"She was bodacious. She was outrageous. She enjoyed shaking things up." One contributor to the "Jump at the Sun" documentary about Zora Neale Hurston described her this way. Peter Bagge's new graphic biography suggests "unencumbered passion" and "grit" (Fire!!! The Zora Neale Hurston Story). In Alice Walker's essay, which opens
In which there is talk of novels which were read too quickly to allow for extensive note-taking and snapshots: good reading. Yewande Omotoso's The Woman Next Door (2017) Longlisted for the Women's Fiction Prize this year, this story about two women in their eighties, neighbours in South Africa, is quietly
Bette Bao Lord's In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson (1984) opens when Bandit is living in China in her grandparents' home. She is ten years old (nine in Western birthdays) and she is about to learn that she will be going to live in the United States.
When I first peeked into the Jalna books, I discovered that Mazo de la Roche's biographers depended heavily upon Ringing the Changes, her autobiography, which I was pleased to find in the library. It's that kind of old book whose pages have been turned so often that they are softer
Although some of the characters in the Margaret Millar mysteries I have read answer their own phones, many answer other people's phones instead: the telephones of older or more privileged relatives or those of their bosses. There's even a switchboard operator in the mix, along with a woman better known
