Believe it or not — and if you know me, this won’t be a stretch for you to believe — I am still working through the requested reviews from my Books I Read in 2020 list! Seriously, thank you to everyone who requested those reviews. I appreciate your engagement so much, and I’ve had fun revisiting so many of the titles I read last year.
At this point, I’ve finished almost all of the requests, either as blog posts or as book chat videos I was doing for a while with my friend Kara. And I now have three books left to tell you about. Allow me to knock one of those off the list today while the next chapter of the new novel I’m writing incubates in my subconscious…
If you type “adulthood is overrated” into a Google search bar, you will get umpteen kajillion sites with articles or products or other content declaiming this travesty against our youthful expectations. Normale.
Adulthood Is A Myth, a compendium of comics by Sarah Anderson about the travails of becoming an adult, takes this pseudo-despair about growing up into “real life” one step sideways. Her comics are amusing and well drawn; they dive deep into the maelstrom of emotions that is the proverbial Human Condition with just the right levels of snark, angst, and immense relatability.
It would be easy to dismiss Anderson’s collection as a lot of comics about millennials not being able to get their shit together, but it would be wrong and ageist to do that. The fact is, adulthood is not a state of being that comes with a manual, despite the proliferation of self-help books related to the subject. Most of the time we observe the world around us and the generations that came before us to find answers, and our life trajectories are shaped by world events. And thanks largely to technology (which has changed not only the metaphorical size of our world but also our ability to view and interact with it), 21st-century young adults have a really different row to hoe from all of us who came before them. Frankly, Gen Z is basically a generation of cyborgs — and as a parent of kids in Gen Z, I mean that in the most loving and practical way.
The comics in Anderson’s collection aren’t really about that, though, which is one reason this book has such wide appeal. It’s about human interaction and daily, practical functioning and the challenging emotions so many of us experience regardless of age or time of life. Moreover, she does it all with a wryness that will make you feel maybe just slightly superior (in a non-snotty way) if you’re generally competent at adulting, and make you feel absolutely seen and heard and understood and even maybe cared for if for you, like for most of us, managing this American life is challenging sometimes.
I really enjoyed this book and will admit I gobbled it up in about an hour, cover to cover.
I’m also not squeamish about telling you that I did it late on a Saturday afternoon, with a basket of laundry next to me, sitting on the floor at the top of the stairs where I had gotten distracted by seeing the book on top of a pile next to Han’s desk and decided it was the right time for me to stop and read a book even though I was literally in the middle of doing a household chore.
(And if that doesn’t give you some context of where my head was or why this book hits all the right notes, I’m not sure anything will.)
One of the books I read in 2020, Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon, is on the list of books some of my blog readers have requested a review of, so here goes!
This little coffee table book — or perhaps “end table book” is a better term, because it is short enough to read and digest in one sitting — makes a lovely gift for someone who is beginning on their creative life journey, or for someone who has been trending on the artistic side for some time but maybe has fallen into a slump, or otherwise just needs a little push to take things to their next level. In fact, this is how Kleon’s book came to me: as a gift from a very thoughtful friend.
One of the things I enjoyed about Steal Like An Artist was its unintimidating format. Rather than being a textbook or even a workbook with exercises, it presents its simple but effective wisdom in a highly digestible and visually stimulating list of truths to consider.
Here is part of the book’s description:
“Nothing is original, so embrace influence, school yourself through the work of others, remix and reimagine to discover your own path. Follow interests wherever they take you—what feels like a hobby may turn into your life’s work. Forget the old cliché about writing what you know: Instead, write the book you want to read, make the movie you want to watch.
And finally, stay smart, stay out of debt, and risk being boring in the everyday world so that you have the space to be wild and daring in your imagination and your work.”
This blurb captures some of the essence of the book fairly well. For me, even though I can’t say I was particularly surprised by any of Kleon’s advice, there were definitely some things in there that I needed reminding of. One thing that I particularly have trouble with sometimes is preventing the world from being too much with me, to the point that it stifles my ability to do mentally challenging creative work — such as, for example, writing a novel — no matter how much I enjoy doing that artistic activity. This book reminded me that sometimes the world being too much with me can be turned to my artistic advantage.
Would I recommend this book? Sure, I would. Not perhaps for the successful working artist on a productive streak, but most definitely for the person who is thinking about jumping into the bracing waters of making art, or for the artist who needs to get their mojo back and could use a little reminder that yes, they really can do this thing.
