Joyce Carol Oates is a seductress who leads you into whatever world she is exploring. This can be poignant, uplifting, or deeply disturbing. In the case of Daddy Love it’s the latter. The first four chapters recount the same time span in a mother’s life—the moment when her child is taken from her. Yet she was conscious of the terrible loss. The child’s hand had ... Read More...
Darker: The Orphan Master’s Son
By its very nature dystopian fiction is dark but Pulitzer Prize winning The Orphan Master’s Son is not technically dystopian. It is set in North Korea, which exists (as we are all too aware recently) and yet the events and lives of the characters are fantastical in their danger, impoverishment, and deprivation. The protagonist is Jun Do, a boy whose mother died when he was ... Read More...
Dark: The Angel’s Game
If you love to read then there is likely to be a time in which you find yourself reading a string of books that follow a similar theme or contain a singular element. A literary synchronicity, if you will. For me, this occurred several months ago and the reviews posted this week are of that time. The unintentional theme was darkness. Each of these three books is well written, ... Read More...
Love Bomb: A Novel
Who doesn’t love a wedding? The friends and family of Gabe and Tess are gathered at her mother’s home for a garden wedding. The only hitch so far? The weather, which has forced the relocation of the festivities into the house. Not a problem for either Gabe or Tess, who are low key, in love and used to last minute changes, having met in Mali while working for Doctors Without ... Read More...
Golden Boy: A Novel
This spring has been a marvelous one for wildly creative authors and their unusual creations. The trend continues with Abigail Tarttelin’s debut novel, Golden Boy, and its tender protagonist, Max. Max is sixteen and in addition to the burdens of being a teenager he is saddled with a secret that is kept even from his own brother. Max is intersex or what used to be known as a ... Read More...
And the Mountains Echoed
I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us. The first time we met Khaled Hosseini was ten years ago when he took us to a place called Afghanistan, which most of us knew only as a foreign enemy, not a country. In The Kite Runner we walked through the door to another world that both opened ... Read More...
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