Reading as much as I do is a joy, but it can make me feel jaded. It leaves me with a ‘been there, read that’ mindset, especially when it comes to thrillers. That’s one of the reasons I was so tickled by Hank Philippi Ryan’s The House Guest. She uses the reader’s cynicism and suspicion against them, jamming the novel with dubious characters at every turn and a maze of a plot. It ... Read More...
The Shadow of Perseus
For some, the retelling of Greek myths may have run its course, but for others (me!) I’m still on board to read mythology from a different perspective. My first 5-star novel of the year was Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes, a fiercely feminist, wickedly funny adaptation of the Medusa myth. Now, author Claire Heywood is tackling the same subject in her new novel, The Shadow of ... Read More...
True Biz by Sara Novic
So much of today’s zeitgeist revolves around the much needed recognition of vulnerable communities, but what about acknowledgement for the community that can’t hear? Sara Novic explores the realities of deaf life in her riveting novel True Biz. Set at the River Valley School for the Deaf boarding school, the novel encompasses the lives of the school’s headmistress and those of ... Read More...
Dust Child
The Vietnam War has been written about from many points of view in fiction, but for the most part my reading has focused on the years of the war, rife as they are with the atrocities perpetuated on the Vietnamese, both by their own people (ARVN soldiers in the South, Viet Cong in the North) and then the Americans. Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai takes a longer view by ... Read More...
All the Beauty in the World
Patrick Bringley is in his 20s and working at his dream job at The New Yorker magazine when a tragedy strikes his family that leaves him unable to give the job what it requires. His grief is such that he quits, looking for a way to make money, but also to escape. All the Beauty in the World is his memoir about how his job as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art which was ... Read More...
The Queen of Dirt Island
The week Saoirse Aylward is born her father is killed in an accident, leaving her mother, Eileen alone to raise her. Their lives in a small village in western Ireland are at the heart of Donal Ryan’s boisterous, tender novel The Queen of Dirt Island. Although the novel stays within the village’s borders it’s an expansive story encompassing four generations of Irish women with ... Read More...
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