Review: In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

Posted on March 23, 2026 by ghostvillehero

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Synopsis:

  • “Merge the house and the woman—watch the woman experience her own body as a haunted house, a place of sudden, inexplicable terrors—and you are reading the blazingly talented Carmen Maria Machado.”—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.

And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope—the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.

Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

Review:

Carmen Maria Machado released the memoir In the Dream House in 2019 about her abusive same sex partner, and the way that the memoir is presented makes the story not only an important document about the hidden abuse in same sex relationships, but also the true feelings behind relationships that bind us to abusive people. She tells the story in short chapters that uses metaphors, research, and anecdotes to construct the story of her navigating her relationship with a woman she calls Dream House. Dream House is also a metaphor for the true feelings that blossom at the beginning of every relationship. When we start to get feelings for someone else, we start to see ourselves together in a house, growing up and growing old. We dream about this house, and this is also a early relationship comfort. A house is supposed to be where you go to rest and recharge, a place that you find safety and feel peace. Some of us can share this home with a person, but some of us bring the wrong person into this space. Sometimes we see this person take over our home, and we lose all of the benefits. Machado’s relationship with her Dream House slowly erodes to the point where she does not see the relationship as one of comfort and safety but one of precarious uncertainty and anxiety. 

“Safe as houses” is something closer to “the house always wins.” Instead of a shared structure providing shelter, it means that the person in charge is secure, everyone else should be afraid. Pg. 76

Everyone else should be afraid because in the end because the control that Dream House gets over Machado is enough to make her question herself, makes her drive back and forth between Iowa and Indiana, spend hours on the phone when they are apart convincing her she is not cheating, crying behind closed doors, and ignoring the ugliness and abuse that she receives from her partner, who post-abuse is clearheaded, sweet, and doesn’t understand what she even did to make Machado upset in the first place. There are stories that are told In the Dream House that will make any person cringe, yell, and want Machado to finally stop the relationship, but it takes much more than our will as a reader to get her to do this. 

The story of the relationship is engrossing but so is Carmen Maria Machado and her writing. We do see her navigating this horrible situation, but we also get to see the way that her mind works. She does not write a straight-forward memoir because she cannot look at the situation in a straightforward way. She struggles with the big picture so she writes a story that when pieces together forms the big picture. Everything that we do is connected, everything that we have done and seen in the past informs our next step, our feelings, and whether or not we will give a person our time and energy. She has a way of showing us different elements of the story that do not seem connected but are completely connected, like the story of her crush on an associate pastor at her church at sixteen, like how her father told her that on test questions, if you do not know the answer, you write all of the things that you do know so that you might get half of the credit (which is the basis of the structure of this memoir), like the dismissive way the world views abuses in lesbian relationships, one of the things that she never knew existed until she was in one. The things that Machado creates to tell the story makes the memoir more of a kaleidoscope, giving us the picture the best it can instead of being a complete narrative where she has filled all of the blanks. This make In the Dream House not only a memoir that feels more of a literary piece, but a story that is interesting in more than one aspect, that makes the reader think about domestic abuse and rewires our brains on how to look at relationships in general.

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Review: Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi

Posted on March 18, 2026 by ghostvillehero

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Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

The intimate, sweeping tale of one man’s restless search for home the world over, as the pendulum of fate swings between loss and life, grief and euphoria, regret and hope

All his life, exile has been the shadow stitched to the sole of Sufien’s shoe.

Born in Palestine on the precipice of 1948’s Nakba, Sufien is forced to leave the only home he’s ever known, the one on the hill with a beautiful blue door. This is the precise moment when time stops making sense. He spends the rest of his life propelled forward, always on the way—although in search of what, he is never quite sure. In the dusty, oil-rich desert of Kuwait, he meets his first love and decides he must leave his family. In a small Italian university town, he spends his youth wrapped up in the sweet promise of the West and the forgetful assurance of wine. When life takes him to a gritty New York, he discovers his true vocation and falls for a Jewish woman born into a wholly different world. Finally, he finds himself recalled to the wild, vast open skies of the desert, in Arizona.

Sufien’s life spans friendships lost and maintained, a stint selling leathers at a tanner’s stall, the ineffable company of cats, and the freedom of the open road, the glowing pride of fatherhood, Sufi myths, prophetic dreams, and visions of the afterlife—and always, always, no matter how far he chases joy, the sweet, treacherous song of a balcony urging him to fly, to fall, to fall. The lyrical pages of Paradiso 17 weave in and out of time and space, beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. They are haunting, haunted with grief, struck through, as Dante once wrote, with “the arrow that the bow of exile / shoots first,” and yet they throb with light—not just the light that Sufien sees as he approaches his own end, but the brilliant light of a life lived.

Like all of our dead, Sufien still speaks, the book begins. Listen, this is his story.

Review:

Part of “Canto XVII” of Paradiso was written by Dante Alighieri during his exile from Florence. He is part of a group that Pope Boniface VIII did not like, so suddenly Dante sees himself as a man whose home, family, and everything that he has known is taken from him. Exile is uncomfortable, and a person is forced to spend time with people he would not spend time with. He writes in “Canto XVII”:

“You’ll leave behind everything dearest to you

And that will be the first arrow

That the bow of exile lets fly.

