Category: Books
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Book Review: Three Dark Crowns
Introduction “It would be sweet to be cared for despite her faults, and to be wanted for her person rather than the power she comes with.” When kingdom come, there will be one. In every generation on the island of Fennbirn, a set of triplets is born—three queens, all equal heirs to the crown and…
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Book Review: Normal People
Introduction “It feels powerful to him to put an experience down in words, like he’s trapping it in a jar and it can never fully leave him.” At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely…
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Book Review: The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue
Introduction “Because time is cruel to all, and crueler still to artists. Because visions weakens, and voices wither, and talent fades…. Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end… everyone wants to be remembered” France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever…
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Book Review: Circe
Introduction “It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment’s carelessness. If I had ever believed it, I no longer did.” In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange…
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Book Review: A Room of One’s Own
Introduction “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on the 24th of October, 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures…
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Book Review: The Bell Jar
Introduction “I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn’t want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went…
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Book Review: Girl, Serpent, Thorn
Introduction “Stories always begin the same way: There was and there was not. There is possibility in those words, the chance for hope or despair.” There was and there was not, as all stories begin, a princess cursed to be poisonous to the touch. But for Soraya, who has lived her life hidden away, apart…
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Book Review: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Introduction “It’s always been fascinating to me how things can be simultaneously true and false, how people can be good and bad all in one, how someone can love you in a way that is beautifully selfless while serving themselves ruthlessly.” Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the…
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Book Review: Love
Introduction “Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy’s.” In life, Bill Cosey enjoyed the affections of many women, who would do almost anything to gain his favor. In death his hold on them may be even stronger. Wife, daughter, granddaughter, employee, mistress:…
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Book Review: These Violent Delights
Introduction “She…hoped. And hope was dangerous. Hope was the most vicious evil of them all, the thing that had managed to thrive in Pandora’s box among misery, and disease, and sadness—and what could endure alongside others with such teeth if it didn’t have ghastly claws of its own?” The year is 1926, and Shanghai hums…
Aliyah and Words 