About a Book

Cities on wheels, devouring other cities: sounds like a kid’s book. And Philip Reeve ’s Mortal Engines is suited for young adults, but it also does well for adult readers who can suspend their disbelief of the wheeled cities long enough to enjoy the connections between the characters. In a future Europe, cities like London have grown wheels and hunt around for other cities to devour to sustain themselves. Pitted against these cities and the people who operate them is the anti-traction league, which resists traveling and instead still live stationary lives. Enter the novels main characters, Tom, an historian’s apprentice who works on the wheeled city of London , and worships the elder historian Valentine. Valentine appears at first to be above board, but is hotly pursued by Hester, who wants him dead. The whys of her vengeance are slowly revealed to the reader; by the time Hester’s reasons are revealed, Reeve has already given the reader investment in all these characters. ...

Kids are resilient. That’s evident in Jeannette Walls ’ The Glass Castle , where from the beginning when the author is boiling her own hot dogs at age three and is horribly burned, a series of nightmares begins that made up the author’s and her siblings’ lives. Enter their parents: Rex and Rose Mary. Rex escaped his own troubled childhood in West Virginia to become an alcoholic, an often hired/often fired mining engineer and electrician, an affectionate yet manipulative father, and philandering husband. Rose Mary, an artist whose parenting style is extremely hands off, is neglectful or her children and enables her husband’s bad behavior. The Glass Castle catalogs the children’s survival, taking them from one side of the United States to the other as the family avoids debt and homelessness by constantly moving. From San Francisco to West Virginia , we see them scrounge in dumpsters for food, outdo their peers at the latest school because their homeschooling apparently ...

A good coming-of-age story lets us feel the growing pains of a character from beginning to end. Tara Westover ’s depiction of herself in Educated shows a metamorphosis rife with conflict, so that by book’s end, we know she’s grown, but we wonder, along with her, if the agony was worth it. Westover, in her mid-thirties when Educated debuted in 2018, grew up the youngest of seven in a survivalist family in Idaho , where her education consisted mainly of aiding her mother’s growing herbal remedies and midwifery practice. Her father ran a junkyard, scrapped metal, and built barns and sheds for a living. Through her father, Westover learned to operate heavy machinery, and to suck it up when the machines got the best of her: the on-the-job injuries she experiences under her father’s supervision are treated with mother’s home remedies, not western medicine. As Westover enters her teens, she endures the near obsessive gaze of her brother Shawn, who deems her a whore for tending to h...

It’s hard not to get lost in Linda Sue Park ’s A Long Walk to Water , as the main character Salva Dut faces seemingly endless trials on his long walk to water. Set primarily in southern Sudan starting in 1985, the book recounts Salva’s journey from the point when the Second Sudanese Civil War , begun in 1983, reaches him at school. Amidst the chaos of gunfire in what had been up to that point a rather peaceful, family-rich life, 11-year old Salva is displaced from his tribe and family. In the trek east to Ethiopia and a refugee camp, Salva encounters kindness, cruelty, and indifference from the people he meets, and the nature he contends with. As wonderful as a gifted bag of peanuts can be in Salva’s story, there is awfulness, too: he witnesses his uncle, whom he happens upon on his journey, murdered by thieves. Always, there is the thirst for hard-to-come-by water. Salva eventually makes it to a refugee camp where he lives six years before being ejected by new soldiers...

What’s clear from the beginning of Karoline Kan ’s Under Red Skies is that her mother is strong, and her influence over Kan is likely going to make the writer into a strong woman, too. Kan is the second born of her family, which meant her parents had to pay a fee under China ’s one child policy when the author was born in 1989. For Kan ’s mother, the fee was never a hindrance: she and her husband wanted Karoline, and they were going to have her. Kan digs further back into her family’s history and tells tale of her grandmother and grandfather, the former getting credit for keeping her family alive during the great famine. Kan ’s strength is also a focus of the book, as we see her overcome the stigma of being raised in a small town, where inhabitants aren’t supposed to want to graduate into Beijing universities, aren’t supposed to succeed as writers. Kan does both, and with a steady determination and a rebelliousness that at first rattles even her own strong-willed mother...