January was a wee bit hectic, so Kara and I pushed off our book chat until this week, and since it’s valentines season, we’re tackling books with romantic plotlines (category romance or no).
You’ll hear in this video that I make reference to my Reading Year in Review lists. (If you want to see those, here they are for 2019 and 2020.) I always invite my readers to request reviews of any titles on those lists — it’s never to late to ask, if you want to know about them — and this year a few people wanted to know more about Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston, so I’ve done that review in this month’s book chat video. (More reviews are coming, so if you requested one, please don’t think I’ve forgotten about you, even if it’s been a minute.)
This picture doesn’t include Kara’s chosen titles, because it’s a pandemic and we can’t actually get together. You’ll just have to watch the video to see what books she talks about!
Today I have a few announcements: some upcoming readings and a sneak preview opportunity for you.
This gorgeous mug will be part of the Writer’s Gift Box, one of the door prizes being given away at the BWB event.
The most exciting news here is my upcoming event at one of Houston’s most beloved independent bookstores, Blue Willow Bookshop! If you’re going to be in town, definitely mark your calendars now for Saturday, August 17th, at 3:00, when I’ll be reading from and discussing The Sharp Edges of Water. This promises to be a fun event with an author Q&A––that’s right, bring your questions for me!––and door prizes and books galore! Even if you already have a copy of my book, come and pick one up as a gift for a friend or family member who likes to read or write. You can check out Blue Willow’s site here for more details. Their address is 14532 Memorial at Dairy Ashford 77079. I don’t mind telling you that the Blue Willow event is a Very Big Deal, and it would be really helpful to make a strong showing there, so please come out for it and pick up one (or more) of my books there!
I’ll also be reading with a few other Mutabilis Press poets at River Oaks Bookstore in Houston on Saturday, August 10th, at 4:00. We’ll celebrating the new anthology, The Enchantment of the Ordinary, and while I’ll be reading my poem from that book, I’ll also be sharing a more recent poem or two, including from the Moss Wood Writing Retreat I attended back in June. The bookstore address is 3270 Westheimer Rd. 77098.
beautiful cover art and design by Lucianna Chixaro Ramos
Finally, would you like a sneak preview of my next book? I’m offering my readers the chance to get a free advance reading copy of either of my next two books––one fiction and one poetry, depending on your preference––before they’re published. You’ll even have the opportunity to give me beta-reader feedback on it if you’d like to! In order to take advantage of this offer, just post a review of The Sharp Edges of Water on Amazon. Now, if you follow the writing/publishing industry, you might have heard that Amazon has been taking down people’s reviews in an effort to remove illegitimate ones, though some genuine ones have been removed inadvertently in this process. I have not experienced this (knock on wood!) and also know that all my reviews are genuine and not planted (except for one baffling troll who posted a weird review of Finis. back in the day). Anyway, Amazon has changed the rules for how reviews get accepted. Fortunately, we know how to navigate their guidelines. You can watch a full explanation here, but I’ve summarized the basics for you:
To contribute a review on Amazon, you have to have spent at least $50 there in the last year, not including promotional discounts.
Amazon doesn’t allow reviews to be posted from people in the author’s household, or from more than one person connected to any same household or bank account or credit card.
Amazon doesn’t allow paid reviews, so your review shouldn’t indicate that you’ve received compensation for it.
Amazon deletes reviews that come in under two days after you’ve purchased a book from them because they assume you can’t possibly have read the book so quickly.
Avoid sounding too chummy with the author in your review: in other words, please don’t ever refer to the author by their first name only, but by either both first and last name or just their last name or “the author”; also avoid sounding “unbiased” by not indicating in your review that you regularly see the author in person or are friends with them in real life.
Thank you again for all your love and support, and I hope to see you on August 17th at Blue Willow! Bring your friends. And if you take me up on the review/ARC opportunity, send me a screenshot of your review on Amazon, then tell me which book (fiction or poetry) you’d like to get a sneak preview of. Until then~
Sometimes you read a book that defies some of the more basic “rules” of writing, or one that’s outside your usual category, but it works for you in so many ways that you can’t help but tell people about it. Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver, which I just finished reading on vacation last week, embodies both of these for me.
