shelves: classics, poetry, 2022-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories]]> 22929586 A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians. Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place.]]> 406 Lucia Berlin 0374202397 Toni 4 4.22 2015 A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories
author: Lucia Berlin
name: Toni
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2022/04/02
date added: 2022/04/02
shelves: fiction, short-story-collections, 2022-read
review:
a robust collection, in every sense of the word. Berlin has a truly unique voice and, as many of these stories are drawn from her own life, has had a truly unique lived life. In her best stories, Berlin gives voice to those who are often in silence and living in the margins. The eponymous story is truly superb.
]]> Intimacies 55918474 A novel from the author of A Separation, a taut and electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths.

An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home.

She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into explosive political fires: her work interpreting for a former president accused of war crimes becomes precarious as their relationship is unbound by shifting language and meaning.

This woman is the voice in the ear of many, but what command does that give her, and how vulnerable does that leave her? Her coolly impassioned views on power, love, and violence, are tested, both in her personal intimacies and in her role at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her; it is her drive towards truth, and love, that throws into stark relief what she wants from her life.]]> 225 Katie Kitamura 0399576169 Toni 3 2022-read, fiction 3.62 2021 Intimacies
author: Katie Kitamura
name: Toni
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2022/03/19
date added: 2022/03/19
shelves: 2022-read, fiction
review:
The idea of this book intrigued me from the moment I heard about it. I have a lot of personal overlap with the book, having moved to the Hague many moons ago to work at one of the international criminal tribunals. For that same reason, it was difficult for me to overlook some of the details (or lack thereof) that clearly pointed to the fact that the writer had limited access and knowledge of the real world of working in an international court. Much of what I couldn't get past was small (details of the detention centre - which I visited on numerous occasions) but some grated on me, like the tropey depiction of the defense attorney as someone with a porous moral center. Most defense attorneys working at the tribunal that I knew had far more nuance, and many had long, storied careers working in human rights (in fact, the current ICC Chief Prosecutor made his name at the court working for the defense). And both sides manipulate the media, not just defense (it was the prosecution that invited Angelina Jolie to the court, after all). Very few of the relationships depicted at the court felt real to the life that I experienced. Ultimately, this fact led me to question why she made the character a translator at the Court? It just felt like a neat trick to me at the end of the day. The story really isn't about the court but about the relationships the narrator embarks on, so I didn't feel it necessary to bring in this world of international criminal courts, particularly because that part of the book rang so one dimensional to me. In the end, it all just fell kind of flat to me. An easy read, but sort of "meh" at the end of the day.
]]> White Houses 35876524 People)--Eleanor Roosevelt and "first friend" Lorena Hickok.

Lorena Hickok meets Eleanor Roosevelt in 1932 while reporting on Franklin Roosevelt's first presidential campaign. Having grown up worse than poor in South Dakota and reinvented herself as the most prominent woman reporter in America, "Hick," as she's known to her friends and admirers, is not quite instantly charmed by the idealistic, patrician Eleanor. But then, as her connection with the future first lady deepens into intimacy, what begins as a powerful passion matures into a lasting love, and a life that Hick never expected to have.

She moves into the White House, where her status as "first friend" is an open secret, as are FDR's own lovers. After she takes a job in the Roosevelt administration, promoting and protecting both Roosevelts, she comes to know Franklin not only as a great president but as a complicated rival and an irresistible friend, capable of changing lives even after his death. Through it all, even as Hick's bond with Eleanor is tested by forces both extraordinary and common, and as she grows as a woman and a writer, she never loses sight of the love of her life.

