Source: Library

Review: A New Deal for Quilts, Janneken Smucker

Posted on by Dana
Review: A New Deal for Quilts, Janneken SmuckerA New Deal for Quilts by Janneken Smucker
Published by International Quilt Museum on 2023
Genres: Nonfiction
Pages: 250
Format: Paperback
Source: Library
Buy on Amazon, Buy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
five-stars

During the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to combat the Great Depression, the quilt became an emblem for how to lift one’s family out of poverty, piece by piece. A New Deal for Quilts explores how the U.S. government drew on quilts and quilt-making, encouraging Americans to create quilts individually and collectively in response to unemployment, displacement, and recovery efforts. Quilters shared their perspectives on New Deal programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and the National Recovery Administration, which sent quilts as gifts to the Roosevelts and other officials. Federal programs used quilts’ symbolic heft to communicate the values and behaviors individuals should embrace amid the Depression, perceiving the practical potential of crafts to lift morale and impart new skills. The government embraced quilts to demonstrate the efficacy of its programs, show women how they could contribute to their families’ betterment, and generate empathy for impoverished Americans.

With more than one hundred period photographs and images of quilts, A New Deal for Quilts evokes the visual environment of the Depression while conveying ways craft, work, race, poverty, and politics intersected during this pivotal era. Accompanying the book is a fall 2023 exhibit at the International Quilt Museum, featuring 1930s quilts drawn from its renowned collection.

I picked up this book because I’m doing a Block of the Month quilting challenge focused on different decades each month. I enjoyed this glimpse into quilts of the 1930s. It was interesting to learn that documenting quilts and creating quilts were part of the WPA, which is something I never knew. I was also fascinated by the political quilts created in honor of the Roosevelts. In our polarized country now, it’s hard to imagine a President with that much popularity. I learned at one point that Roosevelt had over a 70% approval rating. It’s also a bit sad to read the author’s hopes for the Green New Deal and the comparisons made between the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Depression. I’m continually impressed by quilters’ commitment to social justice, and it was interesting to read about how that commitment manifested in the 1930s. This book might be a bit niche for the average person, but if you’re interested in quilting history or even just women’s history in the 20th century, check it out.

five-stars

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Review: The Winding Ways Quilt, Jennifer Chiaverini

Posted on by Dana
Review: The Winding Ways Quilt, Jennifer ChiaveriniThe Winding Ways Quilt by Jennifer Chiaverini
Series: Elm Creek Quilts #12
Published by Simon & Schuster on January 1, 2008
Genres: Contemporary Fiction
Pages: 310
Format: Hardcover
Source: Library
Buy on Amazon, Buy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
four-half-stars

Jennifer Chiaverini's bestselling Elm Creek Quilts series continues with The Winding Ways Quilt, in which the arrival of newcomers into the circle of quilters heralds unexpected journeys down pathways near and far.

Quilters have flocked to Elm Creek Manor to learn from Master Quilter Sylvia Compson and her expert colleagues. There's Sarah, Sylvia's onetime apprentice who's paired her quilting accomplishments with a mind for running the business of Elm Creek Quilts; Agnes, who has a gift for appliqué; Gwen, who stitches innovative art quilts; Diane, a whiz at the technicalities of quick-piecing; and Bonnie, with her encyclopedic knowledge of folk art patterns. But with Judy and Summer, two other founding members of the Elm Creek Quilters, departing to pursue other opportunities, will the new teachers be able to fill in the gaps created by the loss of their expertise—and more important, their friendship?

"When I think of all the different paths I could have followed in my life, all the twists and turns that could have led me anywhere," muses incoming teacher Gretchen, "it's something of a miracle that I ended up here, surrounded by loving friends."

But what of friends departed? As Sylvia contemplates a tribute to the partnership of the Elm Creek Quilters, she is reminded of a traditional quilt pattern whose curved pieces symbolize a journey. Winding Ways, a mosaic of overlapping circles and intertwining curves, would capture the spirit of their friendship at the moment of its transformation.

