Tagged with books

Comprised of Skurnick and a few other writers’ Fine Lines columns from Jezebel, Shelf Discovery really brings a book-junkie adult back to her book-junkie youth.

I went to this camp for two summers, so I’m not an unbiased reviewer. Rapkin has a big old crush on Stagedoor Manor, which I think is a little excessive. Theater Geek is a quick and enjoyable enough read, but I think even if I hadn’t gone to Stagedoor myself, I would have pegged the author as overly effusive. But maybe that’s just sour grapes because I wasn’t a camp star like the book’s three profilees were.

May-lee Chai exposes the racist heartlessness of the heartland in her memoir of spending her teens in South Dakota (near the Pine Ridge reservation where someone perhaps other than Leonard Peltier shot two FBI agents a few years before the Chais moved there). She and her brother faced real danger from their fellow junior high and high school students, and several of the family’s dogs were killed on the Chai’s farm.

You find out what’s going on in this 1980s (date assumed because of a cassette tape as an item of importance) British dystopia, bit by bit, just as its subjects do, so I’m hesitant to write much about it. I do think you should read it, and without knowing too much going in.