From Washington, D.C. to Hyde Park, from a little white house on Long Island to an apartment on Manhattan's Washington Square, Amy Bloom's new novel moves elegantly through fascinating places and times, written in compelling prose and with emotional depth, wit, and acuity.]]> 320 Amy Bloom 0525589929 Toni 4 3.27 2018 White Houses
author: Amy Bloom
name: Toni
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2022/03/19
date added: 2022/03/19
shelves: 2022-read, fiction, history, lgbtq
review:
I am not huge fan of historical fiction but I am a huge fan of Amy Bloom. Her writing just seems to tick many boxes for me. I didn't always like Lorena Hickok but I always liked her voice as the narrator of the tale of her long-standing relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt. The first half of the book really hummed, the last half not so much. Still, an enjoyable read.
]]> Surfacing 46755 Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec. Setting out with her lover and another young couple, she soon finds herself captivated by the isolated setting, where a marriage begins to fall apart, violence and death lurk just beneath the surface, and sex becomes a catalyst for conflict and dangerous choices. Surfacing is a work permeated with an aura of suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond-sharp prose. Here is a rich mine of ideas from an extraordinary writer about contemporary life and nature, families and marriage, and about women fragmented... and becoming whole.

]]> 199 Margaret Atwood 0385491050 Toni 4 3.47 1972 Surfacing
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Toni
average rating: 3.47
book published: 1972
rating: 4
read at: 2022/03/06
date added: 2022/03/06
shelves: 2022-read, fiction, gender-feminism
review:
A bizarre and evocative novel about an unnamed narrator who travels to the Canadian wilderness to ostensibly find her missing father. With her are her pseudo-boyfriend Joe, and David and Anna, a couple with more than a few problems. The prose is stylistically straightforward yet meandering in execution. Underneath it all is simmering violence that made my skin itch. There is so much in this slim novel about being womanhood, marriage, motherhood, the innate violence between men and women. It's a tough read but oh so fascinating. Margaret Atwood's mind will always amaze me.
]]> Ariel: The Restored Edition 11625 Sylvia Plath's famous collection, as she intended it.

When Sylvia Plath died, she not only left behind a prolific life but also her unpublished literary masterpiece, Ariel. When her husband, Ted Hughes, first brought this collection to life, it garnered worldwide acclaim, though it wasn't the draft Sylvia had wanted her readers to see. This facsimile edition restores, for the first time, Plath's original manuscript—including handwritten notes—and her own selection and arrangement of poems. This edition also includes in facsimile the complete working drafts of her poem "Ariel," which provide a rare glimpse into the creative process of a beloved writer. This publication introduces a truer version of Plath's works, and will no doubt alter her legacy forever.]]> 256 Sylvia Plath 0060732601 Toni 5 classics, poetry, 2022-read Red Comet. This is an extraordinary collection - different from what I remember from my first read, likely because I was young and the collection was the Hughes edited version that left out some of her most searing words ("Rabbit Catcher", "The Jailor"). This collection was written in a white heat toward the end of her life after Hughes had left her. Yes, some of it is a big 'ole "fuck you" to Hughes, but that doesn't take away from the genius of the words behind the fuck you. And, apart from those poems, there are those on motherhood, madness, etc. that are brilliant. "Tulips" gutted me. ]]> 4.30 2004 Ariel: The Restored Edition
author: Sylvia Plath
name: Toni
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/25
date added: 2022/02/25
shelves: classics, poetry, 2022-read
review:
I re-read this in tandem with reading Heather Clark's fantastic biography, Red Comet. This is an extraordinary collection - different from what I remember from my first read, likely because I was young and the collection was the Hughes edited version that left out some of her most searing words ("Rabbit Catcher", "The Jailor"). This collection was written in a white heat toward the end of her life after Hughes had left her. Yes, some of it is a big 'ole "fuck you" to Hughes, but that doesn't take away from the genius of the words behind the fuck you. And, apart from those poems, there are those on motherhood, madness, etc. that are brilliant. "Tulips" gutted me.
]]> <![CDATA[Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath]]> 50607347
With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials—including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews—Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley, Massachusetts who had poetic ambition from a very young age and was an accomplished, published writer of poems and stories even before she became a star English student at Smith College in the early 1950s.

Determined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark evokes a culture in transition, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Plath's world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother; her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a marriage of true minds that would change the course of poetry in English; and much more.

