“They were like a tag team, taking turns to fall apart.” Set in Ireland during “The Troubles,” Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses (Riverhead 2022) is a weeping wound of a novel about womanhood, love, and family with a violent backdrop of the politics that defined Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. Admittedly, it wasn’t on my radarContinue reading “TRESPASSES – Louise Kennedy”
Tag Archives: Women's Fiction
QUEEN OF THIEVES – Beezy Marsh
“After all, gangland was a man’s world.That’s what they thought.But us women, well, we knew different.This is our story.” Oh, what promise the prologue to Beezy Marsh’s Queen of Thieves (William Morrow 2022 – Originally published in Britain by Orion Dash 2021) held. Oh, what a roaring disappointment. The premise is great. Inspired by aContinue reading “QUEEN OF THIEVES – Beezy Marsh”
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 WISE WOMEN – Gina Sorell
Actress-turned-author Gina Sorell’s second novel, The Wise Women, will be released by Harper on 4/5/2022. (I rec’d an advanced copy through a Goodreads giveaway. Thank you!) It’s a hug of an “everything works out in the end” story about mothers, daughters and sisters. There were some missed opportunities in developing the fragile and complex relationships,Continue reading “THE WISE WOMEN – Gina Sorell”
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”
THE BATHING WOMEN – Tie Ning
Tie Ning’s The Bathing Women (2000, 2012 – English translation by Hongling Zhang and Jason Sommer) was an unexpected read. The translation received mixed reviews, and I initially found it a bit “off” – but I realized it wasn’t the translation so much as the style of storytelling. It was a bit frustrating, especially earlyContinue reading “THE BATHING WOMEN – Tie Ning”
THE GIRL YOU LEFT BEHIND – Jojo Moyes
The Girl You Left Behind (Penguin Books LTD (Great Britain), 2012, Viking Penguin (USA), 2013) is the first Jojo Moyes’s book I’ve read. I’d been reluctant to read Moyes due to plagiarism allegationsand likely will not read The Giver of the Stars for those reasons, but I did enjoy The Girl You Left Behind. WrittenContinue reading “THE GIRL YOU LEFT BEHIND – Jojo Moyes”
GLAMOUR GIRLS – Marty Wingate
My “women at war” reading list has continued into 2021, finding me in England during WWII with Marty Wingate’s Glamour Girls (January 12, 2021, Alcove Press). Wingate, a cozy mystery writer, slid quite easily into the historical genre, and Glamour Girls is a quick and easy read with much of the violence of war (andContinue reading “GLAMOUR GIRLS – Marty Wingate”
THE MOUNTAINS SING – Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
It truly has been the season of “women at war” books for this booknerd. After I left Korea, I went to Vietnam and a family saga that spans decades of turmoil. The Mountains Sing (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2020) is Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s first novel in English. A celebrated poet, Mai’s language purrsContinue reading “THE MOUNTAINS SING – Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai”
THE MERMAID FROM JEJU – Sumi Hahn
From the battle torn France of World War II, to the women warriors of Ethiopia during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, and now to the haenyeo in post-WWII Korea, I’ve been on a bit of a “women at war” kick. The Nightingale, The Shadow King, and The Mermaid from Jeju are all three written by women andContinue reading “THE MERMAID FROM JEJU – Sumi Hahn”
A Girl Named Tommi 