Will Sylvia's choice inspire the founding members to remember that each is a unique part of a magnificent whole? Will the newcomers find ways to contribute, and to earn their place? The Winding Ways Quilt considers the complicated, often hidden meanings of presence and absence, and what change can mean for those who have come to rely upon one another.

I discovered the Elm Creek Quilts series from fellow quilters in a Facebook Block of the Month group I’m participating in. The block for May was a Winding Ways block, which inspired the story in this novel. It was fun to read the book at the same time as I made my own Winding Ways block.

It seems that this novel doesn’t appeal to all fans of the series, and I can understand why. It’s different from the other two books I’ve read in that it’s not a story so much as a series of backstories about each of the Elm Creek Quilters. I liked that aspect of it. I don’t necessarily think there is a lot of action in these books, but they’re fun to read because I actually learn a little bit more about quilting with each one, and the characters are fully realized and feel a bit like friends. I enjoyed the metaphor of the Winding Ways block, which connects all the quilters.

I enjoyed making my own Winding Ways block as well. This block is so interesting in that when you make a larger quilt, you start to see circular patterns emerge. You can see parts of the circles emerging in my Winding Ways block below. I was inspired by the colors in the Rosie the Riveter poster, as the theme for this Block of the Month focuses on quilting and history for a different decade each month, starting with the 1930s and ending with the 2010s. The Winding Ways block is the 1940s block, so the fabrics I chose evoke the 1940s era.

Winding Ways four-block quilt made with white fabric with cherry designs, yellow fabric with white polka dots, and blue fabric with star designs.

four-half-stars

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Review: Time is a Mother, Ocean Vuong

Posted on by Dana
Review: Time is a Mother, Ocean VuongTime Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
Published by Penguin Press on April 5, 2022
Genres: Poetry
Pages: 114
Format: Hardcover
Source: Library
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This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
three-stars

In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother's death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong's poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.

The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize, and a 2019 MacArthur fellow, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. These poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form, illuminating how the themes we perennially live in and question are truly inexhaustible. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging forth all at once.

I borrowed this collection from the library after encountering a poem from the collection, “Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker.” After reading the collection, I still think that poem is the best in the collection. It’s a found/catalog poem that asks the reader to sift through purchases to assemble an entire life. It tells a fascinating story, and I think I’d like to share it with my students.

There were some other gems in the collection, including “Dear Rose,” “The Punctum,” “Toy Boat,” “Reasons for Staying,” and “Küntslerroman.” The imagery is strong, and I appreciated Vuong’s diction and structure. Overall, I would not say this collection is one of my favorites, but it was well worth a read.

three-stars

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Review: Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar

Posted on by Dana
Review: Martyr!, Kaveh AkbarMartyr! by Kaveh Akbar
Published by Vintage on January 23, 2024
Genres: Contemporary Fiction
Pages: 352
Format: E-Book, eBook
Source: Library
Buy on Amazon, Buy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
five-stars

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Martyr! is probably one of those books I’m going to think about for a long time. I appreciated how complex and real the characters were. There are some moments of exquisite writing, which is no surprise given Akbar’s background as a poet.

Cyrus wants his death to mean something, so he researches martyrs.

If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself—which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.
It is an interesting treatise on life, death, and making sense of a nonsensical world. It also asks a lot of the reader, namely, the ability to sit in ambiguity, to understand that we will not get the answers we seek. Keats called it negative capability. A fascinating book, and I can see why it was mentioned on all the Best of 2024 lists.

five-stars

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Review: Crook Manifesto, Colson Whitehead

Posted on by Dana
Review: Crook Manifesto, Colson WhiteheadCrook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead
Narrator: Dion Graham
Series: Ray Carney #2
Published by Random House Audio on July 18, 2023
Genres: Historical Fiction
Length: 10 hours 47 minutes
Format: Audio, Audiobook
Source: Library
Buy on Amazon, Buy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
four-stars

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winning Colson Whitehead continues his Harlem saga in a powerful and hugely-entertaining novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory.