This book follows Novik’s Uprooted in what I hope will become a series of standalone novels. Both these excellent stories take familiar western European fairy tales and then transform them into an uncanny valley version of themselves, blow them up and out into something so original that you might not recognize the source material in it. Whereas Uprooted played fast and loose with “Beauty and the Beast” in a medieval Slavic world with magic, Spinning Silver borrows key elements of “Rumpelstiltskin” and drops them in the middle of…Russia perhaps? At the time of horse-drawn wagons, the Jews as money-lenders in walled communities inside of walled towns, the tsar and the boyars.
And how does this story break conventional wisdom? It’s a multi-POV novel where all POVs are told from the first person, and new perspectives come into the story late in the novel. Yet all the voices are distinctive and clear, and they all enhance the story well. This is a novel where marriages are strategic and the three young women at the center of the story grow and think and create agency within the limits of their world and the situations, magical or mundane, they find themselves in.
Spinning Silver falls squarely in the YA category, which I often enjoy but which is not usually my very first choice. It doesn’t shy away from genuine violence now and then, but those scenes are vital and artfully crafted, and I could easily recommend this book to any sharp reader as young as late middle school. If I could find a way to weave it into the curriculum for one of my high school classes, I would. The writing is gorgeous, and the structure of the novel really lends itself to deconstructive analysis as a model for what works.
And for those of you who like a long book for your money, this one will do — without feeling like its pacing drags. You should also look into Uprooted if you like fairy tales, and if you like alt-history, Novik’s Temeraire series is particularly charming: the Napoleonic Wars fought from the sky on the backs of dragons.
Spinning Silver won the 2019 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel (also in 2019). I am just not remotely surprised.
It is no secret to people who know me that I hoard books, maybe a little bit. We have thousands of books in our house and have given up any pretense of calling our living room anything but a library. I have an entire bookshelf in my bedroom just to house my TBR list. The acquisition of books that interest me makes me feel genuinely happy and excited about life because I cannot wait to read all those stories. Our Little Free Library might have been constructed in part to help me make peace with letting go of books now and then because we don’t live in a Tardis or have an Undetectable Extension Charm on our house (more’s the pity).
But yo, my job is not to be a Reader Just For Fun. So sometimes it takes me longer than I’d like to get around to reading books on that TBR bookshelf.
Over Spring Break, I finally read The Frog Prince by Elle Lothlorien, a novel which had sat on my TBR bookshelf for several years, enticing me with its romantic-comedy plot and not-pink cover art, and seriously, I cannot believe I waited so long to read it! I devoured it in three days and loved loved loved it!
This book is a romance, but it’s a very sweet one — meaning the main plot of the story is about an amorous relationship, but it’s not an explicit read. I would feel comfortable recommending this book to my high school students who enjoy romantic comedies.
And the comedy? I laughed so much in the first several chapters of this book that I had to put it down occasionally until I finished giggling. Lothlorien’s voice is strong and funny, and her writing style, very engaging. I will admit the book isn’t a laugh-a-minute all the way through: the comedy does dial down just a bit as we get into the thick of the plot to make way for a compelling story. The characters are fun and realistic, I genuinely cared about what was happening to them, and the writing is really good from sentence-level to narrative architecture.
This book is called The Frog Prince but it doesn’t have tons of parallels to the Grimm Brothers’ “Iron Heinrich.” (Think Naomi Novik’s Uprooted and “Beauty and the Beast.”) Lothlorien’s book is pretty original. But if you want an enjoyable romantic comedy in a modern setting with the same kind of feels as a fairy tale, this book is a good choice for you.
It might be tempting for someone over the age of maybe thirty to read the dust jacket of Katharine McGee’s The Thousandth Floor and dismiss it as a story about entitled rich kids and their #firstworldproblemz.
You know how sometimes books will have author’s notes at the beginning? Have you ever read one that told you from the get-go that you should probably not read the book? That it wasn’t really much of a story, and that the author’s army of industry professionals (agent, editor, publisher, etc.) would probably prefer he not say any of this to you at all? That if you hadn’t read any of the author’s other works, this was the exact wrong one to start with?
Last week I read that book: The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss.
I haven’t read Rothfuss’ two novels yet, I will admit, so I was breaking a “rule” as well, and I’m glad I did, because The Slow Regard of Silent Things is a strange and marvelous story that demonstrates in unapologetic, beckoning prose that sometimes rules aren’t as important as we think they are.
