"All this happened, more or less."

A Man Called Ove reminds me of the protagonist in Disney Pixar’s Up , if only that cantankerous old man had been trying to kill himself throughout the story. Ove, pronounced ooh-vuh , cannot let injustices – like choosing a BMW over a Saab – go unchallenged. He lashes out at those who lack what, in his mind, amounts to common sense and decency.  Much to Ove’s dismay, every time he methodically plans to do himself in, he is interrupted by oblivious neighbors. As we journey with Ove through his life via a sequence of flashbacks, we are reminded that no one becomes so sullen without facing adversity and experiencing loss. Through Ove’s recollections of his wife, we learn that Ove’s capacity for love is boundless. Descriptions of how she curled her fingers into his palm made me wonder what little habits I have that my husband notices, and I became more mindful of the special mannerisms he has. I would only recommend this book to mature readers. Though ...

Wiping the tears from my eyes as I closed the book, I realized that what I loved most about Nicola Yoon’s YA novel The Sun is Also a Star is its idealistic affirmation that soul-mates exist and that true love can form quickly. Maybe I’m biased because, like the main characters Natasha and Daniel, I fell in love with my partner in crime of almost 30 years within a day. I can only assume that Yoon has felt the power of such a deep connection herself due to her realistic description of this phenomenon. As I read, I imagined how many people might react more skeptically or pessimistically to such a premise, but Yoon weaves science and poetry together to explain such an occurrence. Through Natasha’s perfectly scientific and quantifiable observations and Daniel’s poetic and hopelessly romantic approach to life, we learn that love can be defined by both chemistry and magic. Yoon incorporates recent studies that find that discussing deep thoughts, important conc...

Entering the world of Ernest Cline’s SF novel Ready Player One is like taking a trip back to the future, for this futuristic world has embraced a resurgence of 1980s pop culture due to a high-stakes contest that necessitates knowledge about the era. The 80s nerd in me – the one who obsessed over certain movies, music, and video games – felt a thrill each time Cline alluded to one of these iconic friends who journeyed with me through my youth.  Today, people claim to be “geeks” and “nerds,” and those titles are largely celebrated; however, this was not always the case. During the 80s, it was deemed perfectly acceptable to obsess over sports trivia, spend hours watching football, and spend obscene amounts of money at the mall, but waste time and money in the arcade, plaster your bedroom walls with posters of bands whose entire catalog you know by heart, or try to build a robot in your spare time? Only loser nerds who needed to get a life would do...

I hesitate to review Transit because I don’t feel that I connected with the book at all. Perhaps this prospect was doomed from the outset. I only read the novel because I felt it would be the responsible thing to do since I’ll be coaching Academic Decathlon, and this is the chosen novel to correlate with the 2016-17 topic of WWII. We never enjoy “assigned” books as much as those we chose for ourselves. The fact that I had recently enjoyed two other novels set during WWII, All the Light We Cannot See and The Nightingale , also served to raise my expectations. The further fact that I have studied WWII fairly extensively and have been so deeply moved by such profound writing 1 and art 2 from the period and its survivors also works against a novel like Transit which I find incredibly dull. If you’ve read Hemingway ( The Sun Also Rises , incidentally, was Academic Decathlon’s choice for WWI) or works by some of his fellow expatriates, you will understand the feelings of restlessnes...

“If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.”   I can’t believe it, but shortly after starting this novel, I put it down in favor of reading A Game of Thrones (Book I) . I liked the writing in The Nightingale ; Kristin Hannah turns quite an exquisite phrase, but I guess it just didn’t grab my attention, or it wasn’t the right timing. When I picked it back up, it didn’t take me long to wonder why I had ever been less than intrigued with the novel in the first place. I want to make it clear: I highly recommend this book. Vianne and Isabelle, two sisters who find themselves in the midst of Nazi-occupied France, initially react very differently to the occupation. Isabelle is a rebellious teen who joins the resistance without a second thought. Estranged from her father and alienated from her sister, she uses pure strength of character, determination, and hatred of Nazi ideology and...

I began reading Stephen King’s work in 6 th grade after falling in love with the brilliant movie Stand by Me . Finally, I thought: a story reflected the realities of negotiating puberty, friend groups, and problematic family dynamics in a way that didn’t minimize the thoughts, actions, and desires of young people (1). King’s keen insight into human motivations, fears, and longings is what has reignited my interest in his work (after years of reading children’s books to my kids and academic texts for college), and this insight is what makes the novella “A Good Marriage” found in the compilation Full Dark, No Stars , so satisfying. No vampires haunt this tale. No creepy ghost twins hang out in the hallway. Not a single clown beckons from a gutter. No, the scariest aspect of this story is that it reminds us that monsters are unfortunately and undeniably real, but they look like ordinary people. Sometimes, they are people lucky enough to be part of a good marriage . When Darcy’s ordi...