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Jana Siciliano

Biography

Jana Siciliano


Jana Siciliano is a writer and filmmaker. Her company, Thieving Granny Productions, creates film projects for non-profit companies, instructs children ages 4-18 in creating original films and graphic novels, and is hard at work writing her own first novel.

Jana Siciliano

Reviews by Jana Siciliano

by Akwaeke Emezi - Fantasy, Fiction, Paranormal Romance, Romance

Tenderhearted Galilee was raised by the Kincaids, a formidable clan of Black women sequestered deep in the weeping willows and dark rushing creeks of their land. Galilee has always known that she’s different --- that there is an old and unknowable secret around her very existence. Lucifer Helel is fronting as the head of security for her wealthy friend Oriaku’s family, protecting a mysterious, ancient artifact. But from the moment she lays eyes on him, Galilee knows he’s not human. From her first incendiary touch, Lucifer knows something even Galilee herself doesn’t --- that she isn’t human either. Leviathan, Lucifer’s most trusted prince of Hell, is determined to eliminate the intolerable danger that is Galilee before she brings death and disaster to those he loves. But Lucifer and Galilee’s attraction threatens to bring all the structures of their existence crashing down around them.

by Patti Smith - Memoir, Nonfiction

“God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper,” writes Patti Smith in this moving account of her life. A post–World War II childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex where we enter the child’s world of the imagination. Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises, and searches for sacred silver pennies. The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, BREAD OF ANGELS takes us through her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative role models as she begins to write poetry and then lyrics, ultimately merging both into the songs of iconic recordings such as Horses, Wave and Easter.

by Catherine Newman - Fiction, Humor, Women's Fiction

If you loved Rocky and her family on vacation on Cape Cod, wait until you join them at home two years later. (And if this is your first meeting with this crew, get ready to laugh and cry --- and relate.) Rocky, still anxious, nostalgic and funny, is living in Western Massachusetts with her husband, Nick, and their daughter, Willa, who's back home after college. Their son, Jamie, has taken a new job in New York, and Mort, Rocky’s widowed father, has moved in. It all couldn’t be more ridiculously normal…until Rocky finds herself obsessed with a local accident that only tangentially affects them --- and with a medical condition that, she hopes, won’t affect them at all.

by Megha Majumdar - Fiction

In a near-future Kolkata beset by flooding and famine, Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma’s husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning they awaken to discover that Ma’s purse, containing their treasured immigration documents, has been stolen. Set over the course of one week, A GUARDIAN AND A THIEF tells two stories: the story of Ma’s frantic search for the thief while keeping hunger at bay during a worsening food shortage; and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose desperation to care for his family drives him to commit a series of escalating crimes whose consequences he cannot fathom.

by Kiran Desai - Fiction

When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart. Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India. She fears that she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.

by Samantha Shannon - Fantasy, Fiction

It has been centuries since the Draconic Army took wing, almost extinguishing humankind. Marosa Vetalda is a prisoner in her own home, controlled by her cold father, King Sigoso. Over the mountains, her betrothed, Aubrecht Lievelyn, rules Mentendon in all but name. Together, they intend to usher in a better world. A better world seems impossibly distant to Estina Melaugo, who hunts the Draconic beasts that have slept across the world for centuries. And now the great wyrm Fýredel is stirring, and Yscalin will be the first to fall.

by Jane Hamilton - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Seventeen-year-old Phoebe was never interested in her birth family. But on the cusp of her high school graduation, her adoptive mother, Greta, insists on a visit to meet her biological parents and siblings. The encounter is a jolt, a revelation that derails Phoebe. With the help of her best friend, Luna, Phoebe runs away --- as far as their friend Patrick O’Connor’s chaotic home, where she hopes to go unnoticed among his 13 siblings. But when Phoebe asks Patrick to chop off her hip-length hair, she’s suddenly transformed. Patrick’s older brothers can’t help but notice the striking, Peter Pan–like stranger who suddenly has appeared in their midst. What starts as an adolescent rebellion soon spirals into a whirlwind of self-discovery and unexpected connections.

by Helen Oyeyemi - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Kinga is a woman who is just trying to make it through the week. There’s a Kinga for every day. On Mondays, you can catch Kinga-A deleting food delivery apps. By Friday, Kinga-E is happy to spend the days soaking, wine-drunk, in the bath. Kingas A–G, perhaps unsurprisingly, live a varied life. Between them is a professional matchmaker, a scent-crazed perfumer, and a window cleaner, all with varying degrees of apathy, anger, introversion and bossiness. At least three of them are Team Toxic. It’s an arrangement that’s not without its fair share of admin, grudges and half-truths. But when Kinga-A discovers a man tied up in their apartment, the Kingas have to reckon with the possibility that one of them might be planning to destroy them all.

by Arundhati Roy - Memoir, Nonfiction

MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME is a soaring account of how Arundhati Roy became the person and the writer she is. “Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022 yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age 18, “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.” And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing and surprisingly funny memoir of the author’s journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prize-winning novels and essays, through today.

by Nathalia Holt - History, Nonfiction

During the 1920s, dozens of expeditions scoured the Chinese and Tibetan wilderness in search of the panda bear, a beast that many believed did not exist. When the two eldest sons of President Theodore Roosevelt sought the bear in 1928, they had little hope of success. Together with a team of scientists and naturalists, they accomplished what a decade of explorers could not, ultimately introducing the panda to the West. In the process, they documented a vanishing world and set off a new era of conservation biology. Along the way, the Roosevelt expedition faced an incredible series of hardships as they disappeared in a blizzard, were attacked by robbers, overcome by sickness and disease, and lost their food supply in the mountains. The explorers would emerge transformed, although not everyone would survive.