Would read again – Ring Reads

‘Flower’ a Gripping, Sobering History

While the prose and structure is a nice read, there’s no making this subject matter go down easy. But then, forced family separation, rampant human rights violations, and elusive justice should never go down easy.

‘Grave’ a Fast-Paced Horror Where Anything Goes

The cover of Carry Me To My Grave, featuring an overhead view of a train passing through dense forest. The smoke from the train makes a large cloud that looks like a skull.

This isn’t a polyphonic novel, nor is it one grappling with morally gray characters. This is a story of humans good, monsters bad, and the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Carry Me To My Grave doesn’t try to do anything more or less than this, and it does it well.

‘Race’ A Nail-Biting Cross-Country Roadtrip

The cover for Eric Moskowitz's debut, The Longest Hardest Race, featuring a colorized picture of two early Ford Model-Ts racing down a dirt road. The portrait of a fairly young Henry Ford is superimposed just beneath the title.

The Hardest, Longest Race at its core is about the struggle between the past and the future, between what’s true and what gets remembered.

‘Rachel West’ a Starstruck Mystery

The cover of Rachel West and the Fallen Starlet by Emma Mills, featuring a hot-pink flip phone against a bright blue background. The phone has skull and ribbon-bow charms.

Rachel West is a rare murder mystery that holds interest but doesn’t demand a reader’s heart rate spike as they fly through pages.

‘Only One’ a Swift and Sharp Thriller

The cover for The Only One Who Knows by Lisa M. Matlin. A stylized illustration of a pink house and lighthouse upon a thin beach of yellow sand and before a teal ocean make up the bulk of the cover. In the water is a dark triangular shark fin. On the beach is the silhouette of a woman. The title and author are superimposed over the image in sans-serif font.

It can be daunting to let characters be messy, especially those whose eyes we borrow to experience the story, but Matlin does so with confidence.

The Past Feels Too Familiar in ‘Fear’

The cover of Fear and Fury, the center of which has what appears to be a black and white photo of protesters and counter protesters at a court hearing about the case; the photo has been shaded blue. The title and subtitle are in white text at the top against blocks of red and blue.

The ideas that led to the shooting and Goetz’s subsequent exoneration are still alive and well, and while it may not be easy, it’s crucial to understand and confront them.

In ‘Infamous,’ Minutiae Gives Meaning to Family Life

Painted portraits of five children peek out from torn antique-looking wallpaper with the title and author of the book in yellow cursive in the foreground.

The Gilberts and Thornwalk are fictional, but the equivalents in our own homes and families and lives aren’t. These bits and bobbles, these trinkets and signs of wear that mean nothing to anyone else and might not even mean a thing to ourselves but nevertheless bear aching witness to, well, life.

‘Magician’ A Pleasant, Low-Stakes Romp

The cover of The Magician of Tiger Castle, which features illustrated tigers among gold filigree around the edge of a dark-green background and the book's title and author.

Magician isn’t exactly a “cozy” fantasy, per se, but it didn’t seek to keep me on the edge of my seat in a way that was really nice, given the current geopolitical climate.

‘Captain’s Dinner’ Focuses on Legal Drama, Not Cannibalism

The cover to Adam Cohen's Captain's Dinner, which features the title, subtitle, and author on a detail of what looks like an 18th-century painting of four men in a rowboat on choppy sea with dark clouds overhead.

There’s a delicacy in writing about history. For one thing, having the benefit of knowing the end of a series of events from the beginning makes it easy for us to criticize the actions of those who lived it. It can be tricky, too, to not overlay the norms and expectations of today to thoseContinue reading “‘Captain’s Dinner’ Focuses on Legal Drama, Not Cannibalism”

‘Heat’ Examines Food in Multifaceted Way

Cover of If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury, which features a bubblegum pink background with red and white lettering of title and author on the top and bottom. In the center is the red-manicured hand of a slender white woman crushing a white-glazed pastry with a maraschino cherry on top.

Food is nutritional, but it’s also cultural, spiritual, creative, historical, and meaningful in a hundred different ways. Geraldine DeRuiter reminds us with humor and heart that the way we interact with it is just as varied and meaningful, too.