You’ll have to learn how the bread of others

Tastes like salt, and what a stony road it is

To go up and down other people’s stairs.

And what will most weigh down your shoulders

Will be the evil and asinine company

With which you’ll fall into this sinkhole.”

~Paradiso Canto XViI, lines 55-63 trans. by Mary Jo Bang

This is basis of Paradiso 17, the new novel by Hannah Lillith Assadi. The story starts with Sufien at a young age, fleeing war with his mother and siblings while his father fights. He never sees his childhood home again, the only image being of a house with a blue door. Sufien spends the rest of his life in exile, never going back to his childhood country, moving all over the world, trying to find a place where he can relax, make money, be a good husband and good father, and find a place that just does not always feel uncomfortable. He travels from Palestine, to Kuwait, to Italy, to New York, to Arizona. This movement is because he does not feel settled like these places are not home but they offer a new opportunity. Arizona and the desert is the closest he can get, where he at least has some reminders of what he is searching for and trying to remember. His life is not perfect. He is not a perfect husband, father, or friend, and there are moments when he acts out of desperation, with the underlying issue being that he never finds a place that feels like his home. The novel begins at the end, when he is dying, slipping away from this life into the afterlife, with the line between the two growing thinner and thinner, where he might be finally finding his peace.

The writing is beautiful and powerful. Hannah Lillith Assadi really pulls emotion out of the scenes, whether it be longing, isolation, sadness, or a sense of loss for a place. She uses language as a tool to make us feel out of place too, many phrases and words that we can understand throught context clues, but do not know unless we spend the time to look them up. She makes us feel like we are also someone in someone else’s home, a guest that does not know how long we should stay. The writing really pulls the reader in so that they can feel some of the same feelings as Sufien and have more empathy to his situation, even when Sufien is not always the most sympathetic character. The narrative also swirls between past, present, and future, and it can be compared to Paradiso by Dante, because this is how the entire Divine Comedy is written. 

Assadi chooses Paradiso as an inspiration, and we must remember that this is not the section of The Divine Comedy where Dante goes to Purgatory and Hell but where Dante is seeing Heaven. And this is a remind of how Paradiso 17 needs to feels. No matter what, this is not just story about the Purgatory or Hell of being in exile, but it is also a reminder that at the end of the day, through all of the trials and discomforts, Paradise waits. For Sufien, this paradise has always been just beyond his vision, the slightest memories of the house on the hill, of the blue door on the house, of looking at the stars in the sky when he is a small child and running from the war with his mother and siblings. Even though he leaves all of this behind as he grows older and never gets to see it again from the same part of the world, he never forgets, and his feelings about this place are never lost. He just needs to find his way back, and the only option is through paradise. Paradiso 17 is a powerful and beautiful novel that will most likely not be read as much as it should.

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 

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Review: Carson McCullers: A Life by Mary V Dearborn

Posted on March 16, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

The first major biography in more than twenty years of one of America’s greatest writers, based on newly available letters and journals

V. S. Pritchett called her “a genius.” Gore Vidal described her as a “beloved novelist of singular brilliance . . . Of all the Southern writers, she is the most apt to endure . . .” And Tennessee Williams said, “The only real writer the South ever turned out, was Carson.”

She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her dream was to become a concert pianist, though she’d been writing since she was sixteen and the influence of music was evident throughout her work. As a child, she said she’d been “born a man.” At twenty, she married Reeves McCullers, a fellow southerner, ex-soldier, and aspiring writer (“He was the best-looking man I had ever seen”). They had a fraught, tumultuous marriage lasting twelve years and ending with his suicide in 1953. Reeves was devoted to her and to her writing, and he envied her talent; she yearned for attention, mostly from women who admired her but rebuffed her sexually. Her first novel— The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter —was published in 1940, when she was twenty-three, and overnight, Carson McCullers became the most widely talked about writer of the time.

While McCullers’s literary stature continues to endure, her private life has remained enigmatic and largely unexamined. Now, with unprecedented access to the cache of materials that has surfaced in the past decade, Mary Dearborn gives us the first full picture of this brilliant, complex artist who was decades ahead of her time, a writer who understood—and captured—the heart and longing of the outcast.


Review:

In 2004, Oprah Winfrey selected Carson McCullers debut novel from 1940 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter for her book club. This caused the novel to be reprinted with a new cover and a spike in sales and readership. I was one of those people who bought the Oprah version of the novel as soon as I saw to cover. I had read and loved some southern writers, To Kill a Mockingbird and As I Lay Dying were favorites at the time. I had heard of Carson McCullers, but I did not know anything about her or her writing. Like many before this exposure by Oprah, I thought Carson was a male writer until this new version of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter came out with her picture on the cover, her wearing a man’s dress shirt and watch, her hair cut short, and a cigarette in her crossed hands. It was the look on her face that intrigued me most. Her eyes sad and contemplating something in the distance, not exactly looking at the camera for the photo but thinking of something so upsetting that she has forgotten that she is getting her photograph taken. I stared at this photo for a long time, I still stare at this photo for a long time, but back then that look on her face helped me develop a major crush on her. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published when Carson was 23 years old, and the novel is much weirder than I ever thought a novel from 1940 could be. It made me seek out more fiction like this, and it really became the catalyst that has lead me on a lifelong journey to seek art that is just a little strange and off-center. 

