By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
May 30th, 2025
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48 Views
REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE “She had known from a young age that everyone had darkness inside – some just controlled it better than others. Very few people believed that they were bad, and this was the scariest part.” Danya Kukafka’s new novel explores the media-saturated, voyeuristic world of ...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
May 30th, 2025
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43 Views
REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE “If it’s possible to be fearless and vulnerable at the same time, she was. It was the thing that made her unstoppable. And very disarming.” It’s hard to not have some opinion of Madonna, a star whose career has spanned generations. So, when I heard about the new biography ...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Apr 30th, 2025
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90 Views
review by Meredith McKinnie “Someday, when you’re old, you’ll see that the ones who came to kill us and the ones who’ll run to save us are the same.” Acclaimed as one of the best books of 2021, Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were explores what happens to the powerless when they demand power. Set [&he...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Apr 30th, 2025
0 Comments
88 Views
review by Meredith McKinnie “We don’t have children to fulfill our dreams. Children allow us to let go of the dreams we were never meant to fulfill.” In Abraham Verghese’s sweeping new novel The Covenant of Water, the real-life physician, turned author, takes us into the story of three generations on...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Mar 28th, 2025
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146 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
173 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
170 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
0 Comments
171 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
201 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
0 Comments
227 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 ...
