89 Followers
1 Following
LiterarySara

Literary Sara

What I've been reading on the trolley. 

Currently reading

Salt Fish Girl: A Novel
Larissa Lai
A Place of Greater Safety
Hilary Mantel
Make Art Make Money: Lessons from Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career
Elizabeth Hyde Stevens
Moby Dick: or, the White Whale
Herman Melville
Everything I Never Told You: A Novel - Celeste Ng

On the surface, this book is like a checklist of details I'm going to find boring or played out: small town in the 1970s, dead teenage girl, family drama, blah blah blah. Yet this is one of the most elegantly written and finely imagined novels I've read all year. As the girl's family staggers and breaks down in the wake of her death, the narrative wheels back and forth in time to reveal a thousand decisions and circumstances--racial microaggressions, gendered expectations, the burden of familial love and the loneliness of social isolation--that brought them all to this juncture.... suggesting that no one, but really everyone, is responsible for the tragedy. I drank the book up in two days and cried a lot as it was ending.