Carson McCullers herself is an interesting lady. She was raised as a wunderkind musician, playing piano and writing music. Her mother encouraged her to do whatever she needed to do to work on her art and forget about the rest. On her way to Julliard, she decides she can write and work instead of going to school but when she gets rheumatic fever, she is forced to go back home to recover. This sickness makes her turn to writing in earnest. The new biography by Mary V. Dearborn Carson McCullers: A Life not only explores Carson’s beginnings, but how she traveled through the world, through her marriage, her work, her literary circles, her unfulfilled crushes on women, her health, and her unwavering alcoholism, and shows that Carson McCullers is always filled with longing to be around people but is probably not a person that was easy to be around. There is a sense that many people loved spending time with her for a short period because she was fun, but after a little bit, people grew tired of childish behavior, her ruthless outbursts, and her increasing dependence on her friends to take complete care of her. She had a series of strokes and became more and more of an invalid as time wore on, but there are some of her friends and acquaintances who saw her and thought her limb weakness, her clawed-hand, and her use of a wheelchair were all for show, that she used this to get more and more sympathy. Toward the end of her life, when she was really starting to become frail, confined to a hospital bed, and needed total care, almost all of her friends who had partied with her during her success were long gone. 

And she was successful in her lifetime. She proved her genius. She wrote very weird and compelling stories about longing, desire, queerness, racism, and being an outcast. Her novels sold well. The stage production of A Member of the Wedding was a hit play. She made a great deal of money. One of her money problems was that she drank much of it away. Her second money problem was that she was married Reeves McCullers, her husband, spent much of it because he could not find success in anything he did. He wanted to be an artist too but failed. The relationship between Reeves and Carson is rocky the entire time, with Reeves having both male and female lovers and Carson wanting so badly to have a relationship with another woman. The biggest crushes she had throughout her life were women who were slightly older than her, world travelled and were interesting. In her letters and writings, she shows her desire is not as much about a sexual component as it is about having them to love. One of the thing brought up by Dearborn is that it seems as if Carson always wanted to give love but did not know how to be loved back. Because of this, she mostly chose her crushes for people who would not reciprocate, and if they did find interest in Carson as well, things rarely happened. McCullers’s writing is incredible, every book she wrote is successful, but she gets so caught up in drinking and wanting to be loved so much that she throws away many good years when she could have been writing. 

Carson McCullers: A Life is a biography of a person that I should not have learned so much about. It is definitely a “Never meet your heroes” type of experience. I had a crush on Carson that started  in 2004, and nothing had changed that for me until I learned about her as a person, learned that she was pretty difficult to be around, particularly in her latter days. and that the likelihood of her being interested in any friendship that was not transactional would be slim. This does not change my admiration for Carson McCullers’s work. Her novels and short stories stand as influential and important, especially in my reading life. They are a testament to her mother for knowing that her daughter Carson is a genius artist and deserved the encouragement to do whatever she wants.

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Review: Hunger by Choi Jin-Young

Posted on March 13, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

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Synopsis:

A word-of-mouth phenomenon turned best-selling cult classic in Korea, Hunger is a visceral, psychologically daring novel that reveals how love and money shape, wound, and consume us.

“A feast for the literary senses.”—Anton Hur, Judge of the International Booker Prize

On an ordinary afternoon, a woman sees her partner murdered in the street. Time freezes. She lifts his body from the pavement, cradles him home, disinfects each inch of skin—and sits down to begin.

As he witnesses his own funeral from beyond, their two voices—living and dead—lament a lifetime of bone-grinding labor in a society that devours everyone whole. But the woman is no longer willing to bow before law, God, or money. In an act of love and rebellion, she transforms his body into her own, entombing him within her flesh so that he may live again.

Raw, furious, and unflinchingly intimate, Hunger is the Korean underground phenomenon that indicts capitalism, mourns lost love, and pushes the boundaries of what the body can endure for justice and survival. A psychologically and philosophically thrilling novel, it cuts to the core of how we are consumed by the world—and how we might consume it back.

Review:

Hunger by Choi Jin-Young was published in South Korea in 2015. It became a word of mouth hit and a cult classic. The story is the life, love, and fate of Gu and Dam, two people who meet when they are kids, grow connected and in love, and believe they will spend eternity by each other’s side. When Gu is murdered in the street, Dam finds him, brings him home, cleans his body, and decides that the best way to live together forever is to truly become one and make his body part of her body. 

The novella is thin and powerful, the narration switches between Gu and Dam, and the entire book can be read in about an hour and a half. But this is not a story you want to rush. Gu and Dam have very deep feelings, thoughts, and desires, not only about their love for each other, but about society and about a world that does not care about regular, everyday people, those who work, want eat a good meal, and focus on a quiet life with the person they love. Instead Gu and Dam learn at an early age that most of life is circumstances out of their control. These moments and people have a tendency to interlope into the simplicity of what life can be by bringing drama and chaos. In the case of Gu and Dam, these moments lead them to make foolish decisions about their relationship, choices that cause even more grief than solutions. These decisions could be placed on their youth, thinking that they are doing what is right while trying to learn how to become adults. It takes them years to realize their youthful decisions are dumb, and they are meant to be together for the rest of their lives. 

