Romantic Parvenu

Book Review: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

October 29, 2015

To consider this book out of context is only to get fractions of the whole picture. Without context, Angle of Repose, which won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is an interesting, well-written, and thought-provoking—if rather ...

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Book Review: Vengeance Road by Erin Bowman

October 24, 2015

I find this book endlessly problematic and troublesome. Aside from the glaring issues of race representation, there’s just the fact that it’s not particularly well-written, and tries to be Very Gritty to the point where Bowman’s insertions of ...

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Book Review: The Unraveling of Mercy Louis by Keija Parssinen

September 7, 2015

Much of the novel is about basketball and new love and old friends and family secrets. At its heart, The Unraveling of Mercy Louis is a coming of age novel, but the darkness of the town’s obsession with “purity” is always just beneath the ...

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Book Review: Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass by Meg Medina

September 6, 2015

This is a book about high school bullying, and that’s honestly about it. It’s not that I don’t think it’s an important topic, and Meg Medina did a great job—but Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass is a book that only deals with one thing, and ...

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Book Review: When a Scot Ties the Knot by Tessa Dare

September 5, 2015

Tessa Dare is always an author I can count on for the sweet and charming side of the romance genre. When a Scot Ties the Knot is extremely cute, and it has a lot of what protagonist Maddie would call “squish” on the insides. This whole book is ...

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Book Review: The First Bad Man by Miranda July

September 4, 2015

This book is weird. There’s no other way to put it. The First Bad Man is weird and nonsensical and a little disquieting. It’s quirkiness at its quirkiest. Honestly, I didn’t think I could finish it because the characters and situations were just ...

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