en-US Thu, 27 Feb 2025 06:30:16 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 213816151 “Greene is the best kind of guide: funny, probing, generous of mind and heart.�
―Ben Fountain, bestselling author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

Exploding sharks, trees riding bicycles, a Hollywood-esque balloon dress, a giant sloth in costume, a stolen woodpecker, and a sentient bag of wasps―and remember: this is nonfiction.

Celebrated author and artist A. Kendra Greene’s No Less Strange or Wonderful is a brilliant and generous meditation―on the complex wonder of being alive, on how to pay attention to even the tiniest (sometimes strangest) details that glitter with insight, whimsy, and deep humanity, if only we’d really look.

In twenty-six sparkling essays, illuminated through both text and image, Greene is trying to make sense―of anything, really―but especially the things that matter most in life: love, connection, death, grief, the universe, meaning, nothingness, and everythingness. Through a series of encounters with strangers, children, and animals, the wild merges with the domestic; the everyday meets the sublime. Each essay returns readers to our smallest moments and our largest ones in a book that makes us realize―through its exuberant language, its playful curation, and its delightful associative leapfrogging―that they are, in fact, one in the same.]]> 304 A. Kendra Greene 1963108086 Emily 0 to-read 3.62
author: A. Kendra Greene
name: Emily
average rating: 3.62
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/27
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]]> 128713487 A rich and riveting debut spanning four generations of Eastern European Jewish women bound by blood, half-hidden secrets, and the fantastical visitation of a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 years.

An ambitious, delirious novel that tangles with queerness, spirituality, and generational silence,  City of Laughter announces Temim Fruchter as a fresh and assured new literary voice. The tale of a young queer woman stuck in a thicket of generational secrets, the novel follows her back to her family’s origins, where ancestral clues begin to reveal a lineage both haunted and shaped by desire.

Ropshitz, Poland, was once known as the City of Laughter. As this story opens, an 18th century badchan, a holy jester whose job is to make wedding guests laugh, receives a visitation from a mysterious stranger—bringing the laughter the people of Ropshitz desperately need, and triggering a sequence of events that will reverberate across the coming century.

In the present day, Shiva Margolin, recovering from the heartbreak of her first big queer love and grieving the death of her beloved father, struggles to connect with her guarded mother, who spends most of her time at the local funeral home. A student of Jewish folklore, Shiva seizes an opportunity to visit Poland, hoping her family’s mysteries will make more sense if she walks in the footsteps of her great-grandmother Mira, about whom no one speaks.

What she finds will make her question not only her past and her future, but also her present. Electric and sharply intimate,  City of Laughter zigzags between our universe and a tapestry of real and invented Jewish folklore, asking how far we can travel from the stories that have raised us without leaving them behind.]]> 384 Temim Fruchter 0802161286 Emily 5 3.75 2024
author: Temim Fruchter
name: Emily
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/30
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The prose in this book completely hooked me - it was just such a pleasure to read. I loved the odd opening chapter, and the rest of the book really delivered! It felt like a book I don't often see in the world, very specific and focused but also very accessible to anyone.
]]> 208580636 One of Electric Literature’s �75 Books by Women of Color to Read in 2024�

From the National Book Award-winning translator, an atmospheric and wise debut novel of a young Brazilian woman’s first year in America, a continent away from her lonely mother, and the relationship they build over Skype calls across borders

“Utterly beautiful . . . The yearning in these pages will haunt me.”—Ayşegül Savaş, author of White on White

In a small dorm room at a liberal arts college in Vermont, a young woman settles into the warm blue light of her desk lamp before calling the mother she left behind in northeastern Brazil. Four thousand miles apart and bound by the angular confines of a Skype window, they ask each other a simple question: what’s the news?

Offscreen, little about their lives seems newsworthy. The daughter writes her papers in the library at midnight, eats in the dining hall with the other international students, and raises her hand in class to speak in a language the mother cannot understand. The mother meanwhile preoccupies herself with natural disasters, her increasingly poor health, and the heartbreaking possibility that her daughter might not return to the apartment where they have always lived together. Yet in the blue glow of their computers, the two women develop new rituals of intimacy and caretaking, from drinking whiskey together in the middle of the night to keeping watch as one slides into sleep. As the warm colors of New England autumn fade into an endless winter snow, each realizes that the promise of spring might mean difficult endings rather than hopeful beginnings.

