Month: December 2020

Saffron Casson is eight years old when she learns that she is different from her other siblings. While all of their names – Cadmium Gold, Indigo, and Rose – can be found on her family’s color chart hanging in the kitchen, Saffron cannot find hers. When Saffy asks her artist mother, Eve, why her yellowish orange namesake cannot be found, her self-view and relationship with her family change significantly. Little does Saffy know, the reveal of who actually named Saffron will lead to the throwing of unwanted sandwiches, a stowaway trip to Siena, Italy, and a search across three different countries for Saffy’s angel. One of the most British books filled I have ever read, with wonderful wordplay and too many utterances of “darling” to count, Helen McKay’s Saffy’s Angel is a quirky, heart-warming read that can be enjoyed by both children and adults…

Classic movies like The Blob (1958), Independence Day (1996), and Men in Black (1997) demonstrate our unwavering fascination with extraterrestrial life, with the idea that we are not alone in the universe. While the above titles warned about the sinister outcomes that would come from encounters with aliens, they also display humans as heroes who eventually defeat the evil intergalactic invaders.Yoss’s A Planet for Rent does anything but that. Each section follows the perspective of a different type of human this new “xenoid”-ruled society has created with Contact day, or as the xenoids prefer to call it: Union day. A social worker reflects on the past choices and hardships that led her to finally get off the planet of Earth, but for an unimaginable price…

Growing up in East Nashville during the seventies with his single mother and aunt, Charlie is blissfully unaware of how the other half lives. He then gains admittance to Yeatman, an elite school for boys, and is paired with golden boy Arch Creigh as his mentor. This friendship opens Charlie’s eyes to the world of Southern conservative affluence, and synonymously to generations of white-skinned, white-collar families that will do everything in their power to keep the socio-economic classes as they are…

Greta Thunberg’s voyage across the Atlantic, Richard Powers’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel, The Overstory, the burning of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest and the widespread Australian bushfires. Such events make it seem that it is only in the last couple years that the world is waking up to the detrimental global issue of climate change. That could not be further from the truth. Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth: A Recent History (2019) reveals the heart-breaking truth: carbon’s influence on the climate was being discussed as early as the mid-19th century by physicist John Tyndall, “an early champion of Charles Darwin’s work” (p. 21). We also learn that the United States government has been discussing the dangers of carbon emissions for at least 50 years.