Clark's clear-eyed portraits of Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath's suicide promotes a deeper understanding of her final days, with their outpouring of first-rate poems. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark's meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over.]]> 1152 Heather Clark 0307961168 Toni 5
In the end, so much of what makes this book sing is that Clark allows Plath’s voice to come through, from her letters, journals, poems, etc. And what a voice it is…wise, thoughtful, complicated, impulsive, angry, brilliant.

And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.
]]> 4.72 2020 Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
author: Heather Clark
name: Toni
average rating: 4.72
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/25
date added: 2022/02/25
shelves: biography, non-fiction, 2022-read, poetry
review:
An incredible biography and not only for the sheer comprehensiveness of it - so vast and deep into the life of Plath that I was in wonder of Clark’s ability to control all the information. Most importantly, Clark dispels the myth of the iconic tragic figure whose life was predestined to end in suicide. Clark, through painstaking research (and immense access to interviews and archives of personal documents of Plath and those around her) reclaims Sylvia Plath the person. And with that, we get this incredibly complicated and multi-faceted woman who was, at turns, brilliant, difficult, funny, joyful, aching, capricious, etc. Clark also contextualizes Plath’s life; her class struggles that was the deep root of pressure, her conflict in desires to be an artist, wife, and mother, and the sexism that was a constant boulder in the way of success � even in death as there were a few male poets who commented that her suicide was some last way to stick it to her husband (of course!). And as for the husband, so much has been said about the marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Clark doesn’t pull any punches with what has been revealed to her about the marriage, yet she eschews casting either in a light that we so often have seen � Ted the monster and Sylvia the victim. Was their marriage healthy? Probably not. But there was far too many levels for any one person outside of Ted or Sylvia to know the truth (as Clark herself admits). And, in the end, the forces that were at play around Plath when she took her life were far more complicated than the equation of crap husband led to death of wife. Clark movingly and painstakingly describes the maelstrom surrounding Plath in her last days.

In the end, so much of what makes this book sing is that Clark allows Plath’s voice to come through, from her letters, journals, poems, etc. And what a voice it is…wise, thoughtful, complicated, impulsive, angry, brilliant.

And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

]]> Tomboy: A Graphic Memoir 20256612
Tomboy follows award-winning author and artist Liz Prince through her early years and explores—with humor, honesty, and poignancy—what it means to "be a girl."]]> 256 Liz Prince 1936976552 Toni 4 3.90 2014 Tomboy: A Graphic Memoir
author: Liz Prince
name: Toni
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/01
date added: 2022/02/01
shelves: 2022-read, graphic-novel, memoir
review:
I've been wanting to read this one for a while. As a former (always?!) tomboy, it was right up my alley. So much of it brought me back...to refusing to wear dresses, wanting to play with boys, hating dolls and clothes, and all the things I was told I was supposed to like. I loved the freedom of wearing what I wanted (thanks, mom, for never forcing me!) and doing things that girls weren't supposed to. Like Liz, I didn't so much love the teasing and bullying and kids bowing to the expectations of gender that society places on us. In that sense, she captures the bittersweet reality of just trying to be yourself as a kid. A great heartfelt graphic novel that was a wonderul little nostalgia trip for this reader.
]]> <![CDATA[Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories]]> 133621
Wants --
Debts --
Distance --
Faith in the afternoon --
Gloomy tune --
Living --
Come on, ye sons of art --
Faith in a tree --
Samuel --
The burdened man --
Enormous changes at the last minute --
Politics --
Northeast playground --
The little girl --
A conversation with my father --
The immigrant story --
The long-distance runner]]> 198 Grace Paley 0374515247 Toni 4 4.05 1974 Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories
author: Grace Paley
name: Toni
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1974
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/31
date added: 2022/01/31
shelves: fiction, short-story-collections, 2022-read
review:
Grace Paley wields a sharp pen. At first blush, this collection felt so surprising and robust - in voice, content, tone, etc. - but that feeling waned a little by the end. However, Paley is an unmistakable voice in the canon of literary short-story and every bit of her work is worth a read.
]]> Lost & Found: A Memoir 57800384 Lost & Found, she weaves the story of those relationships into a brilliant exploration of the role that loss and discovery play in all of our lives. The resulting book is part memoir, part guidebook to living in a world that is simultaneously full of wonder and joy and wretchedness and suffering--a world that always demands both our gratitude and our grief. A staff writer at The New Yorker and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Schulz writes with curiosity, tenderness, erudition, and wit about our finite yet infinitely complicated lives. Lost & Found is an enduring account of love in all its many forms from one of the great writers of our time.]]> 256 Kathryn Schulz 0525512462 Toni 4 4.08 2022 Lost & Found: A Memoir
author: Kathryn Schulz
name: Toni
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/31
date added: 2022/01/31
shelves: memoir, lgbtq, non-fiction, 2022-read
review:
I am not a huge fan of memoir unless it is about the extraordinary feats that the unique or insane among us dare to attempt. But, this book appeared on so many "most anticipated books of 2022" lists that I felt compelled. What luck as this is a beautiful book. It's really about the ordinary....or, rather, the extraordinariness of the ordinary: love and loss. There are so many beautiful musings and allusions to history, philosophy, poetry, etc. and I found myself underlining, noting, and nodding along in remembrance of passages I had tucked back in the recesses of my brain. At the end of the day, it is a bittersweet ode to a father and a wife, and a enjoyable emotional read.
]]> Outline 21400742
Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives. In the stifling heat and noise of the city the sequence of voice begins to weave a complex human tapestry. The more they talk the more elliptical their listener becomes, as she shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself.

