About a Book

In a 1960’s Boston suburb she calls “X-ville,” 24-year old Eileen lives with her occasionally handsy, verbally abusive alcoholic father. She doesn’t know much about social norms, having gone through an arrested development from her upbringing. She also has a disdain for most of life, explaining what she hates about the world around her. When a new teacher shows up at Moorehead, the prison for delinquent boys where Eileen works, her lack of polish is put to the test. The new teacher Rebecca befriends Eileen, despite the fact they have little in common. Suddenly Eileen experiences feelings she never had before. Eileen’s untapped ability to be a good friend surfaces, and it’s like a revelation for the reader. Ottessa Moshfegh 's  Eileen has a twist ending, one that Moshfegh only subtly hints at earlier in the book. The twist, while gasp-worthy, doesn’t distract from the novel’s focus on Eileen’s coming of age. Eileen is dark, moody, naïve, and one to root for from beginning t...

After Hermione, Ron, and Harry, comes Archer, Oliver, and Adelaide . In Nicholas Gannon ’s first in his Doldrums series, the author introduces the three characters who will fuel his books about friendship and adventure. Archer Helmsley is nine years old when his grandparents disappear while exploring an iceberg in Antarctica . At 11, he and his two friends set out to find them. Much of The Doldrums is spent laying out the relationships between the three and exploring their back stories.  Each of the children has their strengths and their weaknesses. Archer has been held under house arrest, more or less, by his worrisome mother, but he has his grandparents’ spirit of adventure. While Oliver bears enough anxiety for the three of them, he’s also a planner, and contributes to the group through his thoughtful devising. Perhaps the most interesting origin story belongs to  Adelaide , a former ballerina who lost her leg during a freakish but unglamorous accident. When she...

Fifteen is a difficult age for most of us, and 15 is the age of Emily Fridlund ’s main character Linda when her world falls apart in History of Wolves .  Linda is in some ways better equipped than many to face challenges: a survivor of a disbanded hippy commune, she lives in the Minnesota woods with two people who call themselves her parents, but maybe they do only because they are the ones who remained when the commune collapsed. Linda navigates the woods with ease, strong enough in her own skin to survive and move through it and high school, complete with all their travails. Linda is written as strong, immovable, and somewhat strange. When a new mother Patra and her child move into the house across the lake from Linda and her parents’ home, Linda is curious.   She befriends the two, eventually becoming the little boy Paul’s babysitter. We see Linda try to understand this new 4-year old creature, speak to it in ways she didn’t know she could, we see her experience ...

On its surface, The Poet X is a simple coming of age story, spanning the teenage years of Xiomara Batista (X), a first generation Dominican-American young woman. Just like in many such stories, there are conflicts at home, school, and internally that push the heroine to grow into another person. Elizabeth Acevedo sets X and her novel apart by infusing X’s poetry into every line of the story, sweeping the reader up in X’s verses and rhythms. Xiomara starts out in the novel as a standout among her peers: at 15 she’s taller than girls her age, a little more developed, and one of the first in her class to get noticed by boys and men. She knows how to fight, and does so when she needs to, but Xiomara is on a quest to be more than strong, wanting a place to be human. It is clear Xiomara will not find that sanctuary at home, as she grapples (sometimes literally) with her Catholic mother and her puritan views on sex and sexuality, and with her twin brother too caught up in his own ...