Chorel's Reviews

Tessa Fontaine’s The Electric Woman is enthralling. Moving between the sustained emergency of a collapse in her mother’s health, the complicated, flawed relationship she has with her mother, and her 5 months as a crew member in the traveling sideshow the World of Wonders, Fontaine writes of the layer after layer of heartache and grind. With lovely, clear prose, she invites the reader in to her attempts to explore and escape reality through the hard and fascinating traveling sideshow life. A tenderly written, captivating memoir. - Chorel

Tommy Orange’s debut offers a contemporary glimpse of Native lives through a wide array of characters. There There lifts the figure of the Native American off the shrine built of white America’s guilt and sins. This novel has horror and rage and sadness and banality—and beauty, too: Orange writes of the humanity of his people who exist now: urban, dynamic, less “other,” more real. - Chorel

Don’t miss our free event with Tommy Orange at Bookshop Santa Cruz on June 18th, 2018.

Reading the stories in Her Body and Other Parties has been among the memorable literary pleasures of 2017. Carmen Maria Machado writes with fearless exploration, precision, and tenderness that would prompt envy if gratitude and admiration weren’t first to arrive on the scene. From the lovely, apocalyptic love story “Inventory” to the dizzying and original “Especially Heinous,” Machado’s work is curious, inventive, and thrilling. It’s feminist and pop culture, classic and weird; the stories are complex and the characters are haunting. What a debut! - Chorel

This remains one of my favorite books. We meet Dolores Price at age 13 and stay with her until middle age. Along the way Dolores attempts various personas, deals with or avoids her various traumas, and tries to temper her wise-ass personality with her longing to be loved. Unpredictable, funny, and emotionally wrenching, She’s Come Undone is truly unforgettable. - Chorel

If you’ve watched the Golden State Warriors in the last couple years, it’s likely you have fallen for the charm of Stephen Curry, whose incredible 3-pointers look effortless and whose smile is infectious. In Golden, Marcus Thompson II explores Curry’s rise to the top of the NBA and the ways in which he has changed professional basketball. Thompson moves smoothly from one area of Steph’s life to another: from his youth on the court to his family (his father was an NBA star himself, and his wife Ayesha and their children have their own following), to his ethos as a player. Reading Golden has me watching games differently, more closely attuned to the plays on the court, more appreciative of the players—not just Steph or the Warriors favorites, but also those on other teams and the coaches, too. - Chorel

The author of this penetrating debut novel about the early days of the war with Iraq is an Army veteran who served there. What you see through the characters’ eyes won’t soon be forgotten: the mundanity and violence of war; the adversity faced by female soldiers within a decidedly male culture. Van Reet’s gift for narrative, his ability to evoke the nuances of place and culture, and his cast of characters create a haunting and tragic story of the dysfunction of contemporary war. - Chorel

For fans of literary fiction, there’s so much to love in Elizabeth Strout’s beautiful and quietly disturbing stories, which trace the secret lives of the residents of a small town in Illinois. The stories in Anything Is Possible are rich variations on several tightly connected themes: poverty, familial bonds and broken marriages, and the mysterious, subtle qualities of forgiveness and acceptance. - Chorel

Lindy West writes about difficult subjects with a hilarious, sharp style that may make you squirm, and is guaranteed to make you laugh—possibly quite loudly. Shrill is bursting with extraordinary insights into the social system that contains and ruins us, and ways to expand beyond what we’ve internalized (“We were all raised in the same f---ing septic tank,” she writes. “Real change is slow, hard, and imperceptible. It resists deconstruction.”). With a vulnerable (but again: hilarious) rendering of her own experiences, West gives the reader an inside look at what it means to be a brave, troll-fighting, fat feminist, and she somehow does so with simultaneous unapologetic intellectual passion and with a gorgeous empathy. Like me, you might find the packed-on layers of your assumptions soften and lift, your eyes widen in surprise as you come face to face not only with the ways in which you fold yourself to fit into an artificial system of self-hatred, but judge others on their failure to do so as well. West’s resounding concerns are fatphobia and feminism, but she is far from oblivious of the privilege she does possess, and in this way, Shrill also contains the kind of intersectional critique we need today. She also is a gifted writer with lovely, masterful sentences that are a pleasure to read. Be prepared to be more lit and awake through reading these essays! - Chorel

The Gloaming is a dreamy, dark book about a woman escaping the fallout of a tragic accident she doesn’t fully remember, and the abandonment of her husband, by hopping a plane to Africa. With powerful prose that evokes disturbance and uncertainty, the novel is divided effectively into two sections: the first told from the perspective of beautiful Pilgrim Jones, and the second from the various characters who encounter her. Some view her with conviction and envy, others with desire. With undertones of women’s vulnerability/strength and the ways in which they are preyed upon, the sense of place, and of being out of place, are also strong. Finn's writing has all the hallucinatory pleasures of Paul Bowles, with that language and story so clear yet unsettlingly veiled.

People Like You is, first and foremost, gorgeously written. Each page of the slim collection contains treasures of language that are a joy to behold, and Malone’s writing feels effortless even in its literary intensity. The stories all concern being stuck—in less-than-perfect relationships, addiction, infertility—and the characters struggle within a powerlessness that seeps onto the reader and troubles deeply. By the end, however, the recurring thread of one set of characters comes out on the other side, and hope is restored. I loved this book. —Chorel