The People in the Trees is the first work of new hot author Yanagihara. It doesn't feel like a first novel at all though. Structured as a frame novel (a story within a story) told from the perspective of an unreliable narrator (edited by an unreliable editor!) the novels follows the life of Norton Perina, a nobel award winning scientist that a few ( Read more... )

41. Alaya Dawn Johnson, Racing the DarkThe first book in a YA trilogy set in a Polynesia-inspired world (with elements from several other cultures; I recognized a few Japanese things in particular), it's a bit hard to describe the plot, because it's very episodic and involves many, many twists and turns. The main character is Lana, who grows up on ( Read more... )

I have been reading! I have just been very bad at posting to the comm.

1. Davis, Tanita S. - A La CarteSeventeen-year-old Lainey already knows what she wants from life: become a celebrity chef, get her own Food Network show, and come up with lots of awesome vegetarian dishes. But she and her best friend Sim have grown apart-he's hanging out with the ( Read more... )

In Coming Through Slaughter, Michael Ondaatje reimagines the life of New Orleans jazz originator Buddy Bolden - who was never recorded - and spins scant details and one lone photo into a poetic fever dream of a novel.  In glimpses, short scenes, hymns, and epistolary-style documents, the novel uses the unstructured, improvisational style of jazz to ( Read more... )

I hope it's all right to post about poets as well. While the book below has been classified as poetry, it's actually more than that.

Here's a brief review:

Eileen Tabios is one of the most prolific Filipino-American poets. She has a varied and exciting body of work in which the desire to engage the reader in a conversation is central.

"The Light ( Read more... )

I've just finished this book, and my brain is still rather clogged up with stray thoughts that I haven't processed yet, so I apologise if this review isn't very coherent ( Read more... )

This book is the second of the multi-author Crimson City series created by Liz Maverick. I listened to the unabridged audiobook, narrated by Rebecca Rogers ( Read more... )

This book was selected for the county wide community reading program here last year ( Read more... )

Schuyler Van Alen is a modern goth emo teen who attends Duchesne, a prestigious, exclusive school for New York’s terminally rich. Naturally, she hates all her snobby classmates and lounges around with her equally disaffected best friend, Oliver. Her opposite number is the bitchy and elite Mimi, who isn’t happy when her twin brother, Jack, the most ( Read more... )

A food-centric memoir of growing up in a huge Indian family in and around Delhi. Jaffrey became a teenager when India got its independence - a time of joy and horror, as the country gained its freedom and then tore itself apart in the violence that came with Partition ( Read more... )