‘The Vanishing Half’ Desiree and Stella Vignes are inseparable identical twins growing up in the mid-20th century in a tiny town in Louisiana. As children, they witness the racially motivated murder of their father and, as teenagers, escape the town to New Orleans, leaving no trace. After almost accidentally passing
Read More →‘A Deadly Education’ Is anyone sick of reading about schools of magic? No? Excellent, because this is the best one yet. Naomi Novik already has a well-deserved reputation for compelling characters and fascinating settings, but she’s out done herself this time. “A Deadly Education” is a stunner of a story
Read More →‘Humans’ Brandon Stanton’s gorgeous, heart-stopping social media pages, “Humans of New York,” is a huge sensation for a reason. Telling the stories of regular people — in all their messy, wrenching, fallible glory — accompanied by stunning pictures of the storytellers has become a recipe for seemingly everyone looking for
Read More →‘No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention’ It’s not a stretch to say that Netflix has, in the course of its existence, reinvented TV and, to a certain extent, entertainment media as a whole. How such an innovation took place, however, and the corporate revolution inherent in the
Read More →‘This is My America’ Tracey Beaumont has 267 days to save her father’s life. He is an innocent black man on death row, and 17-year-old Tracey will not stop until he is free, until suddenly her brother falls under suspicion for killing his white girlfriend. Now Tracey must try even
Read More →‘Mexican Gothic’ Secrets, unsettling atmospheres, haunted families and, most importantly, creepy old houses are in the recipe for a classic gothic novel. Dark, brooding and captivating, “Mexican Gothic” takes these tropes to a whole new level while still evoking the echoes of the genre in gorgeous prose. Noemi Taboada is
Read More →‘Schrödinger’s Dog’ Following the death of his wife almost 20 years ago, Yanis Marès was left to raise his son, Pierre, now a college student and aspiring writer. A cab driver, Yanis has been able to arrange his schedule to allow him to have a close relationship with Pierre; the
Read More →‘The Paris Hours’ by Alex George “The Paris Hours” tells the stories of four characters on a single day in 1927 and culminates when all cross paths at the end of the day. We meet a puppeteer, an artist, a journalist and a housekeeper, each with a backstory, a personal
Read More →‘The Hidden Girl and Other Stories’ In difficult times, I have this odd tendency to reach for sad things. Music, movies, books and art that has a poignant, resonate depth of truth that burns — just a little. There is so much beauty in the blues that entire genres exist
Read More →‘A Good Neighborhood’ Oak Knoll, a racially diverse suburban North Carolina neighborhood of modest ranch houses and mature trees, is upended when Brad Whitman, who is white, builds a mansion for his family on the lot behind the home of Valerie Alston-Holt, a black professor of forestry and ecology, and
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