Posts

Showing posts from January 19, 2025

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad: book review

Image
Enter Ghost  by Isabella Hammad Overview: After a bad break-up in London and a dry spell in her acting career, Sonia decides to go back to Palestine for the first time in a decade. While she spent her summers there as a child and teenager, she hadn't wanted to go back. For a break, she decides to stay with her sister, who works at an Israeli university, for a month. Once there, though, Sonia finds a new stage—this time in a production of Hamlet  in Palestine. Overall: 4.5  Characters: 5 Sonia is a great main character. She has an incredible amount of depth and the perfect personality for first person narration where she can wind deep inside herself but also perceive small nuances from others with her attuned eye as an actress. She's also the perfect guide into this novel for someone who isn't the most well-versed in Palestinian history as she's grown up in this place but at a distance and never with great interest. Sonia becomes increasingly involved and educated as the...

Should You Watch or Read Normal People First?

Image
If you've read this blog at all in the last two years, you'll know I love Sally Rooney's novels. I didn't always feel that way. I read them the first time in the major frenzy around Rooney when the BBC adaption released in 2020, and it wasn't the right time for me. Honestly, I was too young to get it. I hadn't read enough literary fiction to be acclimated to the quirks in the prose like the lack of quotation marks that feel second nature now. I got lucky and read it again a while later and found the spark of the book. Normal People  is now among the books that have most changed my life. To date, I believe I've read Normal People  four times and seen the show all the way through three times. I've read passages and watched random episodes here and there, but after finishing my most recent re-read, I was struck by the reminder that the largely faithful TV adaptation does often deviate or alter details to better suit the screen. Which got me thinking about a...

Notes on Heartbreak by Annie Lord: nonfiction book review

Image
Notes on Heartbreak  by Annie Lord Overview: Annie Lord is a culture writer living in London. She'd been dating a guy she'd met in university for five years until one day he abruptly dumped her. Untangling her feelings about the guy, the break-up, and love as a whole consumes her next year as she tries to figure out how to process and move on. Overall: 4 Thoughts: I am honestly confused why some names weren't changed to enable this book to be sold as a novel. I know Annie Lord has a platform from her online writing background, particularly when it comes to dating, so there's a natural crossover in launching this book, but it reads like Dolly Alderton's forays into novel writing. Stylistically, the book resembles a novel more than a memoir. Every page is a part of a scene with full dialogue and inner monologue and all the bits that make a book feel like a story. It weaves between flashbacks within the relationship told in past tense second person and present tense sc...