Going Home to Hogwarts…

January 6, 2021

In these trying times, I have found myself yearning for the books and movies I used to watch and read when I was younger. I pulled my battered copy of “The Chamber of Secrets” from my bookshelf and was slapped with a wave of nostalgia. I remember the taste of butterbeer, the sound of the films’ soundtrack, the excitement I felt walking through Hogsmeade and exploring Diagon Alley, the feeling of a warm January day in Florida. I had forgotten how much of my childhood was built around Harry Potter…

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Review: “Mexican Gothic”

December 1, 2020

“Mexican Gothic,” written by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, is a “gothic suspense novel,” set in 1950s Mexico. We follow Noemí, an educated and spirited young socialite who’s been summoned to the High Place, which is the home of the Doyles, the family her cousin Catalina recently married into. The Doyles are strange…

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Wolfmother: It’s Essay Writing Time

September 24, 2020

There’s something about the swooning guitar and consistent drumbeat that gets my fingers moving across the keyboard. I’ve written some of my best—and by that, I mean “most passable”—papers while listening to Wolfmother or other music like it. Something hard, fast, and not commanding enough to distract me from my paper. The ticka-ticka-ticka of my keyboard joins the clashing of the drums and the shrill guitars in an orchestral harmony…

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In This Month: Twilight

August 17, 2020

“Twilight” is an easy punching bag, but somehow, despite all its problems, there is something about the franchise that keeps drawing me back. Maybe because these books are targeted directly at me, a teenage girl. Maybe it’s because every guy in a 50-mile radius of Bella immediately falls in love with her, despite her being the physical embodiment of wheat bread. Maybe it’s the edgy, bad boy persona that Edward adopts even though he really isn’t a bad boy at all…

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Praise for “Hunger Games” Prequel

July 3, 2020

Many fans were dismayed when it was revealed that the novel would follow Coriolanus, who is considered to be the main villain of the Hunger Games trilogy. I disagree, however. I believe that all monsters were once men, and “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” reveals Coriolanus’s tumultuous relationship between his humanity and his brutality as he struggled to survive in the brutal social sphere of the Capitol.

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