by B.J. Novak
A book with no pictures?
What could be fun about that?
After all, if a book has no pictures, there's nothing to look at but the words on the page.
Words that might make you say silly sounds... In ridiculous voices...
Hey, what kind of book is this, anyway?
At once disarmingly simple and ingeniously imaginative, The Book With No Pictures inspires laughter every time it is opened, creating a warm and joyous experience to share--and introducing young children to the powerful idea that the written word can be an unending source of mischief and delight.
Thoughts: A cute book to read to your kids or for fun so they could discover the power that words can make without the help of images. Also, Braaaap is a fun word to say in your head or out loud, just saying.
Rating 4/5
by Celeste Ng
Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet . . . So begins this debut novel about a mixed-race family living in 1970s Ohio and the tragedy that will either be their undoing or their salvation. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother’s bright blue eyes and her father’s jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue—in Marilyn’s case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James’s case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the center of every party.When Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together tumbles into chaos, forcing them to confront the long-kept secrets that have been slowly pulling them apart.
Thoughts: Honestly, one of the best books that I've read this year. It's been a while since a book made me want to sit down and just read and read and read. It also helped that it was relatable to a certain extent, that no matter what you're going to be seen as a perpetual foreigner to others even though I lived in the United States my whole life. Plus, there's a very tiny cute fluffy gay boys scene (that takes a lot of extrapolating) and space is mentioned.
Rating: 4/5
The Gangster We Are All Looking For by Thi Diem Thúy Lê
This acclaimed novel reveals the life of a Vietnamese family in America through the knowing eyes of a child finding her place and voice in a new country.
In 1978 six refugees—a girl, her father, and four “uncles”—are pulled from the sea to begin a new life in San Diego. In the child’s imagination, the world is transmuted into an unearthly realm: she sees everything intensely, hears the distress calls of inanimate objects, and waits for her mother to join her. But life loses none of its strangeness when the family is reunited. As the girl grows, her matter-of-fact innocence eddies increasingly around opaque and ghostly traumas: the cataclysm that engulfed her homeland, the memory of a brother who drowned and, most inescapable, her father’s hopeless rage.
Thoughts: I couldn't help but continually think about my own family history while reading about this. How the Vietnam War messed everyone up even those in the future generations (like my siblings and me). Apparently, trauma could be generational and looking at the unnamed narrator and my own family it's true.
Rating: 3/5
And now the weather:
Eyes Nose Lips by David So and Z. Woods
~ Stacy N.
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