Staff Picks Book Reviews
Porchlight is a company filled with voracious readers—talented, creative individuals who know books, and who excel at moving them. Whenever we can, we like to do that by telling you about the books we’re reading.
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Staff Picks
On an Ebbing Seafoam Tide
By Gabbi Cisneros
Alannah Radburn unabashedly shares pieces of herself that others might hide from strangers but that we should be more open about: the overly arduous fight for justice that women endure, the strength it takes to leave a bad relationship, a queer love story without stigma.
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Staff Picks
Without Children
By Gabbi Cisneros
Validating of my own experience as a soon-to-be-married woman who does not have or want children, Peggy O'Donnell Heffington’s new book is also very eye-opening to the difficulties and importance of motherhood and caretaker-hood, bringing much-needed empathy.
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Staff Picks
The Teachers: A Year Inside America's Most Vulnerable, Important Profession
By Jasmine Gonzalez
For how important teachers are in the development of our children, teaching remains one of the most under-resourced, underpaid, and underappreciated professions in the United States. This is what writer—and substitute teacher—Alexandra Robbins explores in her latest book, The Teachers.
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Staff Picks
Continually Working: Black Women, Community Intellectualism, and Economic Justice in Postwar Milwaukee
By Jasmine Gonzalez
Crystal Marie Moten’s Continually Working is an excellent addition to our historic records and a much-needed honoring of Black women.
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Staff Picks
Daughters of Nantucket
By Gabbi Cisneros
When characters’ inner dialogues are crafted with compassion and attention-to-detail, as those in Daughters of Nantucket are, readers can even see themselves in mid-19th century women living in an east coast island town.
Categories: staff-picks, fiction
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Staff Picks
The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media
By Jasmine Gonzalez
The Influencer Industry offers an excellent account of how young creatives turned the internet from a collection of decentralized pages to a highly interconnected, multi-billion-dollar enterprise.
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Staff Picks
Dinner with the President: Food, Politics, and a History of Breaking Bread at the White House
By Jasmine Gonzalez
Alex Prud’homme’s Dinner with the President shines in revealing how the comforts of a good meal can help us tap back into our humanity and reconnect with one another during an ideologically divided and socially distanced era.
Categories: staff-picks
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Staff Picks
Woman of Light
By Gabbi Cisneros
I return to Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s tenacious female characters and vivid Colorado landscapes that I loved so much in her first book Sabrina and Corina, and I leave with a reverence for the many layers of ancestry–the adversity they’ve overcome, the values they’ve imparted, the love for the land that they’ve sewn–the author shares with us.
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Staff Picks
Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls
By Jasmine Gonzalez
Kathleen Hale’s comprehensive narrative of the Slenderman stabbing case is a cautionary tale for us all, illustrating how denying the existence of a problem doesn’t make it go away—it only shifts the burden of who must deal with it, often to vulnerable people without the full capacity to handle it.
Categories: staff-picks
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Staff Picks
The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life
By Jasmine Gonzalez
Author and religious scholar Simran Jeet Singh provides a deep dive into understanding key concepts of Sikhi and gives us a new way to perceive and learn from the 2012 tragedy in Oak Creek.
Categories: staff-picks