In West Mills by De’Shawn Charles Winslow (debut)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date: June 4, 2019
Length: 272 pages
Amazon

{A Bit of Backstory}

Single Sentence Summary

The “not so secret” secrets of a small North Carolina town keep everyone bound together for better or worse….

Read More

The post In West Mills by De’Shawn Charles Winslow | Review appeared first on Novel Visits.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Release Date: February 6.2018
Length: 320 pages
Amazon

{A Bit of Backstory}

Single Sentence Summary

It seems Celestial Davenport has the easy part, waiting on the outside as her husband serves a prison term for a crime he didn’t commit, but does she really?…

Read More

The post An American Marriage by Tayari Jones | Review appeared first on Novel Visits.

{A Bit of Backstory}

Single Sentence Summary

Combining the disparate elements of a ghost story and a road trip novel Ward delivers a rich American story of what it means to be poor and black in rural Mississippi….

Read More

The post Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward | Review appeared first on Novel Visits.

Listening to more audio books was a goal of mine for 2017 and I’ve been very successful in doing so. In fact, listening to books while driving has become a little bit of an addiction. Now, when I don’t have a book going, the radio just seems boring. I want a story all the time! A few times now a colleague has seen me sitting in my car in the morning and knocked on my window wondering if I’m okay. I’ve had to explain that I was perfectly fine, just having trouble tearing myself away from the story I was listening to. Good problems! …

Read More

The post Audio Reviews: All Grown Up & The Book of Polly appeared first on Novel Visits.

This past week was unusually smooth for me. Kids at school were reasonably calm for spring time, getting their work done, and a class that has really struggled aced a big test. They were proud and so was I! Those kind of victories are why I teach. Last night I saw an excellent movie, A United Kingdom. In it, “Prince Seretse Khama of Botswana causes an international stir when he marries a white woman from London in the late 1940s.” David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike played the couple beautifully. I highly recommend it! (View trailer.) On the reading front, it was a really, really good week. Maybe the best of the year, so far.

Last Week’s Reads:

Within two days, I finished two of the best books I’ve read all year! I listened to the audio version of Exit West by Mohsin Hamid and loved both the story and his narration. This is a book I’d been a little leery about reading because it has an element of magical realism in it, which generally isn’t one of my favorite literary devices. But, I loved the way Hamid used it in Exit West. The story itself was amazing and so relevant to the world we live in. …

Read More

The post It’s Monday! What are you reading? 3/27/17 | More appeared first on Novel Visits.