Gu and Dam are not bad people. Gu’s homicide is not senseless, but he does not get murdered because he is a bad person. He is just a person caught in a bad situation. Bad situations are what dictate their whole lives. Each time they stop seeing each other, it is due an outside catalyst, not a problem between them in their relationship. Their lives are reflective of the problems outside of them, and for most of their lives they do not have the strength as a couple to work through the hard times until it is too late. This also means that by the time Gu and Dam decide they are going to be together no matter what life brings them, they are forced to work within the boundaries of Gu’s troubles. The convictions that they hold through the last of their life together carries on into the afterlife, where even death cannot tear them apart.

The grief and the sadness of Dam and Gu is heartbreaking. Dam is now in the world with her dead partner’s body, and Gu is in the afterlife looking at Dam and thinking about how his love is going to be with her for the rest of her life. The final question is will they love each other again in the next incarnation? Choi Jin-Young has written Hunger like this story is not the first time that Dam and Gu have been in love, that this is not their first incarnation together. When they at five years old, they know immediately, without needing to say anything to each other, that they are going to be partners for the rest of their lives. They prove this, even when they are separated, even when Gu is with another person, even when Dam sits over his dead body, devouring his flesh in a symbol of respect, love, and devotion. This story is not their first story but one of the moments they have in the thousands of years they are together. For as much as this story feels hopeless, the truth is that Hunger is filled with hope.  

I received this as an ARC from Europa Editions in exchange for an honest review.

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Review: Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami

Posted on March 11, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

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Synopsis:

‘My heart felt very tender reading this. Astonishing Kawakami, as always‘ Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face
From the International Booker Prize-Shortlisted author of Heaven and Breasts and Eggs.

Hana has nothing but she’s hopeful. She’s fifteen years old. She lives in a tiny apartment in a suburb of Tokyo with her young mother, a hostess at a local dive bar. They have no money, no security. Then Kimiko appears.

Kimiko is older, a bright light in Hana’s dark world. Together they set up Lemon, a bar that, despite its shabby setting and seedy clientele, becomes a haven for Hana. Suddenly Hana has a job she loves, friends to share her days with, and the glittering promise of money. She feels like a normal girl. She feels invincible.

But in the narrow alleys of Sangenjaya, nothing is as it seems. Soon all of Hana’s hope, her optimism, and her drive, will be tested to the limit . . .

A story of enduring friendship and deep betrayal, Sisters in Yellow is a masterpiece of teenage dreams and adult cruelties that confirms Mieko Kawakami as one of the great writers of her generation.

Review:

The newest novel by Mieko Kawakami to be translated, Sisters in Yellow, starts with an older Hana poking around on the internet during 2020 lockdown and finding an article about one of her old friend, Kimiko Yoshikawa being arrested for blackmail, abduction, and battery of a woman over a 15-month period. This makes Hana think about when she knew Kimiko, in the late 90s, when she was still a teenager and Kimiko was in her late twenties/earlier thirties, opening a bar together and being roommates. The story is told in first person by Hana, and while Hana grows older and spends time with Kimiko, she meets two other friends, Ran Kato and Momoko Tamamori. The story is about teenage girls finding their footing in adulthood, and how their friendship fell apart.

The start of the novel is very interesting, but Meiko Kawakami spend too much time telling the full story of Hana in the 90s, about when she first meets Kimiko when she is fifteen. Hana looks up to Kimiko as a role model, and this is a consistency through the entire time that they know each other. The entire novel is about Hana growing up and seeing that the adults who she has around her to admire and emulate are people who are struggling, broken, and trying to figure out what they are doing too. The only thing that Hana really has that is consistent, her safety net, is the money she has saved, a little shoebox in the closet filled with paper bills squirrel away from various jobs. The problem is that this shoebox not only becomes the only thing that she can rely on, but she starts to sees more worth in working and filling up that shoebox that she sees in saving her friendships. 

The novel is about being a teenage girl, growing up around people who are not the best influence, and finding friends that are just like her. They all become archetypes. Hana comes from a single parent home, a mother who is always desperate to pay bills and keep a job. She sees only value in money because this is what her mother so desperately focuses on. Hana sees worth in being someone who has financial stability like her mother never had. Momoko comes from a wealthy family and is somewhat slumming it when she starts spending time with the other girls. She uses them to run away from school and her parents because they are so mean to her. She finds her fit with her friends, but she also is the lazy one, the one that does not need to work as hard as Hana, and the one who can go back to her parents if she absolutely has to. Ran exists in this dynamic in a way that she exists in balancing every space. She is not as emotional as the other girls. They help her with a place to stay and a job, and she does not cause problems. Ran exists as a person who is polite, will not tell someone when she is upset, and does not want to hurts anyone’s feelings. She just wants to be a balance to the other emotions around her. The last of the four is Kimiko, who stays as a mystery throughout most of the novel. Hana never stops looking up to her and admiring her, but we get inklings that Kimiko is not completely stable. maybe it is because she is older than the other girls and has different needs and missions, but Kimiko is quiet, disappears at times, gets mysterious envelopes of money, but is also considered crazy enough by some of the people Hana does business with, to the point where they ask her not to involve Kimiko. In the end, this is a novel about trying to grow up, trying to understand how to maintain friendships and jobs with people who do not always have the young women’s best interests in mind. They are trying to do the best for themselves. The novel is set at the end of the nineties and early 2000s, and there might be some nostalgia for Japanese culture, but I do not remember long periods of the novel that it happened thirty years before, that the dramas these girls have are the same ones that teenage girls continue to have.

