When the Darweesh family makes the trip down to Alamaxa by rail in The Daughters of Izdihar , by Hadeer Elsbai, Nehal’s father doesn’t look at her the entire ride. Knowing she is in Alamaxa when she steps of the rail, she wonders how women in the city wear such heavy attire when it is so damn hot all the time. When Nehal starts to peel the robe from her shoulders, her mother tugs it back on. Giorgina finds solitude nowhere to be found. There is something vaguely familiar abou

In Designing Data-Intensive Appilications , Martin Kleppman points out that you don’t need to operate at Google scale. Developers need to be aware of the constraints and trade-offs that occur in a distributed system. He goes into issues that arise when data is distributed. In Parts I and II , the discussion concerning all the major considerations that are involved in a distributed database assume there is only one database in an application. Applications commonly use a combin

In When the Tides Held the Moon , by Venessa Vida Kelley, Río lies with his head against driftwood. Two months of Brooklyn’s tap appears to be too much for a merman’s power of purification. Benny whispers to his amor to see if he is awake.  In Tom Sawyer Abroad,  by Mark Twain, Tom says the professor is so quiet that he must be asleep, and pauses when he says they better. Huck asks, “Better what?” Tom replies that they better slip back to the professor, tie him up, and land t