Lori Duff Writes
Recently, my family took a road trip to visit my parents in Ft. Myers, Florida. We’ve taken this trip many times. It is about six hundred miles, door to door, mostly on long, boring stretches of I-75, with not much to look at but billboards offering vasectomies, strippers, religious salvation, and outlet malls. There are plenty…
The Language of Flowers: A Novel by Vanessa Diffenbaugh Much of my career as a lawyer has been dedicated to issues related to children. So often; children get lost in the shuffle of grownups making decisions for them. Some of those grownups are well-intended, some are not; some of the decisions they make are good…
I am not delusional. I know that I have “angry resting face.” When I’m thinking, or submerged deep inside of my head, the (lack of) expression on my face looks irate. So. Given that premise, knowing that I look inherently grumpy, what is it about my face that makes people feel the need to interrupt…
My Fair Lazy by: Jen Lancaster I picked this book up because a) it was on sale at Barnes & Noble, and b) because many people had asked me if I’d ever read anything Jen Lancaster wrote because my own writing was similar. I hadn’t. So I did. I see what they are saying. We both…
If you’ve read my book, Mismatched Shoes and Upside Down Pizza, you know how much I loved the Sky Mall catalog, with its can’t-live-without merchandise like the fake grass and miniature-plastic fire hydrant indoor dog potty. When I found out it was no longer going to be published, I grieved. I don’t mean, “Oh, that’s too…
Food: A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan. Comedian Jim Gaffigan loves food. By his words, he’s not so much a foodie as an ‘eatie.’ This means that he doesn’t so much like good food as quantities of food. This is a guy who considers “All You Can Eat” as a challenge. This book is an…
My mother’s mother’s sister, Aunt Pearl, had an old guitar that used to belong to her son, Jeffrey, that she wanted to give my daughter. Aunt Pearl, an admirably independent nonagenarian, lives alone in a two story house near the beach in New York, and, if you had to pick a celebrity she resembled the…
Unwind by Neal Shusterman As you can probably tell if you’ve read more than one of my reviews, I like books that are different. Formulaic books (girl meets boy, they get together, a misunderstanding ensues, they make up) or (someone is killed, it looks like a suicide but it isn’t, impossibly beautiful police officer and…