It's 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. His days moving stolen goods around the city are over. It's strictly the straight-and-narrow for him—until he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up his old police contact Munson, fixer extraordinaire. But Munson has his own favors to ask of Carney and staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated—and deadly.

1973. The counter-culture has created a new generation, the old ways are being overthrown, but there is one constant, Pepper, Carney's endearingly violent partner in crime. It's getting harder to put together a reliable crew for hijackings, heists, and assorted felonies, so Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem. He finds himself in a freaky world of Hollywood stars, up-and-coming comedians, and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters, and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook—to their regret.

1976. Harlem is burning, block by block, while the whole county is gearing up for Bicentennial celebrations. Carney is trying to come up with a July 4th ad he can live with. (Two Hundred Years of Getting Away with It!), while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, the former assistant D.A. and rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire severely injures one of Carney's tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it. Our crooked duo have to battle their way through a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent, and the utterly corrupted.

CROOK MANIFESTO is a darkly funny tale of a city under siege, but also a sneakily searching portrait of the meaning of family. Colson Whitehead's kaleidoscopic portrait of Harlem is sure to stand as one of the all-time great evocations of a place and a time.

I really enjoyed this second book in the Ray Carney series. It is decidedly NOT The Underground Railroad or The Nickel Boys, but I think that’s the point. It feels like Colson Whitehead wanted to write something fun and interesting but not as heavy. This is not to say there are not heavy moments—crime, crooked cops, murder, arson. There is a thread of dark humor underneath all the violence, and as a reader, it was easy for me to see how much Whitehead enjoyed bringing this world of 1970s Harlem to life. I actually think this book was a bit better than the first in the series, Harlem Shuffle. It’s the second in a planned trilogy, but it’s not really necessary to read Harlem Shuffle to enjoy this book. However, as the second of three, it does feel like it ends with unfinished business. My favorite character was probably Pepper. Whitehead seems to enjoy Pepper enough to let him run away with the book. 

four-stars

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Review: How to Hang a Witch Series, Adriana Mather

Posted on by Dana

I discovered Adriana Mather’s book through the Salem Witch Museum. The museum is terribly cheesy, but they have a good social media presence, and they recently shared a picture on Facebook of books written by Salem Witch Trials descendants that are available in their gift shop. I’m not sure if Adriana Mather is a direct descendant of Cotton Mather, but she’s definitely related. Cotton Mather notoriously played a role on the wrong side of history in the infamous Salem Witch Trials. I’m not sure if Adriana Mather plans to write more books in this series, but I’d read them. I think a good description of these books might be Twilight, but with witches and ghosts instead of vampires. I will read practically anything set in Salem. I’ve spent a good bit of time there and know it fairly well. It is a cute little town that takes its history in weird, kitschy directions. One caveat I feel like I must share: it’s not weird at all in New England to be a descendant of one or even several of the players in the Salem Witch Trials, and it bugged me a bit that the notion of being descended from an accused witch or other players in the trials was somehow unique enough to set “the Descendants” apart. But if you lay that quibble aside, the idea of them wafting through the hallways of Salem High School wearing black from head to toe is fun. Adriana Mather has a fascinating family history, and she was lucky to be able to mine it for her fiction.

Review: How to Hang a Witch Series, Adriana MatherHow to Hang a Witch (How to Hang a Witch, #1) by Adriana Mather
Series: How to Hang a Witch #1
Published by Knopf on July 26, 2016
Genres: Contemporary Fiction, Young Adult
Pages: 359
Format: E-Book, eBook
Source: Library
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This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
four-stars

It's the Salem Witch Trials meets Mean Girls in a debut novel from one of the descendants of Cotton Mather, where the trials of high school start to feel like a modern day witch hunt for a teen with all the wrong connections to Salem’s past.

