My Beloved World
Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2013: Happily, it is
becoming a familiar story: The young, smart, and very hardworking son or
daughter of immigrants rises to the top of American professional life. But
already knowing the arc of Sonia Sotomayor’s biography doesn’t adequately
prepare you for the sound of her voice in this winning memoir that ends,
interestingly, before the Yale Law School grad was sworn in as the first
Hispanic Supreme Court Justice. Hers is a voice that lands squarely between
self-deprecating and proud, grateful and defiant; a voice lilted with bits of
Puerto Rican poetry; a voice full of anger, sadness, ambition, and love. My
Beloved World is one resonant, glorious tale of struggle and triumph. --Sara
Nelson
Tell the Wolves I'm Home: A Novel
Amazon Best Books of the
Month, June 2012: In Tell the
Wolves I’m Home, Carol Rifka Brunt has made a singular portrait of the
late-‘80s AIDS epidemic’s transformation of a girl and her family. But beyond
that, she tells a universal story of how love chooses us, and how flashes of
our beloved live through us even after they’re gone. Before her Uncle Finn died
of an illness people don’t want to talk about, 14-year-old June Elbus thought
she was the center of his world. A famous and reclusive painter, Finn made her
feel uniquely understood, privy to secret knowledge like how to really hear
Mozart’s Requiem or see the shape of negative space. When he’s gone, she
discovers he had a bigger secret: his longtime partner Toby, the only other
person who misses him as much as she does. Her clandestine friendship with
Toby—who her parents blame for Finn’s illness—sharpens tensions with her
sister, Greta, until their bond seems to exist only in the portrait Finn
painted of them. With wry compassion, Brunt portrays the bitter lengths to
which we will go to hide our soft underbellies, and how summoning the courage
to be vulnerable is the only way to see through to each other’s hungry, golden
souls.
Recommended by Kathy Didier
The Dovekeepers
"Dovekeepers" orbits around the real life events of
the early 70s A.D. in ancient Judea. Rome was large and in charge and in the
midst of shattering a Judean rebellion (seen commemorated in the famous Arch of
Titus in the Roman Forum only a few hundred yards from the Colosseum in Italy).
Several hundred Jews fled Jerusalem to the desert near the Dead Sea and moved
into the former mountain fortress of King Herod at Masada. While the proud Jewish
rebels held off a Roman legion for several years, Rome ultimately prevailed and
all but two women and five children killed themselves rather than allow
themselves to be overrun.
Hoffman's novel follows the lives of four women who all find
themselves on Masada. Each woman has a dedicated 100-150 pages that weave in
and out of each other's stories with the collective whole building a
comprehensive picture of their mutual plight. The stories connect the women
together in ways that are obvious and follow the primary arc of the novel, but
also in ways that are surprising and poignantly fulfilling. The connections
build and develop on many levels: physically, emotionally, and symbolically.
The book is full of characters who are broken and hurt; affected
by some deep trauma catalyzed by the Roman attacks on Jerusalem; driving each,
by their own will or otherwise, to the fortress in the desert.
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