Expanded from a story originally published in The New Yorker, and in elegant prose that recalls the work of Sigrid Nunez, Katie Kitamura, and Rachel Khong, Bruna Dantas Lobato paints a powerful portrait of a mother and a daughter coming of age together and apart and explores the profound sacrifices and freedoms that come with leaving a home to make a new one somewhere else.]]> 192 Bruna Dantas Lobato 0802163777 Emily 5 3.96 2024
author: Bruna Dantas Lobato
name: Emily
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/30
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A beautiful, melancholy, thoughtful book. So many moments I loved and think back on often. It feels very unique to me, an experiment in tone and thought and pacing that completely worked for me.
]]> 199797861 In Kat Tang’s exciting and resonant debut, a “Rental Stranger”—a companion hired under various guises—walks the line between personal and professional in surprising new ways.

Would you hire someone to be the best man at your wedding? Your stand-in brother? Your husband?

In an age where online ratings are all-powerful, Five-Star Stranger follows the adventures of a top-rated man on the Rental Stranger app—a place where users can hire a pretend fiancé, a wingman, or an extra mourner for a funeral. Referred to only as Stranger, the narrator navigates New York City under the guise of characters he plays, always maintaining a professional distance from his clients.

But, when a nosy patron threatens to upend his long-term role as father to a young girl, Stranger begins to reckon with his attachment to his pretend daughter, her mother, and his own fraught past. Now, he must confront the boundaries he has drawn and explore the legacy of abandonment that shaped his life.

Five-Star Stranger is a strikingly vivid novel about the commodification of relationships in a gig economy, isolation in a hyperconnected world, and the risk of asking for what we want from those who cannot give. This is the story of a man who finds out who he is by being anyone but himself.]]> 240 Kat Tang 1668050145 Emily 5 3.19 2024
author: Kat Tang
name: Emily
average rating: 3.19
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/30
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I was sucked into this book immediately! It's so great when a really smart, unique premise actually works out because the author has the skill and the style to make it work. So often I like the premise but don't enjoy the execution. The characters were so layered and odd in the best possible way, even down to the children, and I loved them all. Thought the ending was very smart too. Highly recommend!
]]> 208519830 In this hilarious, heartwarming tale, mother-daughter skiing champs face the bumps in their own relationship when an avalanche in a Swiss village forces them together.

Alpine skiing G.O.A.T. Claudine Potts and her daughter Wylie have been bred for gold medal glory. They’re skiing their way to fame, but this gilded future is cut short when a fall forces Claudine’s retirement and Wylie’s debilitating anxiety sends her off the slopes.

With the collapse of their ski careers, their relationship falters and now it’s been years since Wylie and Claudine have even spoken. They live on opposite coasts, pursuing different passions, until a chance opportunity to pair up in a European fitness competition drives them back together. Can this duo survive snow-buried regrets and family secrets and have the happy reunion they’re hoping for?

Set in a dreamy Swiss village with a colorful cast of characters, Bluebird Day will make listeners laugh and swoon, as Claudine and Wylie slalom through the complicated terrain of lost ambition, past mistakes, and mother-daughter love.]]> 344 Megan Tady 1958506869 Emily 5 3.65 2024
author: Megan Tady
name: Emily
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/13
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I loved this book! Tightly, smartly plotted, with a lot of heart and emotional stakes, but the author has a light touch and a great sense of humor that make it such a pleasure to read. I was really rooting for both the mother and the daughter, completely taken up by both their motivations and backgrounds. One of my favorite things in novels is when you see the same situation or moment from two points of view, and see how the characters misunderstand or misconstrue each other because of their preconceived ideas of what the other person is like, and this book does those moments SO WELL. You can see them both reaching out to each other, but also being scared of being hurt, because they've hurt each other in the past. Really beautifully done. I'd also highly recommend the audiobook, which has great narration!
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