Salem, Massachusetts is the site of the infamous witch trials and the new home of Samantha Mather. Recently transplanted from New York City, Sam and her stepmother are not exactly welcomed with open arms. Sam is the descendant of Cotton Mather, one of the men responsible for those trials and almost immediately, she becomes the enemy of a group of girls who call themselves The Descendants. And guess who their ancestors were?

If dealing with that weren't enough, Sam also comes face to face with a real live (well technically dead) ghost. A handsome, angry ghost who wants Sam to stop touching his stuff. But soon Sam discovers she is at the center of a centuries old curse affecting anyone with ties to the trials. Sam must come to terms with the ghost and find a way to work with The Descendants to stop a deadly cycle that has been going on since the first accused witch was hanged. If any town should have learned its lesson, it's Salem. But history may be about to repeat itself.

I believe this book is the stronger of the two, but that’s partly because Samantha Mather, the protagonist, is more of an outsider, and all the world-building in this book is pretty interesting.

Review: How to Hang a Witch Series, Adriana MatherHaunting the Deep (How to Hang a Witch, #2) by Adriana Mather
Series: How to Hang a Witch #2
Published by Knopf on October 3, 2017
Genres: Contemporary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Young Adult
Pages: 344
Format: E-Book, eBook
Source: Library
Buy on Amazon, Buy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
four-stars

The Titanic meets the delicious horror of Ransom Riggs and the sass of Mean Girls in this follow-up to the #1 New York Times bestseller How to Hang a Witch, in which a contemporary teen finds herself a passenger on the famous “ship of dreams”—a story made all the more fascinating because the author’s own relatives survived the doomed voyage.

Samantha Mather knew her family’s connection to the infamous Salem Witch Trials might pose obstacles to an active social life. But having survived one curse, she never thought she’d find herself at the center of a new one.

This time, Sam is having recurring dreams about the Titanic . . . where she’s been walking the deck with first-class passengers, like her aunt and uncle. Meanwhile, in Sam’s waking life, strange missives from the Titanic have been finding their way to her, along with haunting visions of people who went down with the ship.

Ultimately, Sam and the Descendants, along with some help from heartthrob Elijah, must unravel who is behind the spell that is drawing her ever further into the dream ship . . . and closer to sharing the same grim fate as its ghostly passengers.

I said I’d read anything set in Salem, and I’m also a sucker for books about Titanic, though, to be honest, I’m not sure I’ve read a good one. I liked the movie when it came out, and I used to play a video game set there that was a ton of fun. I figured out who the antagonist in this book would be early on, but their motive doesn’t make a ton of sense to me.

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Review: The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams

Posted on by Dana

Review: The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip WilliamsThe Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
Published by Ballantine Books on March 31, 2020
Genres: Historical Fiction
Pages: 400
Format: E-Book, eBook
Source: Library
Buy on Amazon, Buy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
five-stars

In this remarkable debut based on actual events, as a team of male scholars compiles the first Oxford English Dictionary, one of their daughters decides to collect the "objectionable" words they omit.

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the "Scriptorium," a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word "bondmaid" flutters to the floor. She rescues the slip, and when she learns that the word means slave-girl, she withholds it from the OED and begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.

As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women's and common folks' experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.

Set during the height of the women's suffrage movement with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men.
Based on actual events and combed from author Pip Williams's experience delving into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary, this highly original novel is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.


This book was one of the most enjoyable I’ve read all year, and I highly recommend it to fans of historical fiction who also love words. I picked it up upon seeing Simon Winchester’s blurb:

“In the annals of lexicography, no more imaginative, delightful, charming, and clever book has yet been written.” —Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

High praise, considering The Professor and the Madman was one of the more interesting and enjoyable works of nonfiction I’ve read.

