What now? by Ann Patchett

If you won’t be attending a graduation ceremony this year, What now? is the book for you: the perfect commencement address sans the harsh sun, the uncomfortable chairs, or the awkward small talk with the other parents. And if you are on graduation duty, I bet the speeches won’t be as good as this one. [...]

The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer

I happened to read The Ten-Year Nap right after the dreary Opting In and I could not help but notice how an entertaining, if mindless novel can make a much better point than a serious expose on the very same topic. The women of The Ten-Year Nap have, for the most part, left high-powered careers [...]

Opting In by Amy Richards

Opting In has a wonderful title: written in response to the insidious “opt-out” movement through which educated women are supposedly dropping careers for babies, it aims at describing how feminists relate to families and children.
In fact, it’s a very awkward book: half personal anecdotes about her children, her non-husband partner, and her role as the [...]

Death Benefits by Jeanne Safer

Death Benefits is written by a psychologist and claims to describe how losing a parent can be an inspiration for making positive changes. In fact, it’s more a self-reflection of how the author felt liberated by her mother’s death and was finally able to come to term with the patently unjust fact that she did [...]

Beautiful Boy by David Scheff

Beautiful Boy describes every parent’s nightmare: the addicted kid (to meth, of all possible horrible choices!) The author is a journalist and tries to tell the story from an impartial, outside perspective – but his anguish pokes through the surface. He seems very convinced that his divorce from the boy’s mother created all the problems, [...]

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Tolz

A Fraction of the Whole is a grandiose saga of the Dean family, starting and ending in Australia but ranging to Paris and Thailand with unprobable situations every few pages but anchored in the outsized and definitely out-of-the-norm personalities of the narrator’s father and uncle. I thought the first part (based in Australia) was brilliant. [...]

Hullabalo in the Guava Orchard by Kiran Desai

Hullaballo in the Guava Orchard is a goofy comedy built around a failed post office clerk who climbs into a tree and unexpectedly becomes a revered holy man. There’s a gallery of funny characters and glimpses of the corrupt Indian civil service (the postmaster uses his clerks to prepare for this daughter’s wedding, for instance) [...]

Sneaker Wars by Barbara Smit

Sneaker Wars is the story of Adidas and Puma, founded by feuding brothers in a small town in Southern Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. I picked up the book because I felt I was a faithful contributor to Adidas and wanted to know more about its origin. The detail that caught my [...]

Black, White, and Jewish by Rebecca Walker

Rebecca Walker is the daughter of Alice Walker and a white, Jewish father (long since divorced from Alice Walker and remarried) and Black, White, and Jewish is her autobiography. A “child of the [civil rights] movement”, Rebcca had a few apparently idyllic years living with both parents, but they soon divorced and settled on a [...]

Mudbound by Hillary Jordan

Mudbound is the story of a woman who follows her husband – unwillingly – to life on a farm in the Mississippi Delta complete with dirt floors, racism, and wife-beating husbands. (Re)enters her husband’s younger brother, back from World War II, along with a black tenant’s son who also fought in a much more egalitarian situation than [...]