Outline is a novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form.]]> 249 Rachel Cusk 0571233627 Toni 3 fiction, 2022-read 3.68 2014 Outline
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Toni
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2022/01/22
date added: 2022/01/22
shelves: fiction, 2022-read
review:
This is the first of Cusk's work that I have read. I missed the autobiographical works that made her the poster-woman of unrepentant caustic motherhood and divorce (now am duly intrigued to read them all). There is so much already written about her and her work, the superfine intelligence, wit, humor, bite, etc. All true. She is a remarkable writer. Exquisite lines abound in this book. That said, will I remember the story? Probably not too much. This type of narrative (plotless, abundant in randomness as much as meaning) rarely does. Will I read more of her? Yes, definitely.
]]> Butter Honey Pig Bread 51168133 Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize

Spanning three continents, Butter Honey Pig Bread tells the interconnected stories of three Nigerian women: Kambirinachi and her twin daughters, Kehinde and Taiye. Kambirinachi believes that she is an Ogbanje, or an Abiku, a non-human spirit that plagues a family with misfortune by being born and then dying in childhood to cause a human mother misery. She has made the unnatural choice of staying alive to love her human family but lives in fear of the consequences of her decision.

Kambirinachi and her two daughters become estranged from one another because of a trauma that Kehinde experiences in childhood, which leads her to move away and cut off all contact. She ultimately finds her path as an artist and seeks to raise a family of her own, despite her fear that she won't be a good mother. Meanwhile, Taiye is plagued by guilt for what her sister suffered and also runs away, attempting to fill the void of that lost relationship with casual flings with women. She eventually discovers a way out of her stifling loneliness through a passion for food and cooking.

But now, after more than a decade of living apart, Taiye and Kehinde have returned home to Lagos. It is here that the three women must face each other and address the wounds of the past if they are to reconcile and move forward.

