Dona's Book Blog

Thank you to the author Ghessan Zeinnedine, publishers Tin House, and thank you as always to NetGalley, for an advance digital copy. All views are mine. By the time I finished reading this collection, I felt as if I'd made a dozen new friends. The character work here is so rich, and the storytelling surprising and rewarding. I'm quite looking forward to my second read of this collection! 1. "The Actors of Dearborn" - Two Lebonese men, one the child of immigrants and the other living in the US on an expired work visa, use acting to help them deal with their daily pressures. 2. "Speedoman" - A stranger in strange attire arrives at the community pool and grabs everyone's attention-- and their wallets! Top 3! 3. "Money Chickens" - A small business owner finds a curious place to hide his illicit earnings. 4. "Marsaille" - coming soon! 5. "I Have Reason to Believe My Neighbor is a Terrorist" - One woman goes to extreme...

Thank you to the author Kim Coleman Foote, publishers SJP Lit, and NetGalley for an digital copy. All views are mine. Opening quote: People will go after you for combining poverty and abuse. . . . [P] eople will say there’s poverty without abuse, and you will never say anything. . . . This is a story about love, you know that. . . . Because we all love imperfectly. —Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton  loc.44 Three (or more) things I loved: 1. This writing is so gorgeous, holy sh-t. The intense beat keeps the book moving even though I haven't read anything this heavy since ROOTS. I can't even pick a passage, at least not yet, because the whole thing is so moving... 2.Foote's descriptions of human state are wonderfully and terribly detailed. For example, accute addiction: You ain’t gotten off the parlor sofa in days, and you know you need to. The state’ll take away your children and the landlord’ll run you out the house if you don’t get back...

Thank you to the author Brando Skyhorse, Avid Reader Press and Simon and Schuster, and as always NetGalley, for an advance digital copy of MY NAME IS IRIS. Thank you also to TLC Book Tours for having me on this tour and arranging for my physical and digital copies. All opinions are mine. This is the story of Iris Prince. She attempts to pull her family, who immigrated to the US or who are second generation USians, together through their own struggles while resisting racism in their city to varying degrees of intensity, everywhere they go. These repeated experiences of exclusion seem to collect in force and lead up to the ending, which is equal in intensity and opposite in tone and internal logic to this long journey. The ending embraces a surreal form and logic, as if to weird the form of magical realism counter to the very idea and existence of racism. But before this surreal conclusion, the story unravels its internal logic, as though challenging the very fabric of the ra...

Thank you to the author Ann Beatty,  publishers Scribner, and as always NetGalley, for an advance audio copy of ONLOOKERS. I find sets of stories are hard to review as collections and do better when reviewed at the story level. In this case, it is easy to review the stories altogether since a common theme unites them. More like a common setting, pregnant with the obviousness of a theme. The setting is a small New England town of mixed political makeup, during an event of political unrest (theme) that mirrors some we might recognize from our own news. Most of these stories aren't political, or rather their plots aren't, their characters aren't any more than they need to be to serve the stories. But the world around them is very, very political and it bears geratly on the characters and plots of each story. Mini reviews of the contained stories: 1. "Pegasus" Named for the city hospital's life flight helicopter, this long short story attempts to c...

I found HOW TO WRESTLE A GIRL by Verita Blackburn on the Libby app. Check for your local library on the app and read great books for free!📚 Several of the stories share a narrating character and her striving for clarity about her sexual identity at varyious stages of her life, and even further, this narrator's object of fascination, Ezparanza. Some of the other stories are more difficult to connect to this core of the collection, but for the repeated theme of criticism of the patriarchy's force and authority on queer existence.  The audiobook is read by a group of individuals, who each perform their stories beautifully. Some, brilliantly. I recommend this form for a short, gripping listen. Mini reviews of the contained stories: 1. "Part I: Fam" A brilliant very short piece on internalized anti-blackness. 2. "Bear Bear Harvest" Cousins are plentiful in all the ways, in numbers and size and feelings, just roaming through the house like mad geese,...

⛽️Thank you @BookSparks for sending me a gifted copy of J.A. Wright's deeply moving coming-of-age novel, ᴇᴀᴛ ᴀɴᴅ ɢᴇᴛ ɢᴀs.⛽️ The book follows Evan Hanson, a plucky thirteen-year-old, as she navigates a very trying time for her family and the whole world -- the Vietnam War. Her mother absconds with her older brother to Canada in an attempt to avoid the draft, leaving Evan and her younger brother Teddy with their father, who never came back the same after his first two tours fighting in Vietnam. He takes them to his mother's motor court and home, a small business she calls Eat And Get Gas. There, they all live and work together, nuclear and extended family, and try to make sense of the situation. Evan misses her mother and remembers a loving, affectionate father, but now finds only a man grappling with himself and his world. And she's just too young to fix any of it. For her parents, her brothers, or herself. This book is deeply emotional, sad as well as hopeful, ...

I found PAPER NAMES by Susie Luo on the Libby app. Check for your local library on the app and read great books for free!📚 In certain sections, this book is beautiful and moving. I enjoyed the primary characters, Engineer educated in China and working in the US, Tony, and his first-generation US-born daughter, Tammy, well enough, for what they were, which were unlikable characters who changed relative to each other through the course of the story. Their troubled relationship hurt for me to read, and felt rewarding when they gained personal ground: “Tammy! You did it!” he said, blocking the TV. “Did what?” she said. His heart swelled so rapidly that he lost his breath. He wanted to tell her about the entire day, what she had made possible, every one of her words that had come out of his mouth during the review. But only one thing, a memory buried deep in his bones, almost someone else’s voice, spoke through him. “Ni shi wo de xin gan.” “What’d you say?” said Tammy. How coul...