Contemporary

Michael Rothenberg’s Punk Rockwell, Review by Mary Woodbury

Punk Rockwell, by Michael Rothenberg. Review by Mary Woodbury. According to Punk Rockwell‘s narrator Jeffrey Dagovich, poetry takes more than a lifetime to write. Dagovich is a poet (he announces at the beginning of the book), not a novelist. So why is he writing a novel? Slowly, it’s revealed that […]

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Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver

Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. Over the course of one humid summer, these characters find their connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with whom they […]

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Winter Damage, Natasha Carthew

On a frozen Cornish moor, a fourteen-year-old girl lives in a trailer with her dad and little brother. Ennor’s mother left years ago, when things started to go wrong – and gradually their world has fallen apart. Now her father’s gravely ill, school has closed, and Ennor knows they’re going […]

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Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver

On the Appalachian Mountains above her home, a young mother discovers a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature. As the world around her is suddenly transformed by a seeming miracle, can the old certainties they have lived by for centuries remain unchallenged? Flight Behaviour is a captivating, topical and deeply […]

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Freaking Green, Laura F. Sanchez

Jasmine Hayward’s dreams for her junior year focus on guys, friends and landing the lead roles in her high school’s plays. Then Jasmine’s cashed-strapped family is forced to cut their carbon footprint by 80 percent to win $5 million. Suddenly everything Jasmine does, from getting to school to making a […]

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