Before we’ve even met her Maeve has lived a lot of life for a twenty-five-year-old woman in the 1930s. After secretarial school she leaves Boston for New York City, using the lie of a big job opportunity as a way to get out of marriage and town. But because no such job existed in Depression era NYC Maeve ends up working in a dance hall on Broadway where only alcohol ... Read More...
Tuesday Nights in 1980
When art dealer Winona George throws a fabulous party on New Year’s Eve 1979 to welcome in the 1980s there’s no way of knowing who and what will converge in her art filled apartment in downtown Manhattan. That James Bennett and his wife Marge arrive late is not too surprising—James is an eccentric art critic. As the esoteric bunch of artists and wealthy NYC bohemians ... Read More...
Terrible Virtue
Margaret Sanger is well-known as the founder of Planned Parenthood and the first advocate of birth control and family planning for women in the U.S. Ellen Feldman’s novel Terrible Virtue begins with Sanger’s impoverished childhood in Corning, New York as one of thirteen children—a fact that greatly shaped her attitude towards child bearing, as she watched her mother die ... Read More...
It’s Not You, It’s Me: Mini-Reviews
It happens in personal relationships and it happens with reading: A book simply does not hold my interest, float my boat, whatever metaphor you want to use. But if the writing is good I’m reader enough to admit: It’s Not You, It’s Me. I’ve always been a fan of South Asian authors so approached these novels with high hopes. In both cases the writing was well done, but the ... Read More...
Mrs. Houdini
Bess Rahner met Ehrich Weiss the summer of 1894 at Coney Island where both were performers—she a singing and dancing girl and he doing an escape act with his brother. Little did she know that this brash, confident young man would become Harry Houdini and she would be his wife. Mrs. Houdini, by Victoria Kelly, looks not only their life together, from their beginnings in ... Read More...
The Nest
The Nest is contemporary-family-behaving-badly fiction—a genre I generally enjoy. Oh, who am I kidding- I like any family behaving badly in fiction! I mean, why not; it’s so much more fun. Sadly, what makes The Nest contemporary is its all-too-realistic theme: people living out their material dreams through credit. In the case of Leo, Jack, Beatrice, and Melody Plumb the credit ... Read More...
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