COUNTING THE COST – Jill Duggar

While doing my latest book nook, I listened to Counting the Cost, Jill Duggar’s 2023 memoir that was written with her husband, Derick Dillard, and Craig Borlase.  I had watched the Duggars with a bit of morbid fascination throughout the years, much like most reality TV, and was even more captivated when the religious houseContinue reading “COUNTING THE COST – Jill Duggar”

JOLLOF RICE AND OTHER REVOLUTIONS – Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi

“…oga dinma, oga dinma, it will be okay. Today. Tomorrow. Someday.”                 Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi’s Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions: A Novel in Interlocking Stories (Amistad 2022) is my favorite kind of short story collections – the kind where the stories weave in and out of each other, building the reader’s connection to a full castContinue reading “JOLLOF RICE AND OTHER REVOLUTIONS – Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi”

THE OGRESS AND THE ORPPHANS – Kelly Barnhill

“But it’s best you know this now, at the beginning of this book. Every story has a villain, after all. And every villain has a story.” Kelly Barnhill is an absolute gift to literature, and not just children’s lit.  She’s another one of my “heart hug” authors, but her hugs come in the form ofContinue reading “THE OGRESS AND THE ORPPHANS – Kelly Barnhill”

ALL THE LITTLE BIRD-HEARTS – Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

“I would not have knowingly allowed even the image of a bird into my home, however beautiful. But I lived for and loved a bird-heart that summer; I only knew it afterwards.” Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s All the Little Bird-Hearts (Algonquin Books 2023), my tenth read of the 2023 Booker longlist, is a peculiar and unsettling read. Continue reading “ALL THE LITTLE BIRD-HEARTS – Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow”