Mia accepts a position with a small crew that restores structures in the outer reaches of space, and the quiet work creates time to reflect on her high school days and her first love. As they traverse the universe, Mia grows to better understand her new friends and herself -- emboldening them to explore dangerous space in search of closure. With stunning colors, striking vistas, and boundless creativity, Walden welcomes us into Mia's beautiful world and asks us to reflect on loneliness, love, and finding ourselves.
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
Beginning with two half-sisters in the Gold Coast of Ghana, each unaware of the other's existence, Homegoing follows eight generations of descendants who forge parallel paths in Ghana and America. Each child bears an inheritance of trauma, with the echoes of their shared history made tangible in their dreams, their inexplicable intuitions, or their destinies to repeat family history. In her sweeping debut novel, Gyasi chronicles the terrible legacy of enslavement and the damage it continues to inflict.
Leda, an English literature professor with two grown daughters, vacations alone on the Italian coast. On the beach she spies a mother-daughter pair amidst a large, noisy Neapolitan family who capture her imagination. As she draws closer to the young mother, Leda reflects on her own painful motherhood and how to know herself after becoming a mother.
Alice, a writer, moves to a costal town not far from her best friend Eileen, who works at a magazine in Dublin. The two women -- each navigating friendship, heartbreak, and torrid love affairs -- discuss their lives, the state of the world, and when next they will meet through lengthy letters. Amidst the tangled ties that connect four young people, Rooney contemplates the world today and the beauty that makes life worth living.
As a fictional narrator, Woolf takes stock of women as writers in this fundamental feminist essay. As she navigates the life of a writer, the narrator contemplates the conditions and space that must be afforded women to write. In clear, compelling prose, Woolf advocates for feminist ideals that remain relevant today.
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
At the age of fifteen, the son of Duke Leto Atriedes leaves his home world of Caladan to make the desert planet of Arrakis, Dune, his home. Harsh climate and political treachery mark the beginning of Paul's new life on Dune, where he will face his terrible purpose and the prophecy that surrounds him. Herbert renders Dune with stunning detail in this science-fiction classic that questions the way civilizations rise and fall.
Lilia - widow of three husbands, mother to five children, and grandmother of seventeen grandchildren - waits for death in a California nursing home, where she spends her days provoking the other residents. Though she insists she is unsentimental, Lilia ponders her past while re-reading her erstwhile lover's diary, which she annotates with comments and memories. In this languorous reflection on meaning, mourning, and mortality, Li asks what it means to have a life well lived.
Thirty-six-year-old Keiko finds direction and meaning from her work in a convenience store, where the store manual and her fellow employees clearly model exactly how she should act. But her peers question the propriety of a single woman of her age working a part-time job, and her attempts to become more "normal" upend her routine at the convenience store. In this affecting novel about honesty, belonging, and desire, Murata offers a love song for the humble convenience store that inspires an appreciation for many ways of being.
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
Kya lives in a marsh on the North Carolina coast, lonely but for the company of seagulls. When the local football star turns up dead, Kya draws attention as a suspect in his murder. Woven with mystery and romance, Owens offers a love song to the boundless beauty of nature in her debut novel.
Through vignettes of a traumatic childhood and deteriorating marriage, Kelly unravels the story of a woman for whom past and present blur and connect. With her story so akin to myth, she appeals to an oracle for the wisdom to navigate her memories. In this anthology of landscapes and scars, Kelly offers a heartrending meditation on love, hurt, and how we might heal.