I read this right after King Lear, and it's such a fabulous deconstruction of the traditional misogynist portrayals of the sisters. Set in an Iowa farm town in the late '70's to early '80's, we hear the story from the eldest daughter's perspective. Her father, an aging farmer, unexpectedly decides to divide his farm and bequeath ownership among his daughters' families. It is through this even that the family begins to unravel and its dark secrets become known. I won't tell you what happens, but I will say that I will nener be able to read Lear again and imagine the sisters as only evil.

A superb feminist sci-fi novel. Genly Ai, a diplomat from Terra (Earth) tries to convince a country from Gethen (Winter) to join an inter-galactic league. What he didn't realize, though, was that the inhabitants of Gethen are androgynous. Only once a month do they enter into a state of Kemmer in which they take on sex-specific characteristics, and mate with another person in a Kemmer cycle. As a gender-static being, Genly Ai faces prejudice and danger on his mission and that's all I'm going to tell you.

I just finished this book, and I'm absolutely in awe of Robinson's prose. Her writing is beautiful, and the story left me feeling out of breath. It's the story of the women in a family--Ruthie, the narrator, has lost her mother to suicide, and she and her younger sister are passed from their grandmother to their great-aunts to their mother's sister, a transient woman. Housekeeping is a heartwrenching tale of love, family, and social dissonance.

This book is amazing! Mitchell deals in six frames, moving from an 1850's journal of a man traveling from the Chatham Islands, to letters from Germany in the 1930s, to a 1970's airport thriller, to modern-day England, to a near-future Korea, to Hawaii 2,000 years from now.  And then back out again. Each character is connected to the others despite the time/space/genre gap and it makes for a book that constantly feeds your mind. Mitchell catalogs human "achievement" and emotion throughout history (and future) and moves seamlessly from one writing style to the next.

I'm not sure if you've ever heard that men have a harder time writing in a female voice. Well, I don't know if Cleave struggled, but he nails creating two female narrative voices. the novel details the second meeting between and English woman and an African girl. After seeing something in her village, Little Bee flees and becomes a refugee. Despite the horror of their first encounter, these women realize they rely on each other. It made me cry.

Benioff, the narrator, retells the story of his grandfather, a defector in the army furing the Russian Revolution. An educated man, his grandfather must feign ignorance and is sent on a mission with a companion to procure a dozen eggs for a general's daughter's wedding. if they fail, they will be killed.