I always look forward to the release of the Women’s Prize longlist, because I get to cheer for the authors I’ve already read, and discover a bunch of new ones. I know I won’t love every book on the list, but I always end up with a few new favorites, so it’s worth it. The…
You’ll have heard of this book because of the awards it won in 2020, including the Booker Prize. This story of a young boy growing up with an alcoholic mother in 1980s Glasgow is worth the read. It’s dark, but once I finished it, I missed the characters. By the time you finish it, Shuggie…
I read this for my book club and really enjoyed it. This is the kind of book you put down and then you find yourself thinking about long afterwards. This author won the Nobel Prize in 2018, and I can see why. It’s kind of a strange book, but then I always find translated works a little difficult…
I love reading about Australia, ever since I traveled there in 2013. I was struck by the similarities in the history of Australia and the United States, though I felt Australia was much more open about its troubling treatment of Aboriginal populations. Too Much Lip tells the story of Kerry Salter, a young woman who…
I couldn’t be happier that Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet won this year’s Women’s Prize. I love O’Farrell but I worried that this book couldn’t live up to my expectations, after all the rave reviews. It absolutely did. Hamnet is about William Shakespeare, though he’s never actually named in the book. It’s 1596, and 11 year old Hamnet…
Every year I put a lot of Women’s Prize nominees on my TBR list. Early in the calendar year, the Women’s Prize announces its longlist of 16 books. These are books written by women and published in the previous year. They must be written in English but they can be from any part of the…
My favorite book list of the year is The Women’s Prize longlist, which will be announced March 3. These are sixteen novels that are in the running to win the Prize, and I get a lot of great reads from this list (though I’m often disappointed by the shortlist). Last year’s longlist included Ghost Wall,…
I wasn’t sure I’d like this book at first. I don’t love science fiction that focuses too much on technology at the expense of character development, and this book features a high-tech robot as a main character. I read it because I needed a winner of a Lambda Literary Award for the Reading Women challenge,…
I absolutely loved this children’s book about a girl from a Cuban-Jewish family living in New York who is seriously injured in a car accident and ends up in a full body cast. It’s a perfect book for children in about 3rd-4th grade who have ever felt left out – and what kid hasn’t? I…
I recommend this historical novel about two researchers who discover a cache of letters from the 1660s about a rabbi in London and the young Jewish woman he’s taken in, Ester Velasquez. The rabbi and Ester have emigrated from Amsterdam, but before that they were refugees from the Inquisition in Portugal. The researchers soon discover…
This year I read nearly all of the Hugo nominees for best novel and best novella, because my husband and I get to vote for the winners. Voting closes at the end of this month and the results will be announced at WorldCon at the awards ceremony August 18 (we bought a non-attending ticket so…
Every year I read as much of the Women’s Prize longlist as I can. Not for any challenge, but just because it’s a great source of reading material and one that continues to get more diverse. It doesn’t matter much to me who makes the shortlist or wins the prize, although I really liked this…
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