Tag: Fiction

Book Review: Life Hacks for a Little Alien by Alice Franklin

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Author: Alice Franklin
Title: Life Hacks for a Little Alien  
Narrator: Sally Phillips
Publication Info: Hachette Audio, 2025
Summary/Review:

Written as a guidebook for the novel’s young protagonist, Life Hacks for a Little Alien is the story of a girl growing up in suburban England with undiaganosed neurodivergence. Her odd behavior and unwillingness to talk much isolate her.  Most of the adults in her life range from clueless to heartless, and her mother is dealing with a serious mental illness.  So deciding she’s an alien and creating a guide to life seems a reasonable coping strategy.

A key part of the story is the protagonist becoming fascinated with the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, a 15th century codex written in a language no one is able to decipher. Librarians, archivists, and ultimately a linguist act as guides for her journey through the Voynich Manuscript.  The novel ends on a hopeful not, albeit as the protagonist is still a teenager it feels like there is more to her story.

Franklin takes the unusual approach of writing the novel in second person.  Perhaps it’s rarely used because it gets a bit grating to constantly be addressed as “you.”  But thematically it works as the protagonist trying to understand herself from outside herself.

Recommended books:

Rating: ***

Book Review: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

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Author: Mark Twain
Title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Narrator: Tom Parker
Publication Info: Blackstone Publishing, 2004 [originally published, 1884]
Other Books Read by the Same Author:

  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
  • Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain
  • The Innocents Abroad
  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
  • The Prince and the Pauper
  • Pudd’nhead Wilson
  • Tom Sawyer Abroad
  • Tom Sawyer Detective

Summary/Review:

It’s curious that Mark Twain is relegated to the “folksy Americana” bucket when his most famous work is actually a scathing satire of the inherent violence of American culture.  The story is about a boy escaping horrific abuse from his father accompanied by a Black man, Jim, himself escaping slavery, America’s original sin.  It’s heartbreaking that by doing the morally correct thing – helping Jim escape – Huck has been conditioned by white supremacism to believe he is being sinful.  Jim is a wonderful, loving person – really the parent Huck deserves – but even then he has been conditioned to humor Huck as a white person by playing dumb at times.

Huck and Jim’s adventures take place on a raft drifting down the Mississippi River.  On their journey the encounter thieves, feuding families, and the horrors of nature and riverboat traffic.  The better part of the second half of the novel deals with two conmen who commandeer the raft, claiming to be a British duke and the French dauphin.  As they continue downriver, they involve Huck and Jim in their attempts to scam people in the towns they pass. For a novel set 180 years ago, there’s a lot about American people and culture that feels relevant to 2026.

While, in many ways this is a perfect book, I do feel the many cons of the Duke and the Dauphin kind of drag.  Also, late in the novel when Tom Sawyer joins Huck and makes elaborate plans to rescue Jim based on romantic novels it gets a bit too absurd.  The end of the novel has something of a deus ex machina, where Tom and Jim each have a bit of information that had they revealed earlier could’ve saved them a lot of trouble. And while the language of the novel is a verisimilitude of how people talked at the time, it was really difficult to hear the “n-word” repeated so often.

As Ernest Hemingway famously noted, this is a novel from which “modern American literature” originated. It was good to revisit this book especially in a time when the character of the American people is being severely tested.  We live in a time where children suffer abuse at the hands of the powerful and people are dehumanized, and just like the characters in this novel we are tasked with choosing what we’re told is the “Real American” way or doing what is morally good.

