The widow has let her hair go. It is half mahogany and half dull grey. Not only grey, but dull grey. Paola and Renata's listening that summer One has the sense that being a widow might have brought this about. The simple act of inhabiting widowhood. But that
To begin with, young Laura is rushed into packing her things into plastic bags. Just a few pages later, Sylvie is thrust into "double-time walking" with her mom. Either of these girls could be the "in-motion" girl on the cover of Catherine Hernandez's Scarborough. But they are only two
I’ve loved the idea of a character named Maybe since I read Katheen Martin’s novel, Penny Maybe, about a sixteen-year-old girl working out all the possibilities ahead of her. Isn’t it just perfect for a coming-of-age story? And, indeed, in Andrea MacPherson’s novel, Maybe Collins is eleven years old
A child's experience of war is strangely pure and slanted. The impact is wholly dramatic at times. Its inconsequence just as overwhelming at other times. Sharing his experiences growing up in a French-Vietnamese family in Saigon, between 1961 and 1963, Marcelino Truong's graphic memoir is vibrant and informative. Some
The dead fuel Jesmyn Ward's novels. She feels the weight of their stories; she shoulders them, shares them. In Sing, Unburied, Sing, their chorus of voices - even in the epigraphs but also in the novel - reverberates between and beyond the covers. Ward's are heart-shattering stories. But they
