About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Sy Montgomery
Positive The Millions If you’re a slob, you’re a pig. If you’re sneaky, you’re a weasel. Cowards are chickens, and followers are sheep or lemmings. If you give bad loans, you’re a shark. If you’re fat, you’re a cow, or maybe a whale. If you’re lazy, you’re a sloth. Crazy folks are batty; people who talk shit are catty. Villains are snakes, women are bitches, and the lowest of low are dogs ... In the English language, at least, being compared to an animal is rarely a compliment ... In fact, comparing people to animals isn’t just unflattering, but dangerous. According to Genocide Watch, equating members of an ethnic group with animals, vermin, insects, or diseases is the third stage of genocide...During the Holocaust, Jews were called rats; during the Rwandan genocide, Tutsis were called cockroaches. This made them easier to kill: They weren’t humans. They were animals. They were less ... In Montgomery’s new book How to Be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals, (Montgomery) focuses her observant eye on her own life and the creatures that shaped her ... In her memoir, Montgomery argues the point that not only should being compared to an animal be taken as a compliment, but we should be humbled in the presence of our fellow creatures. We have so much to learn from them.
Rebecca Traister
Rave Electric Literature \"Her new book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, is yet another example of Traister’s diligent reporting and thorough researching. The connections she makes between contemporary and historic events and figures are both unexpected and exciting, and also completely logical ... But perhaps the most mind-blowing thing about Good and Mad was that after reading this book, a manifesto by a far-left-leaning writer, I found I better understood my extreme-right-wing grandmother ... There is something powerful about understanding another woman’s anger, and also about channeling my own anger into a force for revolution. Good and Mad showed me the way.\
Daisy Johnson
Rave The Rumpus While Johnson should not necessarily be classified as a horror writer, her gothic fiction embraces some of the most terrifying elements of the real world and mixes them with the stuff of nightmares ... commonplace feelings are cloaked in the surreal elements of Johnson’s world. A teenager struggling with an eating disorder starves herself into an eel. A boy who likes to get drunk and pick fights morphs into a bloodthirsty fox. A girl falls in love with another girl, and the house she lives in becomes jealous ... Some stories are stronger than others. The ones heavily charged with surrealism—where magic is accepted as part of everyday life, where souls move between people and animals—stayed with me the longest ... To read Johnson’s stories is to live in dreams, at once both disturbing and comforting.
Melissa Broder
Rave The Rumpus [So Sad Today] is just her own experience, her own neuroses, her own fears. It’s all me, me, me, and, my god, it’s beautiful ... This book is a reminder that you’re not alone. Cry with Broder. Let it out. She is here for you.
Mona Awad
Rave The Rumpus ...when Lizzie is thin that the book becomes truly painful to read, because Lizzie’s hurt is so tangible. Her hunger is palpable to the point that I found myself starving with her. The gnawing in my stomach would become so intense while I was reading, that I would frequently put down the book to get up and make myself food.
Ludmila Ulitskaya
Positive The Rumpus While reading The Big Green Tent, it wouldn’t hurt to follow your high school English teacher’s advice and make a list of characters to reference while reading. But this range of characters and connections is what makes The Big Green Tent great.