BOOKLOVES

Sixteen-year-old Ida Campbell picks the wrong time to start school at St. Anne’s. Not that there ever seems to be a right time; the building, set on a cliff overlooking the English Channel, “looked as if it had been caught in the act of falling down, and was now doing its best to hold itself […]

Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret […]

Editor Knight-Justice, who contributes two illustrations, explains in a note that at age 14, Hughes’ poem “Mother to Son” not only introduced him to poetry’s rich possibilities, but deepened his understanding of his relationship with his own mother. He writes, “This is what poetry did for me, and I want it to do the same […]

At Juniper’s school in the city, bullies—seen in the shadows but apparently white—taunt the young girl. On a day devoted to celebrating students’ heritage, they tell her she doesn’t know where she comes from. Juniper’s mojo bag, tucked in her pocket, doesn’t keep the bullies at bay. But soon enough, she packs up empty mason […]

As longtime Corriere della Sera editor Mian writes, the 2,000-mile-long Volga river has long played a central role in Russians’ sense of national identity past. It does so today in Vladimir Putin’s world, where Russkiy mir is “not a philosophy, but a creed encompassing everything pertaining to Great Russia, where Orthodox Christianity, Fascist impulses, traditionalism, […]