This weird tale of Auri, a waif who lives in the tunnels beneath a setting in Rothfuss’ other books, glories in an inexplicable naming system and an outward premise which perhaps doesn’t pay off. With no dialogue and arguably one character, it defies the expectations of what mainstream fiction does and contains. But I think we need more books like that. It’s just one more way of diversifying what’s available in the marketplace.
I don’t want to tell you much about Auri’s story. For one thing, I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s a quick read, maybe 30,000 words, and part of its magic is in the strange way things are revealed — or not revealed, as the case may be. (It’s definitely a tale for open-minded readers.) But for another thing, I’m not really sure what I would tell you about her story.
Is she an unreliable narrator? Perhaps. Her voice — by which I mean her thoughts — traipse into the realm of mental illness, but in a charmingly benevolent way, if you can imagine. Auri is in some ways a broken girl. But there are moments when I believed it okay: she has found her way in the world, and once I accepted that her world is not my world and that the rules of my world don’t necessarily hold sway in hers, Auri’s differences melted away and I found her to be relatable, and ultimately reliable, too. I found I cared for her tremendously.
Does any of that make sense? Maybe not. Does her story? I’ll let you decide for yourself. I will say that the first few chapters had me bewildered, but I persevered, and on page 84, something so unexpected happened I laughed out loud for several minutes. I couldn’t have appreciated that moment, though, without having first absorbed Auri’s voice and thought process and the mechanics of her daily life. And what followed that funny moment was poignant because, in deft fashion, Rothfuss allows the reader to understand more than the character does in the moment of a scene, and so we can have all the feels while the character has the noble struggle. And he does this without condescending, with patronizing Auri.
Auri’s life is shadowed by past trauma and brightened by future joy. And while it would be a disservice to you for me to explain how the end of the book breaks the rules, I ask you to consider what the rules of story are for. We learn in school that stories must have conflict in order to be stories, and that this conflict must be resolved for the story’s ending to satisfy. But beyond those intelligent guidelines, the details are open to interpretation. If there’s one thing Auri’s story teaches us — both in its details and in its execution — it’s that we can’t always assume that our expectations are fair. And we shouldn’t.
Stories break rules sometimes. They defy expectations, surprise us. They innovate. And if they don’t? They’re not likely to rise to the top of my TBR list.
I could wax unpoetic here about how I used to teach The Catcher in the Rye back when I taught 9th grade English, about the way one of my colleagues taught it as a Buddhist text, the debate between whether that book is a glorious masterpiece or a slice of Americana that has outlived its usefulness in adult life.
But I’d much rather get out of the way, and just present this week’s Women Writers Wednesday, a thoughtful and elegant look at Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year, which comes to us from Sukhada Tatke.
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Envy Joanna Rakoff for her Salinger Year
For any JD Salinger lover, or for that matter, any literature lover, Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year is a delectable treat into which one can bury oneself and come out, once done, feeling refreshed and thrilled. Envy is not an accident, but a lingering feeling which accompanies every turned page.
The book opens in New York, which remains the thread that binds the writer’s experiences as she maneuvers through the complex, multifarious labyrinth that is the city and her own life. Rakoff’s is a story of hundreds, even thousands, of young aspiring writers in New York whose “tote bags (are) heavy with manuscripts.” After completing her Master’s degree in English Literature, she ditches her “college boyfriend” and makes her way to New York with dreams of becoming a poet. But like everyone coming to a big city, she is in want of a job that can pay her. Within days, she finds herself being interviewed in an anachronistic and dark office of Harold Ober Associates, which she refers to as “the Agency” in the book. She lands the job only when she assures her interviewer that she can type: on a typewriter.
It is only after she starts working at the Agency that she realizes the enormity of whom it represents. “Never, ever, ever are you to give out (Jerry’s) address or phone number,” her boss tells her on her first day at work. Among the first funny moments in the book is Rakoff’s confession that the only Jerry who comes to her mind then is Seinfeld.
Considering herself an earnest student of literature, Rakoff had never regarded Salinger as a serious story-teller. “I didn’t want to be entertained. I wanted to be provoked,” she says in her defense for having skipped the most influential American writer of the 20th Century.
One is often left feeling that Rakoff happened to be in the right place at the right time. But how many would have done justice to their Salinger year the way she does?
