I read Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits in one great burst, staying up late at night to read in the darkness of my bedroom, only to fall asleep holding the book and to wake up once the sun peeked through my window, immediately wide awake and ready to finish. This was partially because I had a...

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

J.D. Vance's famed bestseller Hillbilly Elegy is subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. And, indeed, Vance seamlessly blends the familial and the cultural: framing the violence, drug addiction, and economic uncertainty that plagues his own family within the context of the Appalachian "hillbilly" culture in which he grew up. He pulls...

"Where we plant our feet is where we must hold up the sky. We live and die by the rules of the land we live in" (264). If I were to list everything great about The Weight of Our Sky, I could talk endlessly about characters, the plot, and the prose, and I still wouldn't run out of...

It would be remiss for me to spend a year reviewing my favorite realistic fiction novels and overlook author John Sandford. Sandford has written several notable series, including the Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers novels, and collaborated with Michelle Cook on the YA series The Singular Menace. They all tend towards the airport mystery-thriller...

I've been wanting to read Casey McQuiston's Red, White & Royal Blue for a while, ever since I ventured into the world of queer literature. And you know what? I learned a great life lesson from it, and that is to never buy something overly-recommended on TikTok.

Jeff Smith's Bone opens with three small, bulbous, vaguely bone-like creatures wandering aimlessly through a vast wasteland - a scene strikingly reminiscent of my last three braincells after finals week. Exiled from their cartoon homeland, these cousins are about to stumble upon the greatest fantasy adventure of their lives - and, incidentally, so...

I began reading this book with low expectations, wanting to avoid disappointment. After all, Project Hail Mary is the newest book by Andy Weir, beloved author of The Martian, a novel I reread time and again for comfort or a familiar thrill. I was prepared for all other books by Weir to pale in comparison.

11/22/63 is not a book about the assasination of John F. Kennedy, though that may be how it appears. It's a love story about a man desperately trying to appreciate all-too-rare moments of fleeting beauty while he still can. And it concerns that same man traveling back in time to stop the assasination of John F. Kennedy. When...

Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart begins in the fictional village of Umuofia, Nigeria, which Achebe describes as a prosperous town where people feel a great sense of kinship to one another. The protagonist of the story is the unlikable Okonkwo, a brutish man afraid of failure and of weakness. He rules over his three wives and their...