reviews

A harrowing tale of female resilience  Author: Melanie Finn At the hot, pulsing center of Melanie Finn’s unnerving and assured feminist literary thriller is the unlikely hero of Rosie Monroe. We meet Rosie when she’s 18 and a freshman at Parsons School of Design. At first blush, she’s naïve, unfashionable, and starved for any scrap of affection following a brutal childhood in Lowell, Massachusetts. While volunteering at the Museum of Modern Art on a Sunday morning, she’s approached by Bennett Kinney. Older and more sophisticated, he’s wearing a starched shirt and tweed jacket and has a copy of Albert Camus’ [...]

A Feel-Good Speech Without a Soul Authors: Pope Francis and Austen Ivereigh So, I am not Roman Catholic, but my priest (Anglican) highly recommended delving into Pope Francis’ exegesis on how we (as a global people) can use the tragedy and aftermath of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic to apply Christian principles and hope in order to confront and change the world’s evils. Normally, a book by the Pope isn’t a read that would make it to the top of my list, but my priest’s avowal of the powerful and moving book by Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black, was so transformative, that [...]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Meets the Illuminati Author: Leigh Bardugo Since Galaxy Stern (Alex) can first remember, the dead have always been there – walking in the crowd, lounging at the bus stop, brushing past her in day to day life. It was years before she realized this wasn’t normal, that only she could see these butchered ghosts, still stuck somehow in a life that isn’t theirs anymore. But, a person can get used to pretty much anything, can’t they? Alex became used to it, learned to stay quite about it, until one day a ghost breached the thin divide [...]