Some reviewers mention that this book takes a turn when characters start dying, but honestly, that’s what happens in life: as you age, you lose your parents and friends. It would be unnatural for Williams not to include this aspect of Esme’s story.

The novel was well written on top of telling an engaging story. I loved the characters’ meditations on words, and I enjoyed Esme’s efforts to collect words she feared the dictionary was not capturing.

In an interview in the back of the book, Williams said,

By the time I had finished the first draft of this novel, I had become acutely aware that the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was a flawed and gendered text. But it was also extraordinary, and far less flawed and gendered than it might have been in the hands of someone other than James Murray.

Williams’s admiration for Murray’s efforts to bring the dictionary to completion was palpable on every page, but even more than that, her admiration for the lesser-known individuals who contributed to the dictionary was spotlighted.

five-stars

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Review: Daughter Dalloway, Emily France

Posted on by Dana

Review: Daughter Dalloway, Emily FranceDaughter Dalloway by Emily France
Published by Blackstone Publishing on March 14, 2023
Genres: Historical Fiction
Pages: 350
Format: Hardcover
Source: Library
Buy on Amazon, Buy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
four-stars

A retelling of Virginia Woolf's classic Mrs. Dalloway, from the point of view of the famous socialite's only child, Elizabeth.

It is 1952 and forty-six-year-old Elizabeth Dalloway—arguably the most inept socialite in all of London—is fresh off yet another of her awkward parties. She feels she has failed at most everything in life, especially living up to her perfect mother—the elegant Mrs. Dalloway, the woman who never made a misstep, the woman who never arrived for her very own party at the end of the 1923 Season. And hasn't been heard from since.

Elizabeth has given up ever finding out what really happened that summer until she comes across a WWI medal inscribed with a mysterious message from her mother to a soldier, Septimus Warren Smith. Elizabeth sets out to find a member of his family in the hopes she will finally learn her mother's fate. Her journey takes her across London as she pieces together that last summer of 1923 when Elizabeth was a seventeen-year-old girl who escaped her mother's watchful eye and rebelled against the staid social rules of prewar England. A girl who caroused with the Prince of Wales and sons of American iron barons, a girl determined to do it all differently than her mother. A girl who didn't yet feel like a failure.

Faithful to the original yet fully standing alone, Daughter, Dalloway follows Elizabeth as she discovers the truth: though decades have passed and opportunities for women have changed, expectations haven't: to be it all, whatever the costs. And that she shares much more with her mother than she ever knew.


I finished this book a few days ago and had to think about how to rate it. Any author who takes up Virginia Woolf’s mantle is bound to pale in comparison. She’s one of the greatest writers to have lived, and some consider Mrs. Dalloway to be her masterpiece. It’s a book I love, and I love teaching it. On the other hand, this book has some great moments and is well-researched. While Elizabeth Dalloway is Woolf’s creation, Septimus Warren Smith’s sister Octavia is France’s invention, and I enjoyed her character. I didn’t enjoy her companions Redvers and his brother George—they were stock street urchin characters, and they didn’t seem as realistic to me as the other characters France invented. I thought it was far-fetched that Clarissa would commission a medal for Septimus, and her fate, which is a bit spoilery, also struck me as a stretch given what I know of Woolf’s thinking about her characters.

However, I admit France made me think about the concept of the stream of consciousness in a new way, and I plan to share this idea with my students. Typically, I teach stream of consciousness as the way our thoughts flow from one to another, and France also adheres to this definition, but she also conceives of the stream of consciousness as the thread that joins all of us together. This idea resembles Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept of the Over-Soul more than it resembles the traditional conception of stream of consciousness, but I liked it. In his essay on the Over-Soul, Emerson quotes Byron in arguing that the soul “Can crowd eternity into an hour, / Or stretch an hour to eternity.” One could argue Woolf was trying to do both with Mrs. Dalloway.