Rating: *****

Book Review: Old Rosa by Reinaldo Arenas

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Around the World for a Good Book selection for Cuba

Author: Reinaldo Arenas
Title: Old Rosa
Publication Info: New York : Grove Press, 1994, c1989.
Summary/Review:

Old Rosa  is a short book with two related stories.  The title story is about a woman, abandoned by her husband, who runs a farm and raises her children on her own.  When the Cuban Revolution comes she refuses to surrender the farm with tragic consequences.  The second story, “The Brightest Star,”is set some years later when Rosa’s youngest son labors on a prison farm for men arrested for homosexuality. The stories are as grim as you can imagine and Arenas’ evocative writing captures the  point of view of these distinct characters.
Rating: ***1/2

Book Review: Factory Girls by Michelle Galen

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Author: Michelle Galen
Title: Factory Girls
Narrator: Amy Molloy
Publication Info: Hachette Audio, 2022
Summary/Review:

Set in a small town in the north of Ireland in the summer of 1994, Factory Girls is the story of 18-year-old Maeve Murray.  While waiting for her exam results, Maeve joins her friends working at the local shirt factory, hoping at the end of the summer she’ll be able to leave for London to study journalism.  Sharp-witted and outspoken, Maeve finds herself side-by-side with Protestants for the first time as well as in the middle of the class conflict between university-bound people like herself and the working class people who make their living at the factory. But the events of the novel lead to increasing solidarity among the workers against “Handy Andy” Strawbridge, the unscrupulous English factory owner, who Maeve nevertheless finds herself attracted to.

The setting of young women in the 1990s trying to go about their everyday lives and figure out their futures against the existential threat of The Troubles brings to mind immediate comparisons to Derry Girls.  And there are similarities, but the humor in Factory Girls feels more grounded in real life than the goofiness of Derry Girls. It also can be more serious in tone, dealing with issues such as the death of her older sister and other heartbreaks.  And a flashback scene in which Maeve’s mother has to wash shattered glass off her children following a bombing is memorable for the matter-of-fact way she knows how to deal with what should be an extraordinary circumstance.  The ending has a dark twist, but remains hopeful.

Recommended books:
Rating: ***1/2

Book Reviews: Thine is the Kingdom by Garth Buckner

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Author: Garth Buckner
Title: Thine is the Kingdom
Publication Info: Spokane, WA : Ravenna Press, 2008.
Summary/Review:

Gavin Blake (a stand-in for the author’s name if I’ve ever read one) is a young white man born in The Bahamas who faces a problem.  Although his mother is a citizen from a multi-generational Bahamian family, his father is from Florida and according to the law that makes Gavin an American (an relevant issue as birthright citizenship is currently under attack in the United States).  Returning to The Bahamas after studying abroad Gavin returns home where he’s treated like an outsider and mistake for a tourist. Nevertheless, he’s eager to apply for citizenship, and while he waits he finds work on the yacht of a wealthy man named Jacob Thesinger.  The bulk of the novel involves Gaving caught up in the conflicts among Thesinger and the local fishermen, criminal gangs, and corrupt government officials.  It has a Gatsby-esque quality of Nick Carraway observing the careless rich.  There’s also a curious tension as his novel is told from a white perspective in a nation where over 90% of the population is Black, so it’s a minority point of view but they’re also the descendants of colonizers.

Rating: ***

Book Reviews: The Blue Sky by Galsan Tschinag

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Around the World for a Good Book selection for Mongolia

Author: Galsan Tschinag
Title: The Blue Sky
Translator: Katharina Rout
Publication Info: Minneapolis, Minn. : Milkweed Editions, 2006.
Summary/Review:

This narrative offers a child’s perspective on life as a nomadic sheep herding family in the Altai Mountains of northern Mongolia. Young Dshurukuwaa learns the tasks of caring for animals from a young age, and the novel features a lot of detail about everyday life.  It also focuses on his great love of his grandmother and his dog. Dshurukuwaa has to face dealing with grief and loss as well as the changing of traditional ways due to Soviet-style modernization.  The book is based on the author’s own experiences as a child in 1950s Mongolia. 

Recommended books:

Rating: ***1/2

Book Reviews: Sworn Virgin by Elvira Dones

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Around the World for a Good Book selection for Albania.

