By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Oct 31st, 2025
0 Comments
1332 Views
review by Meredith McKinnie “The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.” In the summer of 2024, NYTimes readers chose Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead as the best book of the 21st century, and I can see why. Channeling Charles Dickens’ Da...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Oct 31st, 2025
0 Comments
621 Views
Review By Meredith Mckinnie Adichie’s layered novel opens in an African barbershop in Trenton, New Jersey, where Ifemelu has traversed several trains to have her hair braided, a luxury/burden in America. While enduring the multi-hour process, Adichie emails her old boyfriend Obinze that she is moving...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Oct 1st, 2025
0 Comments
1530 Views
REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE “Life didn’t just get better and better. You could actually miss out on something and that was that. That was your chance and now it was over.” Miranda July’s romp of an autofiction novel is absurd, titillating, and for lack of a better term, off the rails. Needless to say...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Oct 1st, 2025
0 Comments
825 Views
REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE “I soon realized that inevitability of every relationship: the things which initially draw you to each other become the exact things that irritate you the most.” As a mid-thirties struggling comedian, Andy’s at the universal impasse – recently dumped and not knowing ...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Aug 28th, 2025
0 Comments
917 Views
REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE “History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset.” Martin Scorsese’s 2023 film Kil...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Aug 28th, 2025
0 Comments
487 Views
REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE “Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner.” After hearing about Amy Bloom’s memoir, how her writing is the kind of composition a writer dreams of,...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Jul 30th, 2025
0 Comments
914 Views
REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE “Like everyone else, she got only one life. The one she was living right now. This life that could only have happened with every experience she’d ever had – that had landed her here, in this perfect moment.” If you enjoy immersing yourself in novels about the rich an...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Jul 30th, 2025
0 Comments
541 Views
REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE “Humans are the only species who subvert truth for their own entertainment. They call them jokes. Sometimes puns.” In Shelby Van Pelt’s debut novel Remarkably Bright Creatures, we meet Marcellus, the Giant Pacific octopus, who lives in an aquarium on the West Coast. You go...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Jul 1st, 2025
0 Comments
598 Views
REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE “I was a personality before I was a person.” For most of us, Barbra Streisand requires no introduction, but the megastar takes the liberty anyway – in a big way – with her 900-plus page memoir. If you’ve heard Streisand in interviews, you are privy to the tone ...
By Nathan Coker
In Bayou Pages
Jul 1st, 2025
0 Comments
2560 Views
REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE “I had two broken horses…and they were the most unbroken creatures I’ve met here on earth.” I remember the moment I first registered Brandi Carlile as a formidable artist. By happenstance, I caught her 2019 performance of “The Joke” at the 61st Grammy Awards. I sat transfi...
