Who gets to talk, when, and for whom is a conversation I can’t get enough of. For me this is one of the crucial elements of feminism (besides, you know, equal rights and control over one’s own body). It’s a conversation we don’t have enough in literature, though I’m glad we’re having it more often […]
Book Reviews for Writers
The book reviews on this site bring together my love of literature, political science background, and experience living abroad in an attempt to understand the world. As a novelist, I also write about what these writers teach me about craft and how they influence my writing.
Africa
Asia
Ai Weiwei, The Bicycle Book, and the Art of the Tangible
I’m still trying to figure out where I fit in the world, reconceptualizing my career and the way I spend my time. Naturally, I’m turning to books, but I’ve also been slowing down, paying attention to moments and returning to old favorites. Recently, that brought me to The Bicycle Book by Bella Bathurst, but I […]
Latin America
Seeking Myself in Dorfman’s The Suicide Museum
It must have been fate that I finally opened Ariel Dorfman’s The Suicide Museum during the week of September 8. I’d asked for the book ages ago and then kept avoiding it because it looked thick and the title was… not where I was at. But I had forgotten why I’d wanted to read this […]
US & Canada
The Pure Power of Rage in The Bride by Maggie Gyllenhaal
“Darling, something is cracking.” – Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Bride It’s easy to argue, watching the news over the last decade, that something needs to crack. We’re raising the right questions about racism, misogyny, and broken class structures, but as much hope as those questions give me, the thwarting of progress at every turn simply increases […]
Arabia
The Books I’m Carrying into 2026
New Year, new me, right? Except that reading is the fundamental way I relate to the world, so it’s always books, and in 2026 I’m working on unknotting some of the same obsessions as last year (and the year before, and, let’s be honest, always). Three books opened something for me in the past few […]
Eastern Europe
Writing from the Margins in No Friend to This House
I grew up aspiring to a “classical education” where I would read all the tomes of great thinkers from the Greek poets to the French Enlightenment, in their original languages of course. I didn’t achieve this (not only because I failed at teaching myself Latin) and my ambitions have changed. To be clear, I think […]
South Pacific
Crafting Emotional Honesty in In the Quiet by Eliza Henry-Jones
It’s not hard to trigger a newish mom’s “what would happen to my family if something happened to me” fears, but it is hard to sustain a quiet story over 350 pages. In In the Quiet, Eliza Henry-Jones does both so beautifully that not only did I feel immersed rather than manipulated, but I stayed […]
Western Europe
Satisfying a Craving for Craft with Warlight and The Reluctant Fundamentalist
I’ve been reading voraciously lately, hungry for the kind of craft that makes me sink into a book, that I can steal and learn from for my own. This binge put me eight books ahead on my reading goal for the year, but it wasn’t going to be satisfied until I found something really worth […]