It’s always a little strange when new fiction tackles current issues. Once you consider publishing schedules, the authors who write these texts seem downright prescient. In Air, Ryan Gattis takes on police brutality in Baltimore, and creates an instant — if flawed — classic in the process. Continue reading
Born holding hands, Giselle and Isabelle Boyer have the kind of twinship you hear about in weird news. They feel each other’s pain, and can practically read each other’s minds. But in Edwidge Danticat‘s Untwine, the girls’ sisterhood takes a turn for the worst when Giselle experiences something Isabelle never will: the feeling of her sister dying. Continue reading
Adults have been reading juvenile fiction for decades—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, anyone?—but the practice, as a contemporary phenomenon, has divided the literati along ideological lines. Taking the pro position are those who believe that any reading is preferable to none whatsoever, and who are loathe to discount a work of fiction’s literary status on the sole basis of the novel’s intended audience. Against them stand the thinkers who chastise adults for foregoing age-appropriate literature in favor of YA pop fiction: Suzanne Collins, Veronica Roth, etc. Continue reading