November 2020

Alexandra Bergson, the protagonist of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, is a father’s daughter, programmed at his deathbed to continue his work and secure the family and their estate. Alexandra is bold, pragmatic, driven and willing—an empty vessel.  She accepts of course, and in just 16 years accomplishes his vision, single-mindedly and single-handedly increasing the land for herself and […]

On its surface, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna is an immigrant’s tale. Beneath, the plot details the ways fathers’ and husbands’ violent indifference and indifferent violence subjugates wives and daughters—turns them into property, not people. The men in this novel cajole, coerce, corral, and at times beat women into marriage, endless child-bearing,

The first time I read Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game I was eight years old. Let’s see—that would put us around 1981. This murder mystery features an ensemble of characters, everyone with a part to play, but what I remembered then and enjoyed most this time (older and wiser) were the two sisters: The eldest

There is a passage in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees that set my hair on end. She describes a town, like any 1950’s town in South Carolina. A town that, with a few contemporary substitutions could describe many towns across the US today. Those comfortable with the prevailing power structure of the