In The Boat Not Taken, the author deftly, honestly, and vividly pieces together the known facts of her widowed mother’s life….
REVIEW: The Boat Not Taken: A North Korean Daughter and Her Mother’s Story by Joanna Choi Kalbus
Category: Reviews
An archive of our reviews of memoirs, essay collections, and other works of creative nonfiction.
INTERVIEW: Michelle Yang, Author of Phoenix Girl: How a Fat Asian with Bipolar Found Love
A staunch and highly vocal advocate, Michelle Yang has made a name for herself in the national conversation about bipolar disorder
REVIEW: Held Together by Rebecca N. Thompson
Rebecca N. Thompson presents a broad spectrum of experiences and a diverse group of women from different backgrounds and nontraditional families.
REVIEW: Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays by Amie Souza Reilly
Human/Animal is an ambitious, braided essay collection that resists easy answers.
REVIEW: Everything is Fine, I’ll Just Work Harder by Cara Gormally
Cara Gormally delivers a quietly radical graphic memoir that explores how trauma embeds itself in the body, mutates into perfectionism.
REVIEW: What My Father and I Don’t Talk About, Edited by Michele Filgate
Perhaps I was foolish to review this beautiful collection—my father died when I was 14, and the weight of what he and I can’t talk about is ever-present….
REVIEW: Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told by Jeremy Atherton Lin
Lin unleashes the full breadth of his research skills, unraveling the history of same-sex unions and the marriage equality movement…
REVIEW: Son of a Bird by Nin Andrews
“Son of a bird” was what Andrews’s Black nanny called her when she’d been naughty.
REVIEW: It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays by Tom McAllister
McAllister pulls off something wonderful, connecting ordinary life moments to the larger political and cultural perspectives of the time….
REVIEW: Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Freidan, Mailer by David Denby
Fairly presenting the event-laden, controversy-crammed lives of this talented quartet…is a task that would intimidate…any sensible biographer.
