The characters are all distinct and real and they surprised me repeatedly. I felt like the book was as much documentary as fiction -- but the plotting had me rigid with tension. I expected disaster at every turn.
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In a single eye-opening year, two women, worlds apart, experience parallel awakenings.
In New York, Jane Takagi-Little has landed a job producing Japanese docu-soap My American Wife! But as she researches the consumption of meat in the American home, she begins to realize that her ruthless search for a story is deeply compromising her morals.
Meanwhile, in Tokyo, housewife Akiko Ueno diligently prepares the recipes from Jane's programme. Struggling to please her husband, she increasingly doubts her commitment to the life she has fallen into.
The author gives perfect details to locate me right into the setting: strawberries, honeysuckle, dust in the air. The book abounds with sentences that start with words like "When the nights were silvery with moonlight and dark shadows" (p. 36) -- they grabbed me by the heart and placed me in the south where I grew up. While the situation of turning deaf at 8 years old -- with no one to explain why and nothing to be done about it -- and all the challenges of growing up is unfamiliar to nearly all readers, the honesty of this book makes the period of the 1920's-1940's relevant to today, which must be why it's been re-issued so often. And, oh, the closeness of the family was enveloping. Wonderful book.
Originally published in 1999, Sounds Like Home adds an important dimension to the canon of deaf literature by presenting the perspective of an African American deaf woman who attended a segregated deaf school. Mary Herring Wright documents her life from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s, offering a rich account of her home life in rural North Carolina and her education at the North Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind, which had a separate campus for African American students. This 20th anniversary edition of Wright’s story includes a new introduction by scholars Joseph Hill and Carolyn McCaskill, who note…
Ruth Rendell takes characters unlike most I would meet in my daily life and gives me an inside picture of what they do and why they do it. She moves from the point of view of one character to that of another within a chapter, and seamlessly. She builds tension, making us expect the worst, and then makes something even more horrible happen, but it makes sense -- it fits.
Mix Cellini is obsessed. And not just with the supermodel he’s been stalking. He’s also endlessly fascinated by the life of Reggie Christie, the infamous serial killer hanged fifty years ago.
So when things get difficult—his snoopy landlady and her friends watch him with growing suspicion and the object of his desire ignores him—Mix turns to his hero, Reggie Christie, for inspiration. And Reggie was a man for whom murder began as a practical solution and became a matter of appetite.
In Thirteen Steps Down, Ruth Rendell masterfully interweaves the multiple narratives that connect the angry young man who longs…
This is a read-before-going-to bed story, about the child who has trouble accepting sleep. It's a STEM book about other creatures that don't sleep at night -- from teeny ones to huge ones. The food chain is in there. And the illustrations are magnificent. It's a fun read aloud.