As a perceptive observer and gleaming story-teller, Rakoff’s narration brings to life the charming moments—charming, however, often exclusively to the reader and not to those living them—that take place in this Agency which clutches its old ways. Her recounting is laced not with contempt for the older generation which refuses to move forth with time, but with nonchalant amusement. My Salinger Year is as much a story about the literary and publishing world in Manhattan and the wave of transition that had hit it, forcing it to make the shift from Dictaphones and typewriters to computers in the dot com era, as it is a coming-of-age memoir where Rakoff is forced to gallop into adulthood.
The writer of her story reminds me of my favorite Salinger character, Franny Glass, who is trying to understand the ways of the world, slipping into depression every now and then.
Rakoff is at a crossroads that life brings one to when one is evolving and struggling to find one’s self. She learns that she has to repay a loan her father had taken for her education without her knowledge, ends up with a job she doesn’t necessarily like, gets her life entangled with a reckless boyfriend who is differently wired from her, and comes to terms with the changing arc of friendship with a woman she calls her best friend. Jenny, like Rakoff, had dreams of writing but gave them up for a suburban path which she deems easy. “‘I know,’ I said reflexively, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to be normal. I wanted to be extraordinary. I wanted to write novels and make films and speak ten languages and travel around the world. I wanted everything. So, I thought, had Jenny.”
The protagonist of the story, Salinger himself––for who else could be a protagonist in a book mentioning the man––is behind phone conversations with Rakoff, or hushed discussions surrounding him. His is a continual presence, of course, as his name lurks around in the cupboards of the Agency on hard paperback editions of his books.
What surprised me most pleasantly was the portrayal of the reclusive writer who had, in my imagination, metamorphosed into a grumpy old man begrudging his popularity; someone he barely resembles during his limited interactions with Rakoff over the phone. His tone is genial, almost affable when he refers to Joanna with names other than her own, thanks to his debilitating hearing.
Rakoff’s struggles as an aspiring writer in New York are as real as the struggles of Salinger’s characters, although bereft of the sense of unresolved grief that stings the latter. Salinger’s characters, be they the most popular adolescent hero Holden Caulfield or the war veteran Seymour Glass who commits suicide, are rife with melancholia and gloom. Rakoff meets them at a time when her own life is prickled with angst, much like the fraternity and sorority in Salinger’s work.
Rakoff’s Salinger moment was somehow waiting to happen until she entered her 20s. Perplexed by her own life and curious about the legend, she embarks on her Salinger journey on a weekend her boyfriend goes to a friend’s wedding alone. She pores over his work, reading one book after the other until she is done. That’s when she begins to relate to, even appreciate, the fan mail addressed to Salinger, that she painstakingly answers as part of her job.
courtesy of guzelonlu.com
Salinger’s work is timeless and age is only an unnecessary constraint. To bracket his work as being for children or teenagers is as good as depriving one’s life of the treasures required to enrich it. After all, what are love, loss, grief, nostalgia, despair, isolation, and desperation, if not lifelong companions? My Salinger Year celebrates these and pays homage to a man who deserves every bit of it.
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Sukhada Tatke is a freelance writer and journalist based in Houston. She has previously worked in Mumbai at The Times of India and The Hindu. Her writings have appeared in Scroll.in, Texas Monthly, and The Houston Chronicle. Her pet topics include social inequality, cultural heritage, and everyday life. She tweets at @ASuitableGirl, and you can find more of her work on www.sukhadatatke@contently.com.
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To see more kinds of reviews like the ones in this series, check out these blogs by Melanie Page and Lynn Kanter. And of course go to the Sappho’s Torque Books page here to see other reviews by me and by other contributors to the Women Writers Wednesday series.
The Women Writers Wednesday series seeks to highlight the contributions of women in literature by featuring excellent literature written by women authors via reviews/responses written by other women authors. If you’d like to be a contributor, wonderful! Leave a comment below or send me an email, tweet, or Facebook message with your idea.
The topic came up in one of my conversations today about the underrepresentation of protagonists of color in the YA literature being published here in the west. You may debate this all you like, if you want to. I know where I stand, and so I’m happy to feature this response by Iqra Asad to Na’ima B. Robert’s She Wore Red Trainers.
