Lisa Eckstein > Recent Status Updates

The beginning presents a family mystery, starting in the US and moving to Rwanda -- I'm intrigued!

Interesting but difficult story of the young narrator's life, made up of bits and pieces of a childhood.

I'm appreciating this novel, but the subject matter is different and tougher than the back-of-book description suggests, with a big focus on sexual abuse suffered by the young narrator.

Liking the voice of this young narrator and meeting her family and world.

This is great! Would happily read the rest today if I didn't have other things to get done. I'm loving finding out how the characters are connected to each other and seeing how they're going to converge.

Fascinating reading a character's story of being taken to join the 1970 Alcatraz occupation as a child.

I really like the voice of the first character we meet. It looks like there are going to be a whole bunch of viewpoints, and I'm excited for all the characters ahead.

Horrifically thrilling account of Matrosova's cold, windy, doomed journey, mixed in with interesting analysis of how we make good and bad decisions.

Gagne is off to a great start in presenting the situation and major players in this harrowing true story with compelling, detailed writing. I was hoping for something like INTO THIN AIR, and that's definitely a good comparison.

I'm anxious to see how things are going to turn out for all these excellent characters!

Loving these great characters and the thrilling story.

"Krish felt the same way about Jack. Even when he went back to Saskatoon for the quarter to teach, they talked every day. Then, they took things to the next level: They founded an anonymized text repo together, about practical ways to deliver drugs to the public domain. It was the most intense relationship Jack had ever had."

So far we've got a pharmaceuticals pirate in a submarine and a robot assigned to track her down. I'm intrigued!

"But sometimes people do terrible things and we are not to blame."
"Or the list of people who are to blame is so long that we're surprised to find ourselves on it."

"It felt as if a president had been assassinated, but the president was alive. Instead, the country we thought we would be living in was dead. As if a president had assassinated a country."

"The Guardians" is an intense essay about painful memories and therapy. I admire how much Chee reveals, throughout this collection.

Wow, big developments!

"In the time before I understood that I was writing this novel, each time a piece of it emerged, I felt as if I'd received a strange valentine from a part of me that had a very different relationship to language than the me that walked around, had coffee with friends, and hoped for the best out of every day."

Gripping story from the start, with a wonderfully intimate narrative voice. Looking forward to seeing what happens to these characters.

Each essay is so thoughtful, revealing, beautifully written. Especially enjoyed the last two I read, on tending a rose garden and on emotions surrounding money.

On moving to San Francisco during the AIDS epidemic: "... we were a wave arriving on the West Coast from the East: postcollegiate youngsters seeking and finding a paradise of cheap apartments and thrift stores bursting with the old athletic T-shirts and jeans and flannel shirts we all prized. I remember when I put the empty clothes together with the empty apartments..."

"Frankly, she was finding this cloak-and-dagger business dull. There was much too much cloak and not nearly enough dagger."

"They put in at a transit station about a mile from Citadela's gates, and in an exchange that was never *not* bizarre, traded the driftcar for ceremonial black rhinos." I love how this single sentence reveals so much worldbuilding and character voice, with a bit of humor as well.

Chee's writing is so vivid and compelling.

The middle of this book has been less engaging for me than the beginning. A lot happens to this family, but sometimes at too fast a pace, with not enough time to experience the emotional impact.

I feel so much for this poor family and all they're going through!

"A week before the school reopened, they enacted a new policy: every teacher and administrator would be required to keep a gun at their desk, like blackjack dealers in the Old West, and in each grade, ten students would be designated as Class Guardians, armed and trained in tactical shooting." It's hard to write satire in an era when reality looks like satire.

Learning a lot of history from this book, all in an engaging, fast moving plot.

"I hung up. I searched my phone for a button to undo the conversation I'd just had, but I could not find it. Technology does so many things, but almost none of them are useful."

"In America we send children to school to get shot and to learn algebra and physics and history and biology and literature. Less civilized nations don't have such an organized system for murdering their children."