If you’re looking for a slim, comfortable little novella that is reminiscent of the heart hug I get from Backman, try Kim Ho-Yeon’s The Second Chance Convenience Store. (Translated by Janet Hong, Originally published in South Korea 2021; English translation published by Harper Perennial 2025). It’s full of warmth and humor, found families, and secondContinue reading “THE SECOND CHANCE CONVENIENCE STORE – Kim Ho-Yeon”
Tag Archives: Harper
THE MIGHTY RED – Louise Erdrich
“Like the mighty red, history was a flood.” “So it was, every teaspoon of sugar that was stirred into a cup or baked into a pudding was haunted by the slave trade and the slaughter of buffalo. Just as now, into every teaspoon, is mixed the pragmatic nihilism of industrial sugar farming and the deathContinue reading “THE MIGHTY RED – Louise Erdrich”
THE CHERRY ROBBERS – Sarai Walker
Sarai Walker’s The Cherry Robbers (Harper 2022) is a slow burn of a classic Gothic ghost story that just misses the mark. I wanted to love it, and there are some fantastically crafted sections, but the overall feeling I was left with was “meh.” That is due in large part to the lackluster and unsatisfactoryContinue reading “THE CHERRY ROBBERS – Sarai Walker”
THE LOVE SONGS OF W.E.B. Du BOIS – Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (Harper 2021), is a five-star historical saga. Jeffers’s background in poetry gives this chunky book a cadence and rhythm that carries the voices of the silenced ancestors such they stay with you long after the last page. The truths and horrors of AmericanContinue reading “THE LOVE SONGS OF W.E.B. Du BOIS – Honorée Fanonne Jeffers”
THE SENTENCE – Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence (Harper 2021) was my last read of the year, and it was my favorite read of the year. (I didn’t think anything would edge out Black Sun, but Erdrich’s effortless, timely and amazing storytelling did. I shouldn’t have been surprised; Erdrich has been weaving some of my favorite stories for decades.)Continue reading “THE SENTENCE – Louise Erdrich”
BLACK GIRLS MUST DIE EXHAUSTED – Jayne Allen
Jayne Allen’s Black Girls Must Die Exhausted (Harper, 2021 – first published in 2018) is unapologetically “black,” but it didn’t choose to be so – it just is, and it’s taken far too long for a book like this just to exist on the same shelves as books by white authors about white women withContinue reading “BLACK GIRLS MUST DIE EXHAUSTED – Jayne Allen”
A Girl Named Tommi 