Narrator Rosemary Cooke begins We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves in the middle of her family’s story, which is a quick indication of how this unusual and highly imaginative novel is going to go. The year is 1996 and she’s in her fifth year of college. A gregarious child she has morphed into a quiet and secretive young woman, largely due to the circumstances regarding the ... Read More...
Let Me Be Frank With You
Frank Bascombe is back in Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank With You and I, for one am happy to see him again. Ford’s last novel, The Lay of the Land, covered Bascombe’s travails through his mid-fifties in a way that perfectly encapsulated the middle-age process of fight and accept. In Let Me Be Frank With You, Bascombe moves through four vignettes that are comprised of ... Read More...
October Mini-Reviews
Ken Follett provided one of the high points in October with the release of the final installment in The Century Trilogy. Edge of Eternity brings the series to an end at a happy moment in the history of this century—which was a welcome relief from the dystopian fiction that covers the literary landscape these days. The novel spans the decades from 1961 to 1989—some of the most ... Read More...
Land of Dreams
When Ellie Hogan’s sixteen-year-old son leaves his expensive boarding school and heads across the country to Hollywood she wastes no time in asking questions but gets on a train from New York City and follows him. Once in L.A. she decides that rather than punish the boy she’s going to let him have his chance at fame. It’s 1942 and this is Land of Dreams by Kate Kerrigan. Ellie ... Read More...
The Book of Strange New Things
Pastor Peter Leigh is being given the spiritual chance of a lifetime: he’s been chosen to travel billions of miles to a new planet and bring Christianity to its inhabitants. The planet is called Oasis and is managed by a global corporation, USIC. The Book of Strange New Things, the latest novel from Michel Faber, chronicles Peter’s mission and his attempts to stay ... Read More...
Some Luck: A Novel
Some Luck is the first book in Jane Smiley’s The Last Hundred Years trilogy and in it she covers the lives of the Langdons. They are an Iowa farming family and it’s evident by the loving care with which she portrays them that Smiley is happy to return to her roots. In 1920 Walter Langdon is twenty-five and the proud owner of his own farm. He and his wife Rosanna live there ... Read More...
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