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Keeping It Real: A Muslim Girl’s Reaction to She Wore Red Trainers
Growing up reading classics, Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl, I never knew until my mid-teens that mainstream books in English featuring Muslim characters even existed. Of course, I knew about the angsty South Asian novel with the usual conflict of East versus West. In my opinion, those books, featuring characters that either live Western lives in an Eastern setting, or a Hollywood plot with Pakistani setbacks, were in the same line as photographers who only show the “starving Pakistani beggar” pictures in their portfolio. I mean to say that they only show to the global audience what that audience expects to see. Not to say that the starving beggars of Pakistan don’t have a story that deserves to be told, but National Geographic, Reader’s Digest and other leading publications are already doing that. What about privileged, middle-class, educated me who lives a life outside the “angsty Pakistani novel” experience? I like what the Indian author Uma Krishnaswami said about Kipling still being considered representative of the West’s perspective of life in India. Similarly, these novels by Muslim authors with Muslim characters, while entertaining and thought-provoking to read, are not as relevant to me as my more recent discoveries in the world of Muslim novels.
Those discoveries are the work of some groundbreaking female Muslim authors. I would like to talk about one of them today. Na’ima B. Robert entered the publishing world with From My Sisters’ Lips, an autobiographical account with the narratives of some other Muslim women included. She founded SISTERS Magazine, the magazine for fabulous Muslim women. She went on to write Muslim children’s fiction and YA, the latest of which is She Wore Red Trainers, from Kube Publishing. Honestly speaking, I managed to get it because it was only $1.99 in the iBooks and Kindle stores (but then I got the full-price paperback delivered to my Pakistani residence via Fabingo). The reading experience for me was, however, priceless. While she’s not Pakistani (she is, in fact, part Zulu and part Scottish), her stories of Muslim experiences in a British backdrop appeal to me. (As for my particular kind of Muslim experience in a Pakistani backdrop, you know what they say to do if you don’t find the book you want to read. I’m working on that.)
I am aware that not every reader of She Wore Red Trainers walks away with the same fondness for it that I have. Every reader brings their own personal viewpoint with them to the reading experience, and mine was that of a twentysomething-but-still-reading-YA girl thrilled to read a woman writer writing about Muslim teens.
How romantic is this “YA romance”?
The story is boy-meets-girl and happily-ever-after, but there’s a lot of “looking away so as not to stare immodestly” and “keeping away because premarital relationships are not Islamic” in the book. As one Goodreads review stated, it doesn’t feature the frequent and in-depth personal interaction between the hero and heroine as most romances do. However, in my opinion I think that is keeping it real as far as the context is concerned. As a girl who had to shake her head numerous times when asked by her American health care provider whether she had had any sexual partner (No? Really? Not ever? OK, then), I understood the “attracted from a distance” theme of the book. To answer the question, it’s as clean as clean gets. Sterile, even.
Also, it’s not really categorized by Amazon as a romance. It’s categorized under “family”. That should clear things up for you. However, to hook the youthful target readership, “halal romance” (“halal” being “Islamically permissible”) is the label to use. Trust me, we veiled Muslim girls really get a kick out of stuff like this. I think our main occupation really is “dreaming of marriage land.” There, I said it. People who know me as the reserved veiled bookworm can officially faint with shock now.
Who should read this book?
If the blurb appeals to you, read it. If you’re curious, read it. If you want to support this particular niche, I insist you buy it.
A comment about the ending
The ending is very fairytale and a tad unrealistic, but I accepted it, being an enthusiastic reader.
Is it a valuable contribution to the women writers’ narrative?
Yes, of course! As a female reader I want to read women writers writing about women, men, teens and toddlers going through all situations of this world. YA has a special place in my heart and seeing women writers thrive while writing YA really gives me a boost, both as a reader and as a writer.
Have you read it? Would you like to read it? Does this article remind you of a book you’d like to mention? Do share in the comments.
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Iqra Asad is an American Pakistani, fresh out of dental school and writing her way forward in life. She blogs at http://iqrawrites.com/ and tweets as @iqrawrites.
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To see more kinds of reviews like the ones in this series, check out these blogs by Melanie Page and Lynn Kanter. And of course go to the Sappho’s Torque Books page here to see other reviews by me and by other contributors to the Women Writers Wednesday series.
The Women Writers Wednesday series seeks to highlight the contributions of women in literature by featuring excellent literature written by women authors via reviews/responses written by other women authors. If you’d like to be a contributor, wonderful! Leave a comment below or send me an email, tweet, or Facebook message with your idea.
Sappho's Torque 