The beginning really pulls me into the story. The interest that I have in Kimiko and her current day crimes keeps me going through the entire novel about Hana, even though some of it is tediously slow. At some parts it feels like walking around in a store, window-shopping, picking up items to admire then put back, knowing I am not going to buy them. Some of the digressions into the past of the minor characters seems like looking at stuff that is not really important in the end. Some of the characters I wish could have stuck around more, like Tommy-cat and whatever he was up to. Characters like him were not explored, but others seem to be explored too much. Maybe this is to bring authenticity into Hana’s story, illustrating that she does not know everything, and there are parts of the story that do not feel very important, but she still feels like she needs to show me every product in the store while I’m window-shopping my way through her life. The end is good enough. I do not feel an overwhelming sense of satisfaction from finishing the novel. I understand Hana and how lost she gets, I am intrigued by the mystery of Kimiko, which is never really explained completely, and I like this enough to recommend Mieko Kawakami’s work, but this is not my favorite of her works.

I received this as an ARC through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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Review: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Posted on March 4, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood–where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned–Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor–engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.

Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey–hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/undergroundrailroad/

Review:

Colson Whitehead has won several awards for his fiction, and The Underground Railroad is his biggest award winner. This novel won the Pulitzer Prize and The National Book Award (the only other novel to do this is The Shipping News by Annie Proulx), the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the 2016 Goodreads Reader’s Choice award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence, and is placed #7 on the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list. This is a novel I remember buying the day it was released, and it has sat on my shelf for almost a decade before I finally picked it up. 

The main story is about Cora, a slave in Georgia who decides to run north to freedom. She becomes part of users of the Underground Railroad, which in Whitehead’s novel, is a literal railroad that runs through tunnels underground, with depots that are constantly getting shut down and arrival and departure times being sparse and inconsistent. At the Georgia depot, the boxcar she is loaded into seems to be close to falling apart. The next ride in South Carolina is even worse. The underground network seems to reflect the condition of the state where the depot and train is located, and while Cora runs into more and more danger on her journey, there are states where the Underground Railroad is not a reliable form of transportation at all, but it is her only chance for survival. The trials that Cora experiences are compounded by changing laws in each state, different attitudes toward people of color, free or enslaved, and the availability of help. Cora is also being hunted by Ridgeway, a slave catcher who is like Ahab in Moby Dick, willing to ruin his life and reputation with catching her, who’s only failure to catch a slave is Cora’s mother Mabel. Ridgeway, and who’s mania means Cora is never out of danger. 

Any story of slavery is always a horrible story. With all of the disgusting, horrific true accounts that comes of out of American history, Whitehead does not have to even scratch the surface very deep for his novel to be gut-wrenching, devastating, and heartbreaking. Anyone who knows the conditions that slaves lived in while treated as property and farm equipment instead of humans, also knows that escape is the only true option. Cora runs through the swamp away from her owner, and as soon as she takes two steps off of the farm, the anxiety that the reader feels does not let up until the very end of the novel. These feelings, the horror of the plantation and the anxiety of the person getting chased and the punishment awaiting them, is not unique to The Underground Railroad and Cora’s story, but it definitely creates a certain backdrop while reading the novel. 

With a background of anxiety to the danger and inevitable death of the main character, we also spend a great deal of time with the people who are around Cora, the network of people who are trying to help her, whether or not their intentions are pure or they have their own agenda. There are people in history, white people and freed slaves, that helped runaway slaves find their freedom, lawyers who tied up the courts, people who used cellars and attics to hide slaves on the route, and there were some churches that were very involved in helping the Underground Railroad. I remember visiting Detroit in the early 2000s and seeing The Second Baptist Church, a historical Underground Railroad landmark and a place that helped runaway slaves on their way into Canada. Historical sites are scattered across the country, but of course for everyone who was trying to help, there were many more trying to stop it, trying to capture them, trying to make sure that they stayed as property. The climate of all of this, the way that some people were helpful and some people were harmful, depending of if they saw slave as a person or as something to own, makes Cora’s escape, just like any escaped slave story, one that is filled with tension and danger from the first page to the last. 

There are a few moments when Colson Whitehead pulls back from this tension and danger to bring up some more philosophical ideas. Like who is really free if there is hatred for another person in their heart? And one of the biggest freedoms that we have is reading and learning, and does that the people who do not do these things are people who are the true slaves? People who do not read for themselves are people who eventually no longer think for themselves. They become people fed information in a whatever way that suits the person giving the information. Slavery in a physical sense is horrific but so is slavery in a mental sense. The depth of this idea is not really explored enough but there are some examples of this in the book, particularly in the character of Homer, the young black boy who helps Ridgeway catch runaway slaves. There will always be people who do things against their own interests. Much of this is due to the lack of independent thought and critical thinking, things that are strengthened through acts of reading books and learning about the world. The Underground Railroad in this sense is every book, with depots at every library, every bookstore, every place where can. If we take the Underground Railroad, we can continue our journey through lives as free thinking people, or we can be people who do not even know they are enslaved to the rule and agendas of others. 

