Normally, if I were to begin by saying a novel was messy it would not be a good thing, but Days of Awe by Lauren Fox is a messy novel, much in the same way life is messy. Isabel Moore is a wife, mother, and fifth grade teacher. She lives a somewhat insulated live surrounded by her husband, daughter Hannah, and best friend of fifteen years, Josie. When Josie is killed in ... Read More...
Right Up Until the End: Mini-Reviews
Picture this: you’ve started a mystery/thriller/sci-fi/suspense novel—any book that sucks you into a plot that requires full buy-in on the reader's part. And you do. And it’s well written, it’s all working and then BAM!, it’s not. You’re left like Nathan Lane in The Birdcage, a gay man trying to play a straight man discussing the Miami Dolphins. The betrayal, the bewilderment. ... Read More...
Last Night in Montreal
On a cold snowy night a seven-year-old girl leaves her mother’s house when her father beckons her from the yard, beginning an odyssey that continues into her adulthood. Her birth name is Lilia but as she and her father spend the next decade moving from town to town to avoid capture her name changes so frequently it’s hard to remember. Not that it matters, she does not ... Read More...
In the Language of Miracles
The American Dream is portrayed in any number of novels, often from the perspective of the struggle to reach it, but In the Language of Miracles Samir and Nagla Al-Menshawy are Egyptians who have already achieved the dream. He is a doctor and they live in a nice New Jersey suburb with their three children. They have been close friends with their next-door neighbors the ... Read More...
The Beautiful Bureaucrat
The Beautiful Bureaucrat has been raved about and reviewed by almost every book blogger I know and discussed at The Socratic Salon so I’ll try and keep this brief. No matter what else I think about The Beautiful Bureaucrat, author Helen Phillips has to be commended for writing one of the most immersive novels I’ve ever read. The premise is a bland, grey, dreary world in ... Read More...
The Girl Who Slept with God
Even within their evangelical Christian community the Quanbeck family is known as unusual, but in The Girl Who Slept with God, fourteen-year-old Jory is used to it. Until, that is, her devout sister, Grace, is allowed, at seventeen, to go off on a mission to Mexico, and returns pregnant. The potential embarrassment to their father within their religious circle is such that he ... Read More...
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