Author: Elvira Dones
Title: Sworn Virgin
Translator: Clarissa Botsford
Publication Info: High Wycombe : And Other Stories, 2015
Summary/Review:
Under the Kanun law in rural Northern Albania, under certain conditions a woman can take a vow of celibacy and take on the social identity and freedoms of men.  That is the choice Hana Doda – also known as Mark – made 15 years earlier when her uncle and guardian was dying.  But in October 2001 she emigrates to live with her cousin in the suburbs of Washington, DC and has the opportunity to resume being a woman for the first time since she was 19 years old.  The novel follows Hana as she adjusts to a new country and essentially a change of gender, with flashbacks to her younger years in Albania.  Hana’s many challenges include the fact that even in the “liberated” West there are expectations of femininity.

Favorite Passages:

For a while now she’s been unable to balance her thought out, and that makes her angry.  It’s weird but when she was Mark she was better with words.  Mark weighed them inside himself, observed and honed them, stroked them, at times erased them from his mind. As a man, silence was his ally. In silence there was hope; in conversations there often wasn’t.  Sound played for the enemy side.  Once feelings were expressed, they lost their beauty, lost their color, and became diaphanous.

Rating: ***1/2

Book Reviews: Maiba by Russell Soaba

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Around the World for a Good Book selection for Papua New Guinea

Author: Russell Soaba
Title: Maiba, A Papuan Novel
Publication Info: Washington, D.C. : Three Continents Press, 1985.
Summary/Review:

This novel is set during a turning point in the indigenous village life of Papua New Guinea.  Maiba is a girl orphaned after the death of her father, the last chief of Makawana village.  Despite the prominence of her late father, Maiba is an outcast with very little support from her people and is depicted as a disheveled tomboy with a runny nose.  Over the course of the story the community is torn as some are drawn to Western modernism (which arrives with Christianity and capitalism) and yet Maiba emerges to try to defend the community against the forces tearing it apart.  The novel features grim details of violence and sexual assault, as well as more benign passages describing the landscape and traditional ways of Papua New Guinea.

Recommended books:

Rating: ***

Book Review: Memoirs of a Porcupine by Alain Mabanckou

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Around the World for a Good Book selection for the Republic of the Congo

Author: Alain Mabanckou
Title: Memoirs of a Porcupine
Publication Info: Soft Skull (2012)
Summary/Review:

There’s nothing symbolic about the title.  This novel is written from the point of view of a porcupine.  But it’s no ordinary porcupine.  According to the author, in African folklore, animals can serve as a double for a human being.  In this instance, the porcupine doubles for Kibandi, a Congolese boy who is paired during a ritual at the age of 11.  As he ages, Kibandi has a compulsion for murder, using the porcupine as his accomplice. The  novel is the porcupine’s confession of his crimes.  The grim and darkly comic tale is not an easy read, not least because of Mabanckou’s writing style of writing in long run-on sentences with minimal capitalization and only commas for punctuation.  I won’t pretend that I quite get the meaning underlying this narrative, but it is a pointed and unique commentary on humanity.

Recommended books:
Rating: ***1/2

Book Review: Time Loops and Meet Cutes by Jackie Lau

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Author: Jackie Lau
Title: Time Loops and Meet Cutes by
Narrator: Cindy Kay, Raymond J. Lee
Publication Info: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2025
Summary/Review:

Noelle, a young woman who lives and works as an engineer in Toronto, takes a break from her routine on the longest day of the year and visits the night market.  There she meets a mysterious woman selling dumplings that have the effect of causing her to relive June 20th again and again.  Thinking she might need to be kissed to break the time loop she flirts with a handsome brewpub owner Cam.  Noelle forms a special connection with Cam over multiple “first dates” although she struggle with the fact that he can’t remember them. Noelle also meets up with another woman named Avery who is caught in the time loop.  They become friends and eventually roommates as they alternate between carefree adventures and attempts to break the time loop.

I enjoy that in a clever variation on time loop stories that after living through June 20 over 100 times, they return to normal time six months in the future with no memory of what happened in the intervening months.  Thematically, the novel works as a way of Noelle growing beyond being a shy workaholic to someone able to take risks, form connections with other people, and repair relationships with her family.  As a romance it is both very sweet and very horny.

Recommended books:

Rating: ***1/2