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Review: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Posted on February 28, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all: Welcome to The Ministry of Time, the exhilarating debut novel by Kaliane Bradley.

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.

An exquisitely original and feverishly fun fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time asks: What does it mean to defy history, when history is living in your house? Kaliane Bradley’s answer is a blazing, unforgettable testament to what we owe each other in a changing world.

Review:

The Ministry of Time is Kaliane Bradley’s debut science fiction, romance, espionage novel about time travel, culture shock, and how the government is always up to no good. The unnamed narrator is hired to work for the Ministry of Time to be “a bridge” for a person who is basically kidnapped at certain points in history and brought to present day London. Her “expat,” which is a much nicer term than her “kidnapped historical figure”, is Commander Graham Gore, a lifelong sailor who was to die in the Arctic on the mission to find the Northwest Passage (a story famously retold in the Dan Simmons novel and the first season of the AMC show The Terror). Commander Gore is brought into current society where he adjusts to living with his bridge, a single woman who’s mother escaped Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. She is brought into the project because of this background, but the truth is that her background is not even close to the real reason why she is hired.

This novel has some interesting ideas, but there are too many moments when it is trying to decide what it wants to be. Does it want to be an action novel, a science fiction time travel novel, a romance, or does it want to be a novel about how time and the timing of the decisions we make always affects the outcome and trajectory of our entire lives, whether it’s noticeable or not? We are given many threads, but there does not seem to be much follow up to many of them, just random thoughts and scenes. The characters are likeable, especially Commander Gore, but it feels like the good premise that starts the novel runs out of steam, and in the end, Kaliane Bradley has to choose one of the stories she started to complete the novel. She chooses one of the easier ones, the government being up to no good. My favorite threads that should have been explored deeper are the ones that draw parallels between Commander Gore adjusting to a society he was thrown into (going from 1840s England to present day England) and the adjustments the narrator’s mother had to make when coming from Cambodia to England, being thrown into a society that she does not recognize. (This is flirted with but there is no solid connection.)

I also like the thread that is given to us but again not really explored on page 271:

When something changes you constitutionally, you say: “The earth moved.” But the earth stays the same. It’s your relationship with the ground that shifts.  P. 271. 


The whole idea that there are things and events that change the way we see and interact with the world. Sometimes it is sudden (the earth moved) but other times it is a gradual change, like the year spent with a person who was taken from the 1840s. This does relate to the plot of The Ministry of Time, with the relationship between the bridge and Commander Gore changing rather quickly, but the change has also been gradual, that by the time the big events happened her entire relationship with the world and everyone in it has changed. Ideas are mentioned throughout the novel, and they are treated as disposable. Bradley’s ideas of time, our relationship with the world, and how events change everything that we know, are far more interesting than the actual plot of the novel. If she would have focused on these ideas, the novel would have been shaped in a much different way, and it would have most likely been less popular. But these are the things I will remember from this book, not the actual plot and characters because the ideas are much more impactful and interesting. As it is, Bradley focuses on the government, the science fiction and time travel aspects, and the intriguing thoughts are just there. This makes the novel feel unfocused, inconsistent, and not as good as it could have been. The Ministry of Time has many great ideas, but they really get lost in the plot.

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Review: Ring Shout by P. Djéli Clark

Posted on February 25, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

In America, demons wear white hoods.

In 1915, The Birth of a Nation cast a spell across America, swelling the Klan’s ranks and drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of white folk. All across the nation they ride, spreading fear and violence among the vulnerable. They plan to bring Hell to Earth. But even Ku Kluxes can die.

Standing in their way is Maryse Boudreaux and her fellow resistance fighters, a foul-mouthed sharpshooter and a Harlem Hellfighter. Armed with blade, bullet, and bomb, they hunt their hunters and send the Klan’s demons straight to Hell. But something awful’s brewing in Macon, and the war on Hell is about to heat up.

Can Maryse stop the Klan before it ends the world?

A video explaining the Ring Shout:

Review:

The Ku Klux Klan was born out the end of slavery and is a group who started by terrorizing, torturing, and murdering newly freed slaves. The first wave of the KKK lost much of their power due to federal government passing the Enforcements Acts of 1870-1871 that protected people of color against the harassment by this and any other organizations. The second wave started with the release of Birth of a Nation in 1915, the start of Prohibition, the end of WWI which came with economic instability, and the changes of American culture that was moving away from the traditions of a white only past. This second wave, from 1915-1940, had over 5 million members, was in every single state, and not only targeted people of color but Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and bootleggers. The official start of this second wave was when Colonel William J Simmons burned a cross on Stone Mountain near Atlanta, GA on Thanksgiving Day in 1915. However the biggest Klan rally at that time was July 4, 1923, when the D.C. Stephenson was appointed Grand Dragon in Indiana in front of 100,000 Klansmen. (I mention this because this rally happened to have taken place at Malfalfa Park, where I would attend YMCA camp over 65 years later.) This history is the backdrop of P. Djéli Clark’s novella Ring Shout.

