bLog
Book reviews, thoughts, and updates.
Mar 08
Book Review: Bassey Ipki's "I'm Telling the Truth, but I'm Lying"
In this collection of essays, Bassey Ikpi provides her truth about living with bipolar II and anxiety, going all the way back to flashes of childhood in Nigeria to her experiences with medication and being institutionalized.
Mar 07
Book Review: Adib Khorram's "Darius the Great is Not Okay"
Even though Darius’ narrative voice is adorkably endearing and authentic to the cringeworthy angst of teenagehood, it’s not the easiest novel to read. So much of the novel speaks to the unpleasant side of being mixed-race Persian in America: the microaggressions, the macroaggressions, the various -phobias that are compounded by being clinically depressed, overweight, and LGBTQ+.
Feb 12
Book Review: Tade Thompson's "Rosewater"
If the events and characters are the weft, giving color and pattern to this narrative, Nigerian life and Yoruba custom are the warp that gives it structure. Thompson draws on his Yoruba heritage and upbringing in Nigeria in his depiction of the futuristic city of Rosewater: ... Yoruba mysticism and magic are not invalidated but reinterpreted through alien activity.
Feb 10
Book Review: Echo Brown's "Black Girl Unlimited"
Echo Brown’s magical realist mostly-autobiographical debut novel details her childhood in an impoverished inner city community where she uses magic to defend herself against the drugs and suffering on every street.
Feb 09
Book Review: Tracy K. Smith's "Life on Mars"
A collection of poetry as wide-ranging as the cosmos, Life on Mars is a thoughtful exploration of space, death, and the complexities of existence.
Feb 09
Book Review: Akwaeke Emezi's "Pet"
I cannot tell you how rare and beautiful it is that a novel like Pet exists... A novel that addresses how a family can have so much love for their child that they inadvertently cause the child harm when they choose to listen to their own need to care and protect over the voice of the child themself.
Feb 08
Book Review: Ytasha L. Womack's "Afrofuturism"
Ytasha L. Womack, Afrofuturist scholar and author of Rayla 2212, walks us through the origins of the movement through to the present, exploring the neighborhoods of this genre with as much affection as the foundations underneath them.
Jan 10
Book Review: "Border Lines: Poems of Migration" ed. Mihaela Moscaliuc and Michael Waters
A person is a person, no matter who they are, what they look like, or where they come from; if there is one thing these 122 poems have in common, it is that they show us how border lines are no excuse for denying anyone humanity, compassion, and kinship.
Jan 09
Book Review: Dawn Anahid MacKeen's "The Hundred-Year Walk"
With the help of Stepan’s meticulous journals, MacKeen reconstructs her grandfather’s journey on and off the page: she charts her travels through Turkey and Syria, tracing her grandfather’s footsteps nearly a century later.