For readers of African diasporic authors such as Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Butter Honey Pig Bread is a story of choices and their consequences, of motherhood, of the malleable line between the spirit and the mind, of finding new homes and mending old ones, of voracious appetites, of queer love, of friendship, faith, and above all, family.]]> 317 Francesca Ekwuyasi 1551528231 Toni 4 2022-read, lgbtq, fiction 4.31 2020 Butter Honey Pig Bread
author: Francesca Ekwuyasi
name: Toni
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/16
date added: 2022/01/16
shelves: 2022-read, lgbtq, fiction
review:
I really just loved reading this book. I couldn't wait to find the time to dive back into the pages. It felt like a respite to get lost in this beautiful story of sisters and mothers. Taiye and Kehinde, twins born in Lagos who, for a number of reasons, traverse separate landscapes while never truly being able to separate, felt so honest and real. Their mother, Kambirinachi, a woman who spends her life straddling the spirit and tangible realms, is enigmatic and difficult to pin down but equally heartfelt. All three are so beautifully rendered. The story is rich and expansive and sensual. Don't read on an empty stomach. The descriptions of cooking (mostly Nigerian food) are so tantalizing you'll be salivaitng by the end!
]]> Moderato Cantabile 39295651
Moderato Cantabile is a carefully woven tapestry of emotion, in which the characters' inner lives are reflected by the story's spaces and landscapes.]]> 150 Marguerite Duras 0714544558 Toni 4 fiction, 2022-read
The action, so to speak, is limited to this daily dive into obsessive imagination, but Duras fills in the spaces around Anne and Chauvin with tactile description � the colors of the sun setting outside the café, the sounds of the waterfront and the men as they get off from work for the evening, the smells of the magnolia flowers outside of Anne’s house. The foreboding that builds between Anne and Chauvin is echoed all around them � “the slobbering wet sand� and the crane hovering in the sky over the own with “teeth like those of hungry beast gripping its prey.�

The relationship between Anne and Chauvin can also be read as commentary about class and sex, with Anne a woman of the middle class and Chauvin an unemployed member of the working class. The formality of Anne’s life is more at risk as she and Chauvin engage further in their bizarre obsessive interplay. Tangential characters remark on Anne’s behavior with a judgment that eludes Chauvin � and while that may seem a little outdated, it works in the context that is set here.

Subtext is all over the page, making not a particularly easy read for such a short book � but worth it, nevertheless.
]]> 3.69 1958 Moderato Cantabile
author: Marguerite Duras
name: Toni
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1958
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/11
date added: 2022/01/11
shelves: fiction, 2022-read
review:
This slim novel by Marguerite Duras� is a study in slow tension and the allure of obsessions. Anne Desbaresdes is with her son during his piano lesson when she hears a scream from the café below the piano teacher’s apartment. She finds out later that a woman had been murdered by a man � a crime of passion. She becomes obsessed with the story, visiting the café often and striking up a bizarre relationship with a man named Chauvin who also witnessed the aftermath of the murder. Over the course of several days, Anne and Chauvin entrench themselves in the story of the murder, imaging the relationship between the man and woman.

The action, so to speak, is limited to this daily dive into obsessive imagination, but Duras fills in the spaces around Anne and Chauvin with tactile description � the colors of the sun setting outside the café, the sounds of the waterfront and the men as they get off from work for the evening, the smells of the magnolia flowers outside of Anne’s house. The foreboding that builds between Anne and Chauvin is echoed all around them � “the slobbering wet sand� and the crane hovering in the sky over the own with “teeth like those of hungry beast gripping its prey.�

The relationship between Anne and Chauvin can also be read as commentary about class and sex, with Anne a woman of the middle class and Chauvin an unemployed member of the working class. The formality of Anne’s life is more at risk as she and Chauvin engage further in their bizarre obsessive interplay. Tangential characters remark on Anne’s behavior with a judgment that eludes Chauvin � and while that may seem a little outdated, it works in the context that is set here.

Subtext is all over the page, making not a particularly easy read for such a short book � but worth it, nevertheless.

]]> Debriefing: Collected Stories 33931042 A collection of one of our most powerful intellectual's short fiction

