When it came out, Olga Grushin’s novel Forty Rooms blew me away. I had never read a piece of fiction that so perfectly encapsulated many of my feelings about marriage and being a woman. It was with great excitement that I saw Grushin was back with a new novel. Actually, excitement and trepidation because the bar would be high and Grushin looked to be mining the same ... Read More...
The Divines: A Novel
Every year there it seems a different theme emerges in fiction. Last year it was twins (The Grammarians, The Vanishing Half, Thin Girls), but this year, although it’s only January, I have three novels in my winter reading that are about girls’ boarding schools. What is it about that subject that entices those of us who were no more likely to attend one than go into outer space? ... Read More...
What Could Be Saved
The word “normal” ceases to exist in families who lose a child. Either they re-form together into a new unit or they separate. After 8-year-old Philip disappears in What Could Be Saved, the Preston family is the latter. They shatter, with the four remaining members—father, Robert; mother, Genevieve; daughters, Beatrice, and Laura, leaving Thailand to return home to the U.S. ... Read More...
Waiting for the Night Song
We first meet Cadence ‘Cadie’ Kessler as she’s illegally harvesting mountain pine beetles off a tree in the New Hampshire forest. A researcher, she needs proof that the beetles have arrived to their area, threatening the death of trees and the heightened likelihood of rampant forest fires. But within pages, mutilating a tree on public lands is the least of her concerns. The ... Read More...
The Fortunate Ones: A Novel
Things are starting to turn around in Charlie Boykin’s life. The child of a single mother who works as a cocktail waitress, he’s been one of the only white boys at his school and in their Nashville neighborhood. Now, he’s gotten a needs-based scholarship to Yeatman, a prestigious, private high-school. Even better, he’s assigned an upper classman mentor who turns out to be the ... Read More...
The House in the Cerulean Sea
Often when it’s time to begin a book review I try and draw from the facts—plot, place, biographical details. Because I read so much (and don’t have the discipline I should) specifics tend to blur by the time I sit down to write so in starting there I bring the book back to me. All of that is moot when it comes to novels like The House in the Cerulean Sea. I can sum up the book ... Read More...
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