This is another short but poignant read.The Seville setting makes the story. You can almost smell and see and taste (especially taste) the oranges, the paella, the bulls, the heat. Excellent descriptions.I can't think of anything I didn't love about this story. Kenzie's mind is a complicated p...
At first I found the book a little strange to read. I absolutely cannot picture my mother packing me up and sending me off to Spain against my will. But I fell in love with Kenzie right away. She’s a teenage girl who right away knows that she wants to have the baby, and is willing to go against h...
Small Damages was the story of Kenzie and her experience of pregnancy. She was sent to live with Estela, a spanish women, because Kenzie's mom wanted no one to know that she was pregnant. This novel is about how Kenzie deals with the fact she wants to keep her baby but her mom and boyfriend do no...
Like a modern-day Cyrano de Bergerac, Elisa ghostwrites love notes for the boys in her school. But when Elisa falls for Theo Moses, things change fast. Theo asks for verses to court the lovely Lila—a girl known for her beauty, her popularity, and a cutting ability to remind Elisa that she has non...
It started honking soon after the first parabola of sun appeared from behind the mountains that rose beyond the compound; and it didn’t stop until Lobo answered bark for honk—stood at the gate with his nose between the pickets.I’d fallen asleep in that plastic chair and awakened to sunrise. Manue...
I could hear the music playing as I took the diagonal across the street, met Annette on the steps, she coming down and I going up. “Max is in one of his moods,” she told me. “Oh, no,” I said, and we both laughed. Annette had agreed to dance for my grandfather. They were working, I knew, on a fox-...
Says he should have seen it, should have known, should not have brought his family here. What is an obsession? he asks. What is a disease? What is a choice, and what is an affliction? He has a PhD. He’s a historian. He is an Ivy League man. All this time in Florence, searching for the place where...
There are lies that you’ll tell. That night, in your room, you sketch a thousand different versions of a flying fox. That morning you read gravity and physics. You go through the trunk of your grandfather’s things looking for gadgets or signs. You scope low on the balcony, pursuing breaks in the ...
“We’re going,” he had told them, “to the shore.” “Father?” “Cape May,” he said. “I’ve made arrangements. A little sea and salt will do us all good.” He’d set the date for the third week in August, he said, to coincide with the Carvers’ vacation. They’d take the ferry at Market Street and board th...
Miss Cloris is saying. “You take your time. Miss Helen and I aren’t going anywhere, and Harvey’s about to behave. Like a good pup, Harvey is.” “I’m sorry,” I try to say. “I’m sorry.” But the tears keep pouring out, and Minxy stays put on the windowsill, and Miss Helen reaches for my hand, smoothe...
Ms. McDermott’s package is propped up against the door, with just my name on it—KATIE—and her initials: A.M. There’s hardly any weight to it, feels like it could have been blown away by a fraction of a wind, but it’s just so still tonight. I sit on the stoop wishing Danny were still near, his arm...
Deni told me as we walked. Five dead of drowning. Seven dead of crush, shock, or heart attack, bad luck, worst choices. Several dozen unaccounted for and six whole blocks of North gone, no proof that anyone had ever lived there to begin with. Without the bridge and with so many slips and ships su...