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Book Review: The Farm by Joanne Ramos
When struggling single mother Jane Reyes is selected to become a Host at Golden Oaks Farm, she’s ecstatic.
For the next nine months, she’ll be living in a luxury retreat for the one percent—or, well, for the women carrying the children of the one percent—where the staff will trip over themselves catering to her every need. Or at least that of the baby she is carrying.
Leaving her six-month-old daughter in the hands of her older cousin Evelyn, referred to as Ate (“older sister” in Filipino), Jane goes to Golden Oaks, where she meets a variety of people: her new roommate Reagan; Mae Yu, Golden Oaks’ sophisticated managing director; and a number of other Hosts, most immigrants, many of them nonwhite, all of them ready please their faceless clients.
But the more Jane learns about The Farm, the less she sees her family—and the more she wonders if the tradeoff is worth it. -
Book Review: America is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo
A sprawling, soulful debut about three generations of women in one family struggling to balance the promise of the American dream and the unshakeable grip of history. [Pub. Penguin Books. 432 pp.]
In a time of fake news, literature is one of the best ways to combat ignorance and apathy. If you’re lucky, Dekada ‘70 by Lualhati Bautista, a novel about the dark years of Martial Law, made its way into your required reading list in high school. Or perhaps you found Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn while browsing the shelves of your local bookstore.
America is Not the Heart is the book you read after you’ve learned the facts and horrors of life under a dictatorial regime, and now have room for another kind of story—one where its ghost lingers and never quite leaves. -
Book Review: Book Lovers by Emily Henry
Nora Stephens has always had everything under control.
As a successful literary agent, Nora is known in New York publishing circles for her keen eye, strong relationships with her clients, and her most recent success: the world’s latest bestselling novel Once in a Lifetime, written by her client, author Dusty Fielding. But Nora’s personal life is much less rosy, with her growing distance from her beloved younger sister Libby, and a love life littered with men who never made it past the first date–or who left her, and New York, for someone easier to love.
When Libby invites Nora on a girls’ trip to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina, Nora pushes her discomfort back to say yes, and leaves behind her Peloton and NY apartment for her first vacation in a decade.
But when she bumps into unapproachable, black-clad editor Charlie Lastra in town—the same Charlie Lastra who turned down Nora’s offer to edit the Sunshine Falls-set novel Once in a Lifetime two years ago–she discovers that there’s more to him, and this vacation, than meets the eye. -
Book Review: Eastman Was Here by Alex Gilvarry
Alan Eastman is a trainwreck.
It’s 1973, and the biggest years of his writing career are decades behind him, his wife has left him, and nothing seems to be going right.
So when he’s invited to cover the tail end of the Vietnam War as a foreign correspondent, he gets the brilliant idea of frightening his wife into returning to him—by telling her that he’s accepting the assignment. Except the entire literary world finds out, and he finds himself cornered into following through and flying to Vietnam.
Faced with his growing insignificance, Eastman bumbles from one misstep to another. And soon he finds that no matter how far he goes, he can’t escape the problems he tried to leave behind.
Katerina liebt 