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This classic, banned book was a book club read for me in 2024. Told in epistolary style, the main character, Celie, first writes to God and later to her sister, Nettie. The books themes on racism, incest, lesbianism and domestic violence in the American South, all contribute to the controversy surrounding Walker’s prize-winning novel. Celie…
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Many pundits have likened our present American society to that of the Gilded Age, making The Cold Millions a relevant historical novel for our times. Set in Spokane, Washington, in 1909, it focuses on the labor struggles of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the face of a corrupt justice system, bought outright…
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Today’s review is a two-fer: “Remarkably Bright Creatures” by Shelby Van Pelt, and “The Soul of an Octopus” by Sy Montgomery. I’ve had the latter book on my TBR shelf for several years, but it wasn’t until I read Van Pelt’s novel that I pulled it down. Van Pelt clearly drew much inspiration from Montgomery’s…
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This novel is “based on the true story of a sometime hero” named Samuel Solonsch, a British-German Jew. Solonsch also used an alias, John Douglas, and was an ancestor of the author’s husband. The story begins in a POW hospital camp in Batavia during World War II, narrated by a Dutch prisoner who befriends the…
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“In some quarters nowadays it is fashionable to dismiss the balance of nature as a state of affairs that prevailed in an earlier, simpler world—a state that has now been so thoroughly upset that we might as well forget it….The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting, in a…
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This work of historical fiction is based on the real life of Belle Marion Greener, a Black American woman who passed for white as Belle de Costa Green. An educated intellectual, she turned her back on her heritage (pressed by her mother) in order to achieve professional success. Due to her experience as a campus…
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This is an oldie, but a book and author I have read more than once. If you’re a fan of history, time travel, and/or body-switching, you will love this one. Millhiser published fourteen novels prior to her death in 2017 in Boulder, Colorado. This is her best-known work. I’ve also read her books The Threshold…
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I don’t usually read horror, but this one is a page-turner. And, unfortunately, true. The protagonist is a Slovakian Jewish teen named Walter Rosenberg, later known as Rudolf Vrba. First imprisoned during WWII as a 17-year-old, he manages to escape from at least two detention camps before being deported to Auschwitz in 1942. From his…
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As soon as I knew about Sevigny’s book, I put it on my TBR list. It’s the true tale of two botanists, both women, who rode the Colorado River through Cataract, Glen, and Grand Canyons to document the flora of the canyons and collect specimens in 1938. Having spent much of my field biology career…
Eilene Lyon 