notanotherbookreview

  I recently learned that The Grapes of Wrath , John Steinbeck's 1939 classic, is now a banned book. It is more than ironic that a book celebrating American grit in the inhumanly gruelling time of the Great Depression is banned in 2022, a time of unprecedented national hardship. In Grapes , The Joads, a family of tenant farmers, flee their Oklahoma home amid drought, poverty and bank foreclosures that make survival untenable. There is no hope in the Dust Bowl and, like thousands of others, they've seen handbills advertising jobs in California.   The story begins as Tom Joad, paroled from prison, where he was incarcerated for a homicide in self-defense, is hitch-hiking home. He meets a preacher, who he remembers from childhood, and they travel together. Tom finds the farm home deserted and goes to his uncle's, where the family is staying after the banks evicted all the farmers. Tom's family is loading what possessions remain into a Sedan-truck, when he arrives. The farm ...

3/29 I did this interview with Carla Sarett, novelist, short story writer and poet.  https://youtu.be/bAxQKhTz98c      at SMOL small press fair.  if you have interest. 3/4/22 A Closet Feminist (Unsolicited Press, 2/7/22) is an old fashioned new romance set in pre-Covid New York, Philadelphia and L.A., as a young woman finds herself.  I like Emma Roberts for the role of  Bella, a smart, funny self critical young woman overly aware of being too skinny, demanding, lazy and just weird to attract a man that she might want. She becomes a graduate student almost by default. It's the "almost" that's at issue, since Bella is a woman who doesn't yet know her own strengths. On the far side of twenty, she only knows she needs to be on a path. As the story opens, Bella's got a job she barely does and considers herself without ambition, a person who would rather watch movies all day than work. Her tolerant boss also knows she's not living up to her potential. So B...