Review: How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo
The problem is, if we need fiction to teach us empathy, we don’t really have empathy, because empathy is not a one-stop destination; it’s a practice, ongoing, which requires work from us in our daily lives–not just when we’re confronted with the visibly and legibly Other. Not just when a particularly gifted author has managed to make a community’s story come alive for the reader who’s come for a quick zoo visit, always remaining on her side of the cage.
page 30, How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo
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Review: Red City by Marie Lu
They say that trees that grow against cliffsides are tortured, seeds brought there on a wayward breeze and forced to put down roots into stone and salt. They must twist their trunks up at an unnatural angle to accommodate the doomed circumstances they’d been given at birth. Yet they still fight to survive, contort themselves to stretch their branches up to the sun. They grow and grow sideways like this until the day a storm finally tears their bodies apart. And yet, hadn’t they lived wild and free? Weren’t they happy, when they were here?
page 418, Red City by Marie Lu
Can’t we be?
Are we still two kids who need each other?
All I think about is you. You are my beginning and end.
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Review: The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
The hardest thing in the world is to live only once.
page 1, The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
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Review: Alchemy of Secrets by Stephanie Garber
“By now, I’m sure many of you have tried to find the devil at a hotel bar, and I probably should have said this before: Be very careful. Hollywood was not built on dreams, it was built on favors from the devil, and the devil does not handle it well when those favors aren’t paid back.”
page 36, Alchemy of Secrets by Stephanie Garber