A Word About Awards

RADIANT FUGITIVES by Nawaaz Ahmed   Nominations: Aspen Words Longlist 2022, Center For Fiction Longlist 2021, PEN/Faulkner Finalist 2022   Date Read: June 6, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Muslim Indian family, splintered by forces from within and without, attempts to reconnect over one fateful week in San Francisco. "Oh, Grandmother, you’re not asleep yet. The voices from the kitchen are no lullaby. Your daughters are fighting, and you blame yourself. There must have been something you could have done, before the rifts widened to such chasms." Ahmed's complex, ambitious debut is narrated by a fetus who—like his literary cousin in Ian McEwan's  Nutshell —has narrative art to spare. Having just emerged from his mother's lifeless body in the delivery room, he unfolds a tragedy of classic proportions, fluently incorporating the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats, and the Quran and including masterful descriptions of the skies of San Francisco, of Muslim ritual, of LGBTQ+ pro...

BLACK RIVER by S.M. Hulse   Nominations: Center For Fiction Longlist 2015, Dublin Longlist 2017,  PEN/Hemingway Finalist 2016   Date Read: December 27, 2023   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Hulse debuts with a stark, tender tale about one man’s quest for faith and forgiveness.   The initial question is whether Wes Carver can forgive Bobby Williams, the inmate who tortured him during a prison riot that left two of his fellow corrections officers dead. He gets a letter informing him Williams is up for parole just days before his beloved wife, Claire, dies of leukemia, so Wes is in shaky condition when he returns to Black River, Montana, site of the prison and home to his stepson, Dennis. It’s been 20 years since the riot, 18 since Wes and Claire moved to Spokane, leaving behind her 16-year-old son after a violent altercation between the two men. Hulse unpacks this back story slowly, reproducing the way past traumas shape the present. We grow to realize that Wes too needs ...

CHAIN GANG ALL STARS by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah   Award:  Inside Literary Prize Winner 2025   Nominations: Aspen Words Finalist 2024, Carnegie Longlist 2024, Center For Fiction Longlist 2023, Dublin longlist 2024, National Book Finalist 2023, NY Times Finalist 2023   Date Read: October 27, 2023   As much as I don’t like the dystopian future genre, this book might be favorite book of 2023. The dystopian future isn’t that far in the future and it portrays something I could actually believe might happen – turning convicts into gladiators who kill each other. A chain gang is like a team and links in the chain are players.    So richly imagined and full of awful facts about the atrocity that is mass incarceration in America, Adjei-Brenyah has created a work that is so unique, so fresh and so very necessary. We can all agree that murder and rape are atrocious. And of course there are people who need a time out or a permanent time out but does that mean soci...

AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART by Elaine Castillo   Nominations: Aspen Words Longlist 2019, Center For Fiction Longlist 2018   Date Read: July 15, 2023   Hero, an unlikely name for a woman broken by her past, finds herself in Milpitas starting life over as an undocumented immigrant from the Philippines. She spent 10 years in the Philippines as a doctor to insurgents fighting for freedom from their oppressive government. Now in Milpitas, living with her aunt and uncle, Hero works in a restaurant.   The beauty of America Is Not The Heart is the cultural references and rituals that are unfamiliar to those not of Filipino ancestry. The customs, language, food and connection are texturally rich and filling. How extended family is considered family is heart-warming and makes me jealous that I don’t have those same kind of extended connections. I’m also jealous that we don’t have the same kind of rituals to pass the many holidays and celebrations of life.   I also appreciate...

THE BEAUTIFUL BUREAUCRAT by Helen Phillips   Nominations: Center For Fiction Longlist 2015, LA Times Finalist 2015   Date Read: June 3, 2023   From the outset of The Beautiful Bureaucrat, an eerie tone invades every scene and interaction. Having come from a nameless hinterland, Joseph and Josephine still have a newlywed vibe while struggling to make their way in a new city. Being from the country, they feel out of their depth in this urban environment where both are lucky to land jobs almost simultaneously.   As strange as it may be, Joseph and Josephine never discuss work. I don’t think they even know the names of the companies they work for, their titles, where their offices are located or what their jobs consist of. I love talking shop with my husband so that stook out rather stark to me. I did understand, however, just how happy they both were to finally be employed.   Their living situation goes from precarious to even more precarious with every miserable s...