The novella takes place in Georgia, where Maryse Boudreaux is a Ku Klux hunter, with her targets being demons who started as Klan members but have turned into mindless monsters who are only out to murder. The Ku Klux hunters are women who can see the Ku Klux for who they truly are. For strength they use traditional African folktales, haints and root magic, and most importantly, the ring shout, a song and dance from the Gullah-Geechee culture that help connect the fighters to all of their ancestors. The Klan is aware of these hunters and are planning to do something big to defeat them. Led by Butcher Clyde, they plan another rally on Stone Mountain where they will show Birth of a Nation, turn all of the Klan into Ku Klux monsters, and release the most powerful demon of all. 

I find this novella fascinating because of the historical context more than the plot or characters. I love the things that Maryse and the fighters use as strength when they go into battle, how there are older men and women doing a ring shout while they go into battle, and how Maryse lets the anger of those before her run through her sword as she battles the Ku Kluxes. The plot is much larger than the page count, and some of the story is hampered by this. A few of the things that they do deserve more time and explanation, but this might also slowed down the story, turned Ring Shout into a slow action horror novel. As it is, Clark wrote this story with plot and purpose more than understanding and explanation, and it is up to our curiosity to delve deeper into the situation. I also like some of the ideas on race that are mentioned but not dwelled on. There are a few moments when the white people who become Ku Kluxes are considered, and how the anger and fear these people have is processed in an artless, ungracious, and damaging way. This is why the Ku Klux Klan rose to power in the first place, and why racism still exists as a major thorn in the side of American culture. I would have liked more of this story, but it also does so much for being such a short novella, bringing up so much history and social thought that I would instead like a second in a series. There is a hint of a sequel toward the end, but I am not holding onto hope. 

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Review: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Posted on February 23, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

n his long-awaited first novel, American master George Saunders delivers his most original, transcendent, and moving work yet. Unfolding in a graveyard over the course of a single night, narrated by a dazzling chorus of voices, Lincoln in the Bardo is a literary experience unlike any other—for no one but Saunders could conceive it.

February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returned to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy’s body.

From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a thrilling, supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory, where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.

Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction’s ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices—living and dead, historical and invented—to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?

Review:

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders has been around long enough for me to have a good idea of what it is about. The story is about Abraham Lincoln and dealing with the death of his son, Willie, while Lincoln is president. The true story is that when Willie died, Lincoln went to visit the crypt where his son was laid, and Lincoln would hold him. This story also takes place within the first year of the Civil War so Lincoln also feels the mounting pressure regarding a war that many do not see as very popular. With Lincoln’s grief over the death of his child, a wife who is not in the best state of mental health, and himself getting pushed against his beliefs because ending the war is something that might be the popular opinion of his colleague but it does not feel right in his heart, Abraham Lincoln is stoop in grief, sadness, and worry. But Lincoln in the Bardo is not about him. 

A “bardo” is a Tibetan Buddhist idea on the afterlife where a person stays for an undetermined amount of time, sometimes seconds and sometimes trapped for eternities, between death and rebirth. The time spent is determined by the way that person conducted themselves during their life. William Wallace Lincoln died when he was 11 years old in February of 1862 of typhoid fever. His death came only ten months after the death of Eddie Lincoln, age 3, his younger brother. Willie is a good kid and he loves his father, so when he see his father in the graveyard mourning him, Willie wants to stay in the bardo for as long as he can because he feels like his father is going to come get him. The Lincoln in Lincoln in the Bardo is Willie Lincoln, but the novel does not soley focus on him because there are so many other people trapped in the bardo with him.

Lincoln in the Bardo is about the afterlife as a whole, the people who are stuck in the bardo, and how they arrived (how they died) more than what is keeping them from moving on to the next life. Three of these characters, Hans Vollman, Roger Bevins III, and Reverend E Lawrence Thomas, tell most of the stories about the bardo, and the truth of this afterlife is that there are so many people stuck for different reasons, not able to get to the true afterlife. They want to make sure that Willie Lincoln is not one of them, so they do what they make it their mission to help him crosses over.

The audiobook of this novel has 166 narrators, one for each character. This is due to George Saunders leaning heavy on a way of telling this story in clips and excerpts. Most of the story involving Lincoln, the death of his son, the state of the White House and the feelings on Lincoln as president are told through quotes from books, articles, letters, and diaries from historians and people around them. Some of these quotes are real, some of them are fictional. The telling of the stories in the bardo is more about oral tradition, people sitting around and repeating the stories of their lives or the lives of those that they know. With Vollman, Bevins III, and Rev. Thomas taking the lead, the three of them can tell the stories of everyone we meet in the bardo, and it almost feels like they are trying to entertain us by telling the story of Willie Lincoln. However to tell his story, you have to hear all of the stories of the people in the bardo. This makes Lincoln in the Bardo less about Lincoln and more about the bardo itself, the people who are already stuck there and how their lives never change. 