Debriefing collects all of Susan Sontag's shorter fiction, a form she turned to intermittently throughout her writing life. The book ranges from allegory to parable to autobiography and shows her wrestling with problems not assimilable to the essay, her more customary mode. Here she catches fragments of life on the fly, dramatizes her private griefs and fears, lets characters take her where they will. The result is a collection of remarkable brilliance, versatility, and charm. Sontag's work has typically required time for people to catch up to it. These challenging works of literary art--made more urgent by the passage of years--await a new generation of readers. This is an invaluable record of the creative output of one of the most inquisitive and analytical thinkers of the twentieth century at the height of her power.]]> 320 Susan Sontag 0374100756 Toni 3 3.40 2017 Debriefing: Collected Stories
author: Susan Sontag
name: Toni
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2022/01/10
date added: 2022/01/10
shelves: short-story-collections, 2022-read
review:
A strange array of short stories that defy traditional structures and narratives. Sontag's essays have always been, at the very least, thought-provoking. I may say the same for these stories, but for different reasons - it was so difficult to get my head around many of them. Still, some stand out to me and will likely stay in my memory for some while. "Pilgrimage" was a a great memoir-ish look at what happens when precocious youths meet their literary idols. "Baby" was a strange and wonderful ride. And the story, "The Way We Live Now" was a deeply affecting look at friends impacted by the mid 80's AIDS crisis.
]]> Strike Your Heart 39095406 Marie is the prettiest girl in her provincial hometown and is dating the most popular boy in town. She is the envy of all her schoolmates and she loves it. When she falls pregnant and gives birth to Diana, things change. Diana steals the hearts of all who meet her, inciting nothing but jealousy in her mother.

This is Diana's story. The story of a young, brilliant woman who grows up without maternal affection. It is the story of Diana's relationships with other women: her best friend, the sweet Elisabeth; her mentor, the selfish Olivia; her sister, the beloved CĂ©lia; and, of course, her mother. It is a story about the baser sentiments that often animate human relations: rivalry, jealousy, distrust.

With her trademark wit, brevity, and tightly wound plots, Nothomb, one of Europe's most acclaimed and beloved authors, has devised a telling adult fable about human relationships and the mother-daughter bond.

]]> 128 Amélie Nothomb 1609454863 Toni 4 2022-read, fiction

Spare and stark, the novel is fable-esque in its delivery of a story on the relationships between women � mother/daughter, sisters, friends, mentor/mentee � and the inherent complexities. At the center of the story is Diane, an accomplished woman whose life has been deeply marked by her relationship with her mother, Marie. Marie was a gorgeous and jealous woman whose jealousy of her own daughter precluded any chance at mothering her (yet, somehow, has no similar effect on her attentions to Diane’s siblings who came after her). Diane navigates her way to a position at a University where she becomes assistant to a woman whose own shades of Marie-like behavior initially draw Diane to her.

The buildup between Diane and her mentor, Olivia, is so precise and poignant and, for me, the part of the story that really hummed. I will admit to being a little put off at the start with the mother/daughter relationship at the center of focus. Once the focus shifted to Diane and her professional sphere, I was hooked. Nothomb captured a certain awfulness between women that is surly recognizable to just about every woman.

There were moments in the story that did feel a little contrived � some events appearing and wrapping up a little too neatly � but by then end, I didn’t really care that much, I was much too curious as to where Diane would land.
]]> 4.02 2017 Strike Your Heart
author: Amélie Nothomb
name: Toni
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/04
date added: 2022/01/04
shelves: 2022-read, fiction
review:
A novel that hits like an x-acto knife to the skin.


Spare and stark, the novel is fable-esque in its delivery of a story on the relationships between women � mother/daughter, sisters, friends, mentor/mentee � and the inherent complexities. At the center of the story is Diane, an accomplished woman whose life has been deeply marked by her relationship with her mother, Marie. Marie was a gorgeous and jealous woman whose jealousy of her own daughter precluded any chance at mothering her (yet, somehow, has no similar effect on her attentions to Diane’s siblings who came after her). Diane navigates her way to a position at a University where she becomes assistant to a woman whose own shades of Marie-like behavior initially draw Diane to her.

The buildup between Diane and her mentor, Olivia, is so precise and poignant and, for me, the part of the story that really hummed. I will admit to being a little put off at the start with the mother/daughter relationship at the center of focus. Once the focus shifted to Diane and her professional sphere, I was hooked. Nothomb captured a certain awfulness between women that is surly recognizable to just about every woman.

There were moments in the story that did feel a little contrived � some events appearing and wrapping up a little too neatly � but by then end, I didn’t really care that much, I was much too curious as to where Diane would land.

]]>