How lucky I am that I came across Little, by Edward Carey, while digging around on the internet for book recommendations. My Google search phrases must have included the words “brilliant”, “absurd”, and “hilarious”, because this book is all these things. Little is the dark and dazzling story of the young orphan girl who becomes…
It’s a Wonderful Life is my husband’s favorite Christmas movie and we often watch it on Christmas Eve. But my daughters and I have talked about George’s temper—it bothered them as children and it bothers them now. There’s something about people venting anger, and in this case the prospect of male violence, that shakes them…
The ability to describe is the key to great storytelling, but when it comes to depicting characters, our first impulse is often to go straight to the basics (height, hair color, clothing) and leave it at that. It’s not that those descriptions are bad, it’s just that they provide surface-level characterization rather than truly characterizing….