By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Mar 28th, 2025
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65 Views
review by Meredith McKinnie “The only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.” Daniel Mason’s novel North Woods is more than simply the history of a place. It is the telling of American history and the American people’s history situated [&h...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Mar 28th, 2025
0 Comments
68 Views
review by Meredith McKinnie “Some people spend their entire lives waiting for the time to be right to make an improvement.” Like so many of us, spring brings feelings of renewal and self-assessment. Along with decluttering my environment, I begin to evaluate my behaviors. James Clear’s book Atomic Ha...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Feb 28th, 2025
0 Comments
82 Views
review by Meredith McKinnie “Good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs.” It’s rare that I indulge books that I know my mother-in-law will love, but Ann Patchett’s new feel-good novel is definitely one of them. It’s technically a pandemic novel, but not in how you might think. Lara Nelson...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Jan 30th, 2025
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121 Views
REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE “I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.” The aforementioned opening words of Namwali Sherpell’s new novel, chilling and ambiguous, suggest a confessional of sorts, a dive into the abyss of emotion that follows a tragic loss. And that would ...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Jan 30th, 2025
0 Comments
119 Views
REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE “There is so much freedom in being anonymous.” When Britney Spears’ first album Baby One More Time dropped in 1999, her face and song by the same name were everywhere. She dominated the radio, MTV, and Total Request Live, the daily video show of top songs in the country. E...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Jan 3rd, 2025
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152 Views
REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE “But at least she was married to the smartest, funniest man she had ever met, and that counted for everything…” In keeping with my current fascination with historical fiction, I anxiously cracked the new spine of Gill Paul’s 2022 novel The Manhattan Girls. I was intrigued ...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Jan 3rd, 2025
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152 Views
REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE “The first weapon I ever held was my mother’s hand.” I didn’t so much fall in love with Jesmyn Ward’s novels as I did with the power of Ward’s writing. She tackles hard, gritty subject matter, exposing the underbelly of American reality, and in this novel American history,...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Oct 31st, 2024
0 Comments
177 Views
review by Meredith McKinnie “I wanted to see who I was, without using another person’s love for me as a measurement of my value.” When I think of Jessica Simpson, I first think of the MTV show Newlyweds, in which she and then-husband Nick Lachey documented their first year of marriage, only to divorc...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Oct 1st, 2024
0 Comments
272 Views
review by Meredith McKinnie “Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding with a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.” Michelle Zauner’s meditat...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Sep 2nd, 2024
0 Comments
229 Views
review by Meredith McKinnie “The conversations that help me see the world most clearly are generally not with researchers, policymakers, or so-called experts. They aren’t with the people journalists crassly call ‘newsmakers’ at all. They’re with artists – especially writers.” The essence of Sh...
