Teddy Wayne’s latest novel, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, is about 11-year-old tween pop star, Jonny Valentine, and the circus that is his life. In the book, Jonny relates a few months of his second tour, sparing us nothing—the media hoopla, his infinitely complicated relationship with is mother-manager, daily tour business, his search for […]
Chad Kultgen’s latest novel, The Average American Marriage is the sequel to his provocative first novel, The Average American Male. The Average American Marriage is much like The Average American Male—both are carefully constructed shock-and-awe satires with strong language to provoke, to offend, to teeter just on the edge of memoir. And they are funny. […]
You guys, I did something crazy. I read a non-fiction book. This is … new and different for me. I don’t usually read nonfiction if it’s not about infectious diseases. …By which I mean Ebola. Really, pretty much just Ebola. In middle school and high school my dad got so frustrated with my 100% fiction […]
Tenth of December is Saunders’s fourth collection of short stories, and it is very very good. You may have heard about it. Some have (already) said that it’s the best book of 2013. That’s a lot of faith, or love, or something. And the book is, really, very good. Saunders’s Tenth of December appropriately holds […]
Okay, so I know I haven’t really reviewed that many kids books here before, but I get asked (by relatives, by children, by parents of children) for recommendations for kid’s books ALL THE TIME!!! And I mean, I will not tell a lie, I ADORE telling people what to read—you know, sharing books that I […]
Generally speaking, I’m not very good at serials. I don’t watch TV when it airs (people watch things weekly?! How????), I always end up marathoning whole seasons in great swaths, or abandoning series partway through. For example, I have not finished either Battlestar Galactica OR Friday Night Lights yet. I love both of them, I’m […]
You may well have guessed that I like graphic novels/graphic story-telling in general (there may have been a few hints: comic con, for example). You’re right! A+ for you! I could give you a whole little essay about why—it would be kind of long though, and have lots to do with visual literacy, language as […]
Okay, in the second (third? I guess it depends on how you count) installment of Borah’s Best of 2012, we have two categories. Think of it as a double feature. 1) Books That Don’t Let Go This is erroneously named. Only one book really needed to be here. But it did, indeed, need to be […]