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No October Surprise Here–Witches! ☾✔️

October 28, 2024

My late summer, early fall witchy reads: Witchcraft is nonfiction and tracks the history of witch trials and modern versions of them up through Stormy Daniels. Fawkes’s Daughters of Chaos is a historical fantasy set in 19th c. Nashville. I’m a huge fan of the All Souls Trilogy and will read anything Harkness writes! The Familiar is my first Bardugo book, although she is very prolific. I chose this because, well, witches and historical fantasy. And Giddings’s 2022 novel is set in a dystopic, patriarchal society where men control women’s bodies and the historical narrative. Favorite worlds: Harkness’s and Bardugo’s. But Giddings’s theme/message is impossible to ignore.

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Anne Michaels’s Held ✔️

April 5, 2024

What can you say about a book this beautiful? It is about everything life is—love, loss, longing, the paradox of human being. This novel reads like poetry and philosophy but traces generations, evokes places, makes real…

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Idra Novey’s Take What You Need ✔️

March 5, 2024

Idra Novey’s Take What You Need speaks to the teen in me who took welding in high school (metal shop was required) and is grieving the loss of a complicated person. Set in the Allegheny Mountains…

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Pluff, Spume, and Mångata

February 27, 2024

My grandmother used to say (frequently) that a day without learning something new is a day wasted. Raised in the foster care system, she left high school during World War II to work as a switchboard…

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Paul Yoon’s The Hive and the Honey ✔️

January 26, 2024

A short story collection in which the stories range widely in time and place but are gently linked. Displacement and diaspora. Whispers of places, textured (New York City, Russia, Japan, Korea). Belonging. Violence. Ann Patchett likens…

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Alix E. Harrow’s Starling House ✔️

January 18, 2024

First start-to-finish novel of the new year. A not-too-heavy gothic fantasy continuing Alix Harrow’s penchant for portal fantasies, this time with a 26-year-old protagonist who sometimes sounds younger than her years. (We all know someone like…