If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need
Synopsis: How do you honour blood and chosen kin with equal care? A groundbreaking memoir spanning nations, prairie punk scenes, and queer love stories, Lindsay Nixon’s nîtisânak is woven around grief over the loss of their mother. It also explores despair and healing through community and family, and being torn apart by the same. Using… Continue reading Review: nîtisânak by Lindsay Nixon
Synopsis: In an urgent and visceral work that asks essential questions about the treatment of Native people in North America while drawing on intimate details of her own life and experience with intergenerational trauma, Alicia Elliott offers indispensable insight into the ongoing legacy of colonialism. She engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love,… Continue reading Review: A Mind Spread Out On The Ground by Alicia Elliott
Synopsis: Cyril Avery is not a real Avery or at least that’s what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn’t a real Avery, then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin… Continue reading Review: The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne
I don't know about y'all but when quarantine started I was at a loss for what to do. Craft? Can only do that so many hours of the day. Get a head start on school work? Um... no. Exercise? ......... So I didn't have that much going on lol. But for the first time in… Continue reading Reading During Quarantine
Synopsis: Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled… Continue reading Review: Beloved by Toni Morrison
It is literally no secret that I am inconsistent as heck. I mean, just look at the dates of my blog posts... a few consistent posts here or there, and then MONTHS of silence. I know that this is bad, but honestly... it's worse over on Instagram. I've been trying to post more recently, but… Continue reading Why I’m bad at Bookstagram…
Synopsis: Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational—as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration… Continue reading Review: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Hello and welcome back to Monika tries to diversify her reading list! Something else that I want to be cognizant of, especially when it comes to reading Black authors, is that I don't only read books about slavery or anti-racism. I think those books have a lot of important and should all be read, but… Continue reading Diversifying my Bookshelf: Black Authors
With everything that has been going on in the United States and essentially the world (aka. the calling out of racism both in police brutality, systemic structures and our everyday lives) I thought that it would be a good idea to try to actively learn more about how I can combat racism in my life.… Continue reading Diversifying my Bookshelf: Indigenous Authors
Synopsis: "In the four years before the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, most women determined to get abortions had to subject themselves to the power of illegal, unregulated abortionists...But a Chicago woman who happened to stumble across a secret organization code-named 'Jane' had an alternative. Laura Kaplan, who joined Jane in 1971, has… Continue reading Review: The Story of Jane by Laura Kaplan
Synopsis: In the final days of December 2004, in a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa hides in the woods when her father is abducted by Russian forces. Fearing for her life, she flees with their neighbor Akhmed—a failed physician—to the bombed-out hospital, where Sonja, the one remaining doctor, treats a steady stream of… Continue reading Review: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
Synopsis: Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold… Continue reading Review: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