Reading this book has given me some ideas for teaching Mrs. Dalloway, and it’s better than average historical fiction. Compared to its source material, it can’t help but suffer—it does not quite pull off the same feat as The Hours—but it was pretty good.

four-stars

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Review: Black Cake, Charmaine Wilkerson

Posted on by Dana

Review: Black Cake, Charmaine WilkersonBlack Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson
Narrator: Lynnette R. Freeman, Simone Mcintyre
Published by Random House Audio on February 1, 2022
Genres: Contemporary Fiction, Historical Fiction
Length: 12 hours and 2 minutes
Format: Audio, Audiobook
Source: Library
Buy on Amazon, Buy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
four-half-stars

We can’t choose what we inherit. But can we choose who we become?In present-day California, Eleanor Bennett’s death leaves behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a black cake, made from a family recipe with a long history, and a voice recording. In her message, Eleanor shares a tumultuous story about a headstrong young swimmer who escapes her island home under suspicion of murder. The heartbreaking tale Eleanor unfolds, the secrets she still holds back, and the mystery of a long-lost child challenge everything the siblings thought they knew about their lineage and themselves.

Can Byron and Benny reclaim their once-close relationship, piece together Eleanor’s true history, and fulfill her final request to “share the black cake when the time is right”? Will their mother’s revelations bring them back together or leave them feeling more lost than ever?

Charmaine Wilkerson’s debut novel is a story of how the inheritance of betrayals, secrets, memories, and even names can shape relationships and history. Deeply evocative and beautifully written, Black Cake is an extraordinary journey through the life of a family changed forever by the choices of its matriarch.


I enjoyed this book quite a lot, but part of the reason it earned 4.5 stars for me was the excellent narration which added interest. Had I read the novel rather than listened to it, I might have settled it at 3.5-4 stars. At times I felt that the novel had a bit too much going on. However, it was a thoroughly enjoyable read, and I would recommend the book to others.

One of my favorite aspects of the book was the importance of food in storytelling and history. The New York Times shared this black cake recipe if you’d like to try it after reading the book. I could see it being a fun refreshment for a book club discussion of the novel. Some of the recipe’s reviews offer helpful tips.

four-half-stars

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Three Books from My Old TBR Pile and One New Book

Posted on by Dana

I recently finished reading three books I’ve had in my TBR pile for a long time. In fact, The Cookbook Collector and Heavy have been on my Kindle for years. Here are some quick reviews.

Three Books from My Old TBR Pile and One New BookGold Hill Family Audio (Cowles Poetry Prize Winner) by Corrie Lynn White
Published by Southeast Missouri State University Press on 2022
Genres: Poetry
Pages: 75
Format: Paperback
Buy on Amazon, Buy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
five-stars

"It is hard not to fall in love with the sensual, contemplative, sharp-eyed and often playful voice of Corrie Lynn White in her gutsy debut as she traverses the landscape of her personal history—its 'uneven ground' and its badass set of matriarchs—looking to chart her own 'narrow road' toward a complete and fulfilling life. Sometimes that means, 'delet[ing] Tinder,' and going it alone. Sometimes that means embracing romance and its raw 'I sleep next to him/like a hog/ when it finds/ cold mud.' Where must we go? And, who with? It is the anxieties of this poet’s very human search that ring most true. And, as a woman, I have rarely felt so seen by a book." —Lauren Goodwin Slaughter, author of Spectacle.

Full disclosure, Corrie Lynn White and I attended a Kenyon Writing Workshop for Teachers some years ago. We were not in the same group, so I didn’t hear much of her writing at the workshop, but I did hear her work at our final reading and was very impressed. I enjoyed her collection. My favorite poem was “To Mother or To Be Lonely,” mainly because the line “They put stale cornbread in their milk and let it soften” made me think of my grandmother, who used to crumble cornbread into her buttermilk.

