I began the year by reading this book because in our time of environmental destruction, it felt only right to hand the narrative of people and trees over to the trees. I wasn’t disappointed.
Powers examines the tragic paradoxes of life in our world by taking a long, long view akin to the view that a tree takes. It’s a brilliant imaginative leap and the prose is marvelous to boot. It swept me along through the novel’s 500-odd pages so I could not stop.
The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of-and paean to-the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers's twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours-vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see…
Rebecca Leavitt is seeking herself—in the Northwest Territories of Canada during the late 1800s.
I had a visceral memory of this spirited protagonist, because I’d heard Martine, who is my friend and writer colleague, read from drafts at residencies where we both taught at the time. I found that same spirit in these pages, carrying its sparkle all the way through.
Here is a YA novel that captures what it means to be a young person with dreams and yearnings. It speaks at once to past and present, which is exactly what I long for in historical fiction.
Based on true-life histories, Buffalo Flats shares the epic, coming of age story of Rebecca Leavitt as she searches for her identity in the Northwest Territories of Canada during the late 1800s.
Seventeen-year-old Rebecca Leavitt has traveled by covered wagon from Utah to the Northwest Territories of Canada, where her father and brothers are now homesteading and establishing a new community with other Latter-Day Saints. Rebecca is old enough to get married, but what kind of man would she marry and who would have a girl like her—a girl filled with ideas and opinions? Someone gallant and exciting like Levi…
I loved this deep dive into a history that I knew absolutely nothing about.
It’s the story of an enslaved man from East Africa transported by the Portuguese to Japan, left behind there with a Jesuit mission. He came to fight alongside feudal lord Odo Nobunaga to become Japan’s first foreign-born samurai. What? He’d been in India before that?
Every chapter yielded something new I didn’t know and it’s all really well contextualized. The writers make it clear where the gaps in documentation lie, even as they tell a gripping story and bring a larger-than-life character to the page.
"A readable, compassionate account of an extraordinary life.” —The Washington Post
The remarkable life of history’s first foreign-born samurai, and his astonishing journey from Northeast Africa to the heights of Japanese society.
Warrior. Samurai. Legend.
When Yasuke arrived in Japan in the late 1500s, he had already traversed much of the known world. Kidnapped as a child in Northeast Africa, he served as a bodyguard to the head of the Jesuits in Asia, traveling to India and China, and eventually arriving in Japan, where everything would change.
Most Japanese people had never seen an African man before. Some believed he…
Every day, nine-year-old Yasmin borrows a book from Book Uncle, a retired teacher who has set up a free lending library on the street corner. But when the mayor tries to shut down the rickety bookstand, Yasmin has to take her nose out of her book and do something. What can she do? The local elections are coming up, but she’s just a kid. She can’t even vote!
Still, Yasmin has friends—her best friend, Reeni, and Anil, who even has a blue belt in karate. What’s more, she has an idea that came right out of the last book she borrowed from Book Uncle.
So Yasmin and her friends get to work. Ideas grow, and soon the whole effort is breezing along nicely... Or is it spinning right out of control?
