Summary: Charlie D. Hankin’s Break and Flow examines the language, culture, history, and politics of hip hop in Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti. Organizing his chapters around a series of themes––yearning, raplove, uprooting, scale, writing, and violence––Hankin invites the reader to consider the many ways that hip hop culture and rap music have influenced (and been influenced by) […]
Summary: Lisa Damour’s The Emotional Lives of Teenagers provides a handy crash course for parents and mental health professionals who are seeking to understand and support the teenagers in their lives. Drawing from her career in clinical psychology and contemporary research, Damour lays out the reasons why adolescence is a particularly challenging and special time in a young […]
Summary: Naomi Novik’s The Golden Enclaves is the third and final book in her Scholomance trilogy. Still reeling from the chaos of graduation day, Galadriel and her companions are tossed into a complex tangle of international conflicts threatening to disrupt the lives of magic users everywhere. Through providing aid to compromised enclaves across several continents, they learn […]
Summary: Naomi Novik’s The Last Graduate is the second book in her Scholomance trilogy. Now in their senior year at the Scholomance, Galadriel and her classmates are generating every bit of mana they can muster and practicing to take on the horde of maleficaria that awaits them on graduation day. As the end of their final term approaches, […]
Summary: Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education is the first book in her Scholomance trilogy. The book drops readers into a grim fantasy world in which magicians are constantly threatened by “maleficaria,” a ravenous horde of magical monsters eager to devour the mana that each magician carries inside them. Adolescent magicians have a particularly high mortality rate, so […]
Summary: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a fascinating, impressive, and frustrating work of historical fiction. Mantel provides an intimate and meticulous examination of Thomas Cromwell‘s rise to power, showing how he gained favor and influence as an advisor to England’s King Henry VIII during the 1520s and 1530s. The text is packed with vivid historical details and offers […]
Summary: Children of Memory is the third volume in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time” series. Tchaikovsky continues to build on the evolutionary concepts and thought experiments from the previous two books, this time taking the story in a mysterious and surprising new direction. When an eclectic crew of interstellar adventurers discovers Imir––a partially-terraformed planet colonized by refugees […]
Summary: Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a poignant and powerful piece of modern literature. The novel tells the story of Sam and Sadie, two adolescents who strike up an unlikely friendship based on a shared love of video games. As young adults, Sam and Sadie both become video game designers and discover a knack […]
Summary: Lauren Groff’s Matrix is a work of historical fiction loosely based on the life of Marie de France, a poet from the 12th century. Groff depicts Marie as an unusually large and willful woman who, at the young age of seventeen, is forced to join an impoverished abbey of nuns somewhere in England. Matrix tells the story of […]
Summary: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a fictional mélange of philosophy, history, romance, and political commentary. Set in Prague during the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the novel recounts the story of two couples struggling to find peace and connection in turbulent times. In a world where time flows forward and everything happens […]