MY DARK VANESSA by Kate Elizabeth Russell   Nominations: BookTube Finalist 2021, Center For Fiction Longlist 2020, Goodreads Finalist 2020   Date Read: April 14, 2023   Wow. Just wow. Russell explores the complicated relationship of a teenager preyed upon by a teacher – the grooming, the desire, the guilt, the confusion – all twisted together into a complicated and ugly reality. Russell walks this crooked line so well, conveying how devastating this type of relationship can be for a teenage girl unsure of her own power and place in the world. As is so often the case, the attention from an authority figure is like a drug, both exciting and abhorrent.   Strane is an English teacher at a boarding school. He instantly zeroes in on Veronica and slowly begins grooming her, making the smallest and subtlest of gestures to make her wonder if he is attracted to her. As their relationship quickly progresses, he rests his head in her lap and confesses he is going to ruin her. An...

DODGERS by Bill Beverly   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2017, Center For Fiction Longlist 2017, LA Times Finalist 2016, PEN/Hemingway Finalist 2017   Date Read: April 2, 2023   Dodgers is not quite a coming-of-age story, not quite a road trip adventure, and not quite any eye opening for inner-city street kids. While all three of those components come into play here, Dodgers is all those plot points, yet none of those plot points. Told through the vantage of Easy, a 16-year old kid from inner city Los Angeles, Easy has been working the streets as a drug lookout since he was 10. He has slowly worked his way up until he managed the outside team of lookouts for a high-volume drug house.   One slightly strange day, his world came crumbling down when the police raided the house and the early and a neighborhood girl who was visiting from Jackson was killed right in front of her. Easy is haunted by her memory. Although Easy has been living on the streets for most of his lif...

THE AFFAIRS OF THE FALCONS by Melissa Rivero   Nominations: Aspen Words Longlist 2020, Center For Fiction Longlist 277, PEN/Hemingway Longlist 2020   Date Read: January 12, 2023   The Affairs Of The Falcons is such an intense and exhausting book that I’m almost glad it’s over. Almost. Rivero so masterfully conveys the desperation, impossible choices and hopefulness of those living in the U.S. as illegal immigrants and how that status causes life to be so uncertain and unfair. When the worst of the “illegal” blaming goes on in politics, I cannot help but think how much bravery it must take to leave the comfort of the known to uprooting yourself and your family to face an uncertain future and to live like a fugitive in a country that doesn’t want you. I get so disgusted at the lack of compassion and the lack of understanding that “… there by the grace of God go I.”   Ana has been reviled from her very first encounter with the Falcons. Her skin is too dark, her roots to...

THE BOBCAT by Katherine Forbes Riley   Nomination: Center For Fiction Longlist 2019   Date Read: October 16, 2022   The Bobcat is, in my opinion, an absolutely beautiful novel about the power of nature, the power of quiet and the beauty in shared humanity. Laurelei has escaped her Philadelphia college after a rape and is now living in a secluded cottage that abuts the forest somewhere in Vermont. She is enrolled in another college’s art program and has well-worn grooves for coping with her life to ensure she feels safe at all times. For money, she takes care of a very little boy in exchange for rent.   Her life is changed again one day when she is exploring in the woods with her young charge and encounters the hiker. Not until the end of the book do we learn his name but you realize how little that matters. His essence is what we get to experience and it is beautiful and simple and quiet. They both falsely believe there are obstacles to them being together – his viru...

EILEEN by Otessa Moshfegh   Award: PEN/Hemingway Winner 2016   Nominations: Booker Finalist 2016, Center For Fiction Longlist 2015, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2015   Date Read: October 9, 2022   “Those people with perfect houses are simply obsessed with death. A house that is so well maintained, furnished with goo-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses.”   Eileen Dunlop is invisible. She wears odd, mismatched clothes, has a plain face and is able to fade into crowds without anyone realizing she’s gone. In other words, Eileen has no one in her life who loves her. She has no friends, no partner, no mother and a father that is constantly fall-down drunk. She is resentful and self-loathing.   Eileen works at a juvenile detention center called Moorehouse. She has worked there a long time and yet it seems as if she’s new. None of her colleag...