Three Books from My Old TBR Pile and One New BookThe Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman
Published by The Dial Press on 2010
Genres: Contemporary Fiction
Pages: 405
Format: E-Book, eBook
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Goodreads
four-stars

Heralded as “a modern day Jane Austen” by USA Today, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author Allegra Goodman has compelled and delighted hundreds of thousands of readers. Now, in her most ambitious work yet, Goodman weaves together the worlds of Silicon Valley and rare book collecting in a delicious novel about appetite, temptation, and fulfillment.

Emily and Jessamine Bach are opposites in every way: Twenty-eight-year-old Emily is the CEO of Veritech, twenty-three-year-old Jess is an environmental activist and graduate student in philosophy. Pragmatic Emily is making a fortune in Silicon Valley, romantic Jess works in an antiquarian bookstore. Emily is rational and driven, while Jess is dreamy and whimsical. Emily’s boyfriend, Jonathan, is fantastically successful. Jess’s boyfriends, not so much—as her employer George points out in what he hopes is a completely disinterested way.

Bicoastal, surprising, rich in ideas and characters, The Cookbook Collector is a novel about getting and spending, and about the substitutions we make when we can’t find what we’re looking for: reading cookbooks instead of cooking, speculating instead of creating, collecting instead of living. But above all it is about holding on to what is real in a virtual world: love that stays.

I was a bit disappointed that this book had a misleading title. I thought it would be much more about this old bookstore and the collection of cookbooks. I found it kind of improbable that some of the cookbooks in the collection existed, as I know a bit about collecting cookbooks—I collect them myself. A “signed Mrs. Fisher“? Doesn’t exist!  Details like that will just take you out of the plot. The book was much more about the Dot-Com Bubble. I can see this book is pretty polarizing on review sites. It seems like a lot of people hate it. I didn’t. It was good, even if it wasn’t what I was expecting. However, I don’t think anyone does Allegra Goodman any favors by comparing her to Jane Austen. The only comparison I see is that the plot is loosely lifted from Sense and Sensibility.

Three Books from My Old TBR Pile and One New BookConjure Women by Afia Atakora
Narrator: Adenrele Ojo
Published by Random House Audio on April 7, 2020
Genres: Historical Fiction
Length: 13 hours 59 minutes
Format: Audio, Audiobook
Source: Library
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Goodreads
three-half-stars

A mother and daughter with a shared talent for healing—and for the conjuring of curses—are at the heart of this dazzling first novel

Conjure Women is a sweeping story that brings the world of the South before and after the Civil War vividly to life. Spanning eras and generations, it tells of the lives of three unforgettable women: Miss May Belle, a wise healing woman; her precocious and observant daughter Rue, who is reluctant to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a midwife; and their master’s daughter Varina. The secrets and bonds among these women and their community come to a head at the beginning of a war and at the birth of an accursed child, who sets the townspeople alight with fear and a spreading superstition that threatens their newly won, tenuous freedom.

Magnificently written, brilliantly researched, richly imagined, Conjure Women moves back and forth in time to tell the haunting story of Rue, Varina, and May Belle, their passions and friendships, and the lengths they will go to save themselves and those they love.

I struggled with how to rate this one. The characters and story were compelling, but the story dragged in parts. The book is clearly well-researched, and Bruh Abel is like a character out of Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner. Atakora has excellent writing chops. I think the storytelling could have been more taut. Moments in this debut novel dazzle, but finishing this novel was hard-going at times.

Three Books from My Old TBR Pile and One New BookHeavy by Kiese Laymon
Published by Scribner on October 16, 2022
Genres: Memoir
Pages: 248
Format: E-Book, eBook
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Goodreads
five-stars

In this powerful and provocative memoir, genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse.

Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been.

In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.

A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family that begins with a confusing childhood—and continues through twenty-five years of haunting implosions and long reverberations.

Heavy is a fantastic, well-written memoir. It’s unflinching, honest, raw, and beautiful. Fair warning: it is extremely sad and deals with some difficult issues, including addiction, weight fixation, anorexia, physical abuse, psychological abuse, sexual abuse, and racism.

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