Olive Senior, Anna Carries Water, illustrated by Laura James, 2013 ( Read more... )

I was lucky to see Kei Miller reading from this at a recent writers' festival (during which he charmed me, and I suspect much of the audience, into buying the book). This gave me an idea of how the (two very distinct) narrative voices should sound, which I think was helpful in reading the book.

( On to the review, which contains vague spoilers )

I'm excited about this community and this challenge. I hope I can do it in a month. I'm going to start by counting the book I read last month.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Much like everyone else, I fell in love with this book. It was hard for me to put down. Even the characters I found hard to take, were made a little ( Read more... )

This week I read Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson; it's a collection of sort of mythical or magical-fantastic short stories, Caribbean-Canadian with lots of fantastic or ghostly elements from Trinidad and Jamaica. There were a couple that were more science fictiony including the future where body switching is possible but expensive, and the future where ( Read more... )

This has been on my reading list for quite a while, and I finally got around to it yesterday. I read it in one morning and loved it.
( Cut for spoilers and review )

Mer is a plantation slave in the Caribbean, a healer who both hopes for and fears liberation. Jeanne Duval is a Paris entertainer, lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire. Thais is a prostitute in Alexandria, who journeys to Jerusalem. Weaving their stories together across centuries are their shared experiences of oppression and a mysterious spirit ( Read more... )

This is an interesting book ( Read more... )