When I picked up this wonderfully researched and evocative novel, my knowledge of Ethiopia was woefully limited. Within a few pages, Abraham Verghese drew me in to a world of struggle and fear, love and compassion. Largely set in a mission hospital in Addis Ababa, the book tells the story of Marion and Shiva Price […]
….Aaaaaand we’re back. Remember, Kill Shakespeare is a comic book series about two factions of Shakespeare characters trying to save or kill the god/wizard Will Shakespeare. In this corner, we have The Heroes (trying to save Will): Hamlet, Juliet, Othello, Falstaff, and co. In this corner, we have The Villains (trying to kill Bill and […]
If you watch NBC’s The Office, you already know Mindy Kaling. Or to be more specific, you know her on-screen counterpart: Kelly Kapur. And maybe you think that Mindy is actually Kelly, and therefore assume that Mindy is obsessed with weight loss, boys, and shopping. But you’d be wrong. Mindy is obsessed with weight loss, […]
I read Matched, the first in the trilogy that includes Crossed, in a sort of breathless blur. Left yearning as I was after finishing The Hunger Games, Matched seemed like its heir apparent. But Crossed actually makes me think retrospectively less of Matched, while still admitting that I’m definitely going to read the third installment […]
Faulkner’s The Hamlet is about a family of hicks (The Snopes) living in the boonies of Mississippi in a town called Frenchman’s Bend. The novel kicks off by introducing us to the town and giving us a little bit of backstory before bringing in the Snopes and launching us into a Southern, poetic, fablelike, and […]
Kill Shakespeare is a graphic novel created and written by Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col, with art by Andy Belanger, about a wizard/god (it depends on who you ask) named William Shakespeare and the characters that are out to kill/save him. Our heroes and villains are Hamlet, Juliet, Othello, Iago, Falstaff, Richard III, The Macbeths, […]
I don’t tend to like things set in high schools—books, 80’s movies, tv shows, classes, you name it—and we could go into the whys, but what it basically boils down to is that I feel like I already know that story, and I’m bored by the way most people tell it. But there are exceptions […]
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from Hunger Games fever it’s that YA readers were desperate to move on from the Bella Swan heroine model. Feminists, hipsters and tween girls alike have flocked to the stubbornly flawed but undeniably kickass Katniss Everdeen like she was a breath of fresh air; which, after years of a […]