“Loving a country besides the one you lived in was a recipe for disaster.” The Star Side of Bird Hill is an enjoyable coming-of-age novel about two sisters, Dionne and Phaedra, who are sent off by their mother to spend their summer with their grandmother, Hyacinth, in a small town in Barbados. The girls’ aren’t […]
More“I want to be forgotten. I want it to feel as if I’ve never existed. I want to be a stranger. Rootless.” A few days before reading The Veins of the Ocean I read, and enjoyed reading, Patricia Engel’s Vida, a collection of short stories centred on a Colombian-American woman. I was intrigued by the […]
More“I wondered if all daughters fought with their mothers this way when they grew up.” Frying Plantain presents its readers with a vibrant coming-of-age. Through the course of twelve chapters Zalika Reid-Benta captures a girl’s transition from childhood to adolescence into young adulthood. But this is far from a conventional Bildungsroman as within each chapter […]
More“Everything I could see looked unreal to me; everything I could see made me feel I would never be part of it, never penetrate to the inside, never be taken in.” From the very first page, I was enthralled by Lucy’s deceptively simple narration. To begin with, I was struck by the clarity of her […]
MoreAfterlife is a slim novel that covers many topical and important issues, like mental health, in a not always satisfactory way. Alvarez’s style was at times a detriment to her story. While I could have moved past the lack of quotations, I had a harder time buying into the recursive narration. I sort of understood […]
More“The difference between her and them was as stark as the gulf between those who’d escaped a catastrophe unscathed and others who’d been forever mutilated by it.” This was such a wonderful and poignant collection of short stories.In a interview on LitHub Edwige Danticat said that one of the reasons why she loves the short […]
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