Book review: The Bitch Is Back

Great title, right? Perfect for on A Day Without a Woman, when women around the country are marching, striking, and celebrating women’s work and accomplishments (by showing what happens if we step away, Lysistrata-style). I’m home with a sick kid today, so I’m celebrating women by wearing red (and my 1 Billion Rising t-shirt) and…Continue reading Book review: The Bitch Is Back

Book review: I Am Jazz

Banned books stun me. Seriously? We’re still doing this? When I read about a school in Wisconsin cancelling an author’s reading–of a PICTURE BOOK–for fear of lawsuits, and then 600 people packed a library a week later to hear that author read, I knew I had to check out this book. I Am Jazz by Jessica…Continue reading Book review: I Am Jazz

Book review: Brown Girl Dreaming

How did I not know that Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming was a book in verse?! Highly awarded, this memoir (in verse!) describes the author’s childhood in the 1960’s and ’70s in Iowa, South Carolina, and Brooklyn. Woodson paints portraits of places and people with spare-yet-lush poetic language. Each poem could stand alone, some moreso…Continue reading Book review: Brown Girl Dreaming

Book review: Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

Carrie Brownstein is a personal hero of mine. She is just…so cool. At least, she seems like it, from a distance. How could the guitarist/vocalist of Sleater-Kinney and Wild Flag and the writer/actress from Portlandia not be cool? In that self-deprecating, sense-of-humor as well as sense-of-style way the truly cool have. I mean, what a…Continue reading Book review: Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl