Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer by Alberto Ledesma is sort of a hybrid memoir. It intersperses essay-style text sessions with sketches, illustrations, and political cartoons, some depicting Ledesma’s life, others illustrating the more general experience of being currently or formerly undocumented.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Review: What An Owl Knows by Jennifer Ackerman
This book covers a little bit of everything about owls: their biology and what makes them unique; their ecological niche; myths, legends, and public attitude about owls; current challenges to their survival, and conservation efforts trying to counteract that; and of course, the answer to the question, are owls really that wise?
Book Review: Murder Always Barks Twice by Jennifer Hawkins
Cozy mystery is the weirdest genre. It’s light, fluffy, and usually has punny or otherwise humorous titles, but the fact still remains that in the vast majority of these books, someone has been murdered, leaving behind grieving friends and family.
Why This Isn’t a Review
I am not reviewing one of the books I read in June, because it was published by St. Martin’s Press. I’ve decided to participate in the boycott.
Book Review: The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
What a great title! It evokes images of a mushroom that might outlive us, which is funny, because matsutake thrives in sites of human disturbance. If we died out tomorrow, how long would the mushroom survive?
Book Review: Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency by Chen Chen
Because I don’t know enough about poetry to know what I like, I basically only read one poetry book a year, and that’s because Book Bingo inevitably has some poetry-related prompt.
Book Review: Heroes by Stephen Fry
You can probably surmise from the title what this book is about: the heroes of Greek mythology, those demigods and other generally supernaturally awesome people (mostly dudes…) who went around doing labors and ridding the ancient world of monsters.
Book Review: Remedial Magic by Melissa Marr
The whole world needs to know how much I despise this book.
Book Review: The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon
This is some real trauma porn. It’s got Jewish trauma, gay trauma, war trauma, refugee trauma, drug abuse trauma, just trauma for days. Or decades, really, since the book spans more than 30 years and then has a 21st century epilogue.
Book Review: Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger
There’s not one big thing that makes this story of a young woman who can summon ghosts a good book. It’s a lot of little things.