NIGHTCRAWLING by Leila Mottley   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2022, BookTube Longlist 2023, Center For Fiction Longlist 2022, Oprah Book Club 2022, PEN/Hemingway Longlist 2023   Date Read: August 1, 2022   It’s been a VERY long time since I’ve given a book five stars but this one absolutely deserves it. Mottley’s prose is absolutely superb and I never wanted her writing to end. The story, however, you want to end – hopefully in some beautiful ending that gives Kiara some reprieve from the reality she faces far too young.   Kiara and her brother, Marcus, have been left on their own in an Oakland apartment complex, both parents dissolved by death and prison. Kiara is laser-focused on making the rent and keeping her family together, even if her only remaining family is Marcus. Marcus, however, has other priorities, trying to make it big as a rap artist.   The two good things in Kiara’s life are Trevor, the next-door crackhead neighbor’s son, and Ale, Kiara’s someti...

REAL LIFE by Brandon Taylor   Nominations: Aspen Words Longlist 2021, Booker Finalist 2020, Center For Fiction Longlist 2020, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2020   Date Read: January 8, 2022   Real Life gripped me from the first page to the last. It’s been a while since I felt so deeply for a character as I did for Wallace. He is so wounded but trying. Rising above, while still sinking under. Wanting love but holding back. I resonate with all of this so much, even if I am a straight, white girl and Wallace is a gay, black boy.    Wallace has risen above his inauspicious beginnings in Alabama poverty and landed in graduate school studying biology in a large, midwestern city. He is the only black person in his graduate program and he feels this fact starkly in how he is treated and side-eye looks from just about everyone. Still, Wallace is grinding, head down, catching up on the knowledge he is supposed to know but is behind on.   With such a small cot...

LINCOLN IN THE BARDO by George Saunders Award: Booker Winner 2017 Nomination: Carnegie Finalist 2018, Center For Fiction Longlist 2017, Dublin Finalist 2019, Goodreads Finalist 2017 Date Read: March 7, 2020 Lincoln In The Bardo is written in a unique style, with a multitude of voices pondering the significance of death. Based on a historical fact, President Lincoln loses his son Willie to an illness, Saunders uses this historical moment to convey the varying responses to the permanence of losing someone dear to you. Instead of wandering away after the funeral, Lincoln returns to the crypt to hold his boy again and again, unable to let go. These scenes are heart wrenching. Behind the scenes, the cemetery is made up of a host of characters, some good, some bad, that are forced to co-exist (yes, I understand the humor in this word choice) for eternity. These souls believe they are sent to this place to recuperate from their varying illnesses and must live i...

CITY ON FIRE by Garth Risk Ha llberg   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2016, Center For Fiction Longlist 2015, Dublin Longlist 2017   Date Read: May 21, 2016   “New York City, 1976. Meet Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, estranged heirs to one of the city's great fortunes; Keith and Mercer, the men who, for better or worse, love them; Charlie and Samantha, two suburban teenagers seduced by downtown's punk scene; an obsessive magazine reporter, Richard, and his idealistic neighbor, Jenny, - and the detective trying to figure out what any of them have to do with a shooting in Central Park on New Year's Eve.   The mystery, as it reverberates through families, friendships, and the corridors of power, will open up even the loneliest-seeming corners of the crowded city. And when the blackout of July 13, 1977, plunges this world into darkness, each of these lives with be changed forever.”

MAKE YOUR HOME AMONG STRANGERS by Jennine Capo   Nominations: Center For Fiction Longlist 2015   Date Read: January 19, 2016   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Lizet Ramirez, the first in her Cuban immigrant family to attend college, must learn to navigate academia’s culture of privilege alone as her family breaks apart. It's Thanksgiving Day 1999. Overwhelmed with the microaggressions inherent in being one of the few nonwhite students at an elite East Coast university, Lizet saves her work-study wages for a surprise trip home to Little Havana, Florida, to see her family. But this is also the same day that Ariel Hernandez, a 5-year-old Cuban boy who saw his mother die on a raft as they escaped to America, arrives in the state. Advocating for Ariel’s well-being quickly becomes Lizet’s mother’s raison d’être. The twin narratives play off each other in a masterful way: the battle for Ariel to remain in America echoes Lizet’s own story of the breakup of her family and her formation of ...