There are some moments that really show how powerful of a writer that George Saunders can be. He paints the picture of Lincoln and his grief in a haunting and heartbreaking way, the mourning over the loss of his child being something that is most likely going to break him as a human. This sadness is only shown in spurts throughout because most of the novel is not about his sadness but about three guys trying to get an 11-year old boy to move on to the next life. At times this novel does not feel very focused, and some of the stories that are introduced do not seem like they have much importance to the whole of the novel. This is difficult to say because it is difficult to think that telling about one person’s life and death is more or less important than another, but for the sake of the focus of a novel, this aspect could have been a little more condensed. We could have done with fewer narrators and stories, because some of them really push away the impact of how grief-stricken and devastated Abraham Lincoln is while he visits his young dead son in a borrowed crypt. I do not know if this was purposeful distraction, like to break the tension and sadness, but there feels like more of it than necessary. People love this novel, it has won awards, it will most likely be one of those novels that will be on “Best Novels of the Century” lists, and it might be a novel that is taught in universities in the future (if not already). I can respect these ideas, and I can agree with how people feel about this novel, but my agreement is not wholehearted. This is a good book, but it is not gong to be the best book I read this year, and most likely will not be in the top ten. Maybe I will revisit this novel at some time in the future, but for right now, my feeling is that this is not even George Saunders’s best book.  

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Review: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Posted on February 21, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. By age twenty, in fact, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most elite universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?

Still searching for answers to this herself, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. These eight windowless “tombs” are well-known to be haunts of the future rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street and Hollywood’s biggest players. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive.

Review:

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo is the first in the Alex Stern series, a character who has been selected to be a student at Yale University to also work as part of their team of people who oversee the different houses while they use their magic and complete rituals. Alex is a high school dropout and recovering drug addict who is found after she flees a house where everyone that she lived with and knew are murdered and is found on the street naked and delirious. When Alex is in the hospital, Yale comes to recruit her, because they know. For centuries, New Haven and Yale University has been a hub of paranormal activity and magical powers. The eight houses who are sanctioned to do rituals sit on weak points between this world and the magic world. This means many people are doing weird stuff and it is up to Alex Stern and the Lethe House to make sure none of this goes sideways. Enter the murder of a girl on a Thursday night when all of the rituals are being done around campus. Since the victim is not a student or someone important, her murder is seen as a simple case of a boyfriend stabbing his girlfriend to death. Alex sees things differently, is bothered by the whole murder and excuse, maybe because she felt something weird happen at the same the the girl was being killed and maybe she sees a little bit of herself in the dead girl (both underestimated and seen as inferior to those around them). She cannot stop thinking about it and cannot stop investigating. 

Part of Ninth House is setting up a world of magic and mayhem, where different magic houses are doing things they probably should not be doing. What could possibly go wrong when we give young people, many of them without fully developed frontal lobes, access to magic powerful enough to have someone visit the underworld or someone to lose all of their inhibitions or the abilities to make super powerful drugs? Even with Lethe House trying to keep track of all of this, there is no doubt that most of the magic done on campus is not sanctioned and not every ritual is done in good faith. The biggest part of Ninth House is about the characters and developing them in a slow and steady way so that the reader will want to come back for the next book in the series. There is no illusion that this is planned as the beginning of a book series, and from the very beginning this book is doing a lot of heavy lifting to establish the world and the major players. I like all of the characters at Lethe House. I enjoy the rawness of Alex Stern, how she does not fit into the societies that she has been brought into, societies that have been established through the centuries. She does not always follow the politeness or manners that are expected of her as a member of Lethe House. Her time before Yale University when she lived off of her wits and instincts really does her favors in this setting because she can surprise many of the entitled kids that are her peers but underestimate her. She is always thinking about the final outcome of any situation before she does it, particularly if there will be repercussions for stepping outside of the normal boundaries. She believes she can get away with many of the corners she cuts and the rules that she breaks because everyone has something they want to keep hidden. I also like the backstory of Darlington, the person who is supposed to be training Alex but disappeared before the book begins. He is thought to be stuck between the living world and the magic world, and they have to wait for the new moon to get him back. I even like Dawes, the research assistant who is irritated by Stern and reluctantly helps her when all she wants to do is listen to her headphones and work on her laptop. The other characters are interesting enough. Some of the college students are a little cliche, but they are also vehicles for the Lethe house characters more than having their own narrative. In the end, Bardugo does spend time and effort to give the major characters backstories and histories that make them unique but believable. 

The most minor part of this novel is the actual plot, the investigation of the dead girl but also trying to get Darlington to return home. The plot is good enough, interesting and keeps the book moving, but it is also kind of like the college kids: a vehicle for the main characters and world structure to become well established for the next book. Bardugo’s interest is definitely more about the characters and the magic tricks than actually the plot. Sure it all ties together nicely, and the storytelling and plot are well done, but the focus on the murder investigation seems to be a little soft compared to the amount of time spent on building the world. 


Ninth House is interesting and I do like fiction that take place on college campuses. There is a great deal of thought and skill used to the build a version of Yale University that runs on secret societies using magic for their own gains but is still believable as a university. The characters of Lethe House are strong enough to want to read the next book about them. There are many moments where I think that Ninth House does some unique and wonderful things, but this is also a novel that really spends more time with character development and world building over substance, and sometimes it feels like more of a setup for books to come than a book that does much on it’s own. I will be reading the next in the series though. I need to know what